Francona: The Red Sox Years (46 page)

Not willing to take a chance on losing tax credits, the Sox decided the bullpens were not particularly dangerous after all.

“I went to Larry, just to break his chops,” chuckled Francona. “I said, ‘What about the bullpen safety?’ And he said, ‘Ah, they’ll be all right. They can be careful and work around each other out there. They’ll figure it out.’”

Francona was entering the final season of a deal with a two-year club extension that had to be triggered within ten days of the end of the 2011 season. Given Francona’s success, his seven years on the job, and the expectations for the 2011 ball club, there was remarkably little talk about the lame-duck status of the team’s field manager. Folks close to Henry knew that the owner had had the manager in his crosshairs for a couple of seasons. It would be impossible for any field boss to consistently satisfy and support the data Henry loved.

“A New York writer asked me about my contract the first day of spring training,” said Francona. “He tweeted that my contract was going to be picked up the next day, and I actually got a little excited about it, but nothing happened. If anyone asked me about it, I deflected it. I had told them I wouldn’t bring it up, so I didn’t. I wanted them to appreciate that, but I don’t think they did. This was when I was starting to feel that maybe they weren’t that big on me. When it was all over later, I told Larry, ‘I could have made things a lot tougher on you guys.’”

He stayed in a condo at the Miromar Lakes country club in February of 2011. It was his first year away from the Bell Tower’s Homewood Suites. Miromar had a pool Francona could use in the dark hours of morning before driving to the Sox minor league complex.

The manager’s recently married middle daughter, Leah, came to visit for a few days with her husband and was disturbed when she came across a bottle filled with as many as 100 Percocets. Like everyone else around her father, Leah Francona knew her dad took pain medication. He had considerable history with pain pills and joked about it regularly.

The manager of the Red Sox had undergone an extraordinary number of surgeries in his 51 years. The most recent knee replacement followed the 2006 knee replacement, knee scopes, knee reconstructions, cervical disk surgery, and numerous wrist, elbow, and shoulder surgeries. He’d cheated death during the Christmas season of 2002, surviving a pulmonary embolism on each side of his lungs, as well as subsequent blood clots, staph infections, massive internal bleeding, and the near-amputation of his right leg. He had a small metal device (a Greenfield filter) implanted into his vena cava vein to prevent clotting. He was unable to jog and would be on blood-thinning medication (Coumadin) for the rest of his life. He still wore sleeves on both legs, and still got cold easily. Anytime he sat too long, his legs swelled and needed to be elevated. He had a hard time remaining comfortable. Blood-level maintenance and pain management would be part of his daily life for as long as he lived.

The vial of Percocets had been stockpiled over a long period of time.

“I saved ’em up,” said the manager. “I had hoarded them.”

Francona’s daughter was concerned that his pain was not being carefully managed and asked him to consult with Dr. Larry Ronan, Red Sox head team internist since 2005. Francona knew Ronan well and trusted him.

“I had that bottle, and Leah was worried,” said the manager. “It was legal, but it wasn’t good. I didn’t even open ’em. It wasn’t under the Red Sox umbrella. She knew what I’d gone through, and she wanted me to go to Larry [Dr. Ronan], so I did. I told Larry the truth and that it was no big deal. I didn’t want to lie to him. I told him, ‘I have these, didn’t open them, but I like the idea of having them if I need them.’ I wanted to be up-front. He said he’d keep an eye on me. The next day he said he wanted to tell Theo. He told me, ‘I know you’re okay, I see your eyes, but I want you to meet with somebody, a pain management guy.’ He said he had to document this.”

As Epstein recalled, “I got a call from Dr. Ronan telling me what happened and what he thought we should do about it. We talked about how we could handle this in a way that fulfilled our responsibility to the organization, protected Tito, and, most importantly, protected Tito’s confidentiality. We had to limit the amount of people who knew about this and get Tito the help if he needed it. We had to alert MLB that something was going on, but do it without mentioning Tito’s name. Terry’s name was not specified in our report to MLB. It was just reported that there was a staff member who had an issue. And that was pretty much it. I have tremendous trust and faith in Dr. Ronan. He’s one of the special people in the world. So I felt like as long as he was the point guy handling it, that Tito would be in good shape and we’d ultimately be covered too.”

Francona agreed to participate in the MLB program and see a pain management specialist several times per month during the upcoming season. Still, he was uncomfortable with the arrangement and worried about his privacy.

“It was just Theo, Dr. Ronan, and me with that agreement,” said Francona. “I remember Larry [Dr. Ronan] looking at me as a friend and saying, ‘Tito, nobody outside of this room will ever know.’ And I said to him, “This will come back to bite me in the ass. I know how shit works here. This will fuck me someday.”

According to Major League Baseball’s executive vice president Rob Manfred, the only people authorized to know the identity of an individual in the MLB drug program would be the three-man MLB drug policy oversight committee (Manfred, MLB drug abuse consultant Dr. Larry Westreich, and Jon Coyles, director of MLB’s drug policy) and the “employee assistance professional” at the participant’s own ball club. The employee assistance professional for the Red Sox in 2011 was Dr. Larry Ronan. Under the terms of the program, Francona met with a pain management specialist a couple of times a month, usually at Ronan’s office.

Lucchino said that ownership was initially unaware of Francona’s participation in the program, adding, “Later in the season I became aware of it, but not earlier in the season.”

“They weren’t supposed to know,” said Francona.

There didn’t seem to be much else to worry about. Spring training 2011 was a lovefest.

On Saturday, February 19, Henry, Werner, and Lucchino made their way to the Sox minor league complex in Fort Myers for the annual full-squad team meeting. Minutes before the owners walked in for the start of the annual meeting, Francona had a word with Varitek.

“’Tek, these guys just emptied their wallets for us over the winter,” said the manager. “They dug deep. Maybe we should show them some appreciation.”

“I’ll take care of it,” said the 38-year-old catcher/captain who’d been with the Sox since 1997.

“’Tek was such a leader,” said Francona. “He was our captain before we ever put the ‘C’ on his jersey.”

When the owners walked into the lunchroom, Varitek popped up out of his chair and started applauding. Everyone followed the captain’s lead, and Henry, Werner, and Lucchino smiled and bowed.

“I think this was a sort of spontaneous appreciation for our commitment to the organization,” said Werner.

“I think they appreciated it,” said Francona. “They’d just spent a lot of money, and I wanted to let them know that we didn’t take it for granted.”

After the meeting, the owners took questions from the media. Werner noted that the Sox had 16 players on their roster who had been All-Stars at one time or another. Henry said, “This off-season was tremendous.” Asked about Crawford, Henry said, “He’s the right player for us,” words he would come to regret. Lucchino said the Sox paid $85.5 million to Major League Baseball’s revenue-sharing fund in 2010 and another $1.3 million in luxury tax. The Sox 2011 payroll came in at $161 million, one of the top three payrolls in baseball.

“We come to camp with a sense of high expectations,” said Lucchino. “There’s very definitely a sense of confidence, a sense of optimism, a sense of what could possibly be, and you feel it when you first walk into the camp.”

The players were no less enthused. Beckett said that he’d never been on a team that won 100 games. (The last Red Sox team to win 100 was the 1946 team returning from World War II.)

“I think it’s important to remember that we haven’t done anything yet,” said Epstein. “We didn’t even finish second last year. . . . Baseball is such a humbling game. If you get ahead of yourself even for a minute or two, it kind of knocks you right back down on your backside.”

“As good as people thought we were, I thought we were going to be even better,” Francona said later. “I thought the pieces fit. I was really excited. Adding Adrian Gonzalez. Adding Carl. I thought,
Wow, this is going to be unbelievable.
We were going to be fast and athletic. Defensively, the balls weren’t going to hit the outfield grass. I was thrilled.”

When the spring games started, the manager was presented with the annual problem of building a team while splitting squads for two- and three-hour bus trips in southwest Florida. The Red Sox Fort Myers site was a logistical problem. Many major league teams had migrated to Arizona or the east coast of Florida, and the Sox faced long bus rides anytime they were not playing the Twins, who trained on the other side of Fort Myers.

“I never felt like I could get my hands on the team enough because of where we were in Fort Myers,” said Francona. “Every trip is a bitch. You can go two or three days without seeing people, and it’s hard. It’s a little bit of a disadvantage as far as getting your work done. I used to tell Theo, ‘If I take what I am supposed to on the road, it’s gonna fuck us up.’ Theo was inevitably going to be getting a complaint from the league because we weren’t taking a lot of regular players sometimes. He always said he’d handle it, and I really appreciated that. I’d leave guys back to get their work done. Guys are supposed to be getting ready for a season, and when you put them on a bus for two hours for two at-bats, it doesn’t help ’em. We had a lot of new guys in 2011, and that worried me as far as getting ready for the season.

“Expectations are great. That’s how you’re supposed to feel. That’s the way spring training is. But there’s a process. You can’t go from one mile an hour to 100 miles an hour. You’ve got to go through spring training and prepare and pay attention to detail. I understand expectations are great, and that’s okay, but if you skip the process, you got a chance to have some problems. In 2011 I felt just like I felt after we won in 2007. I had to put up a fight to make sure they knew—if we don’t win, all that other stuff isn’t going to be there. I wasn’t excited about talking about winning 100 games. Those are dangerous things to say. You’re forgetting about the process.”

Sports Illustrated
picked the Sox to win 100 games and beat the San Francisco Giants in the World Series. The magazine also projected Crawford as 2011 American League MVP. Six of six
Boston Globe
“experts” picked the Sox to finish first, but more unlikely respect came from the
New York Post,
where seven of seven “experts” picked the Sox over the Yankees.

“We’ve got a World Series kind of team when you look at our 25 guys,” said Clay Buchholz, who had won 17 in the “shitty” season of 2010. “There really aren’t any weak spots.”

The inimitable
Boston Herald
cut through all logic and presented the 2011 Sox with the headline “Best Team Ever.”

And then they lost their first six games and stumbled to a 2–10 record over the first two weeks.

Crawford batted in the number-three spot in the lineup in the opener in Arlington, Texas, and went 0–4 with three strikeouts, leaving five runners on base. The next day he went 0–3 with one strikeout. Francona moved Crawford to the seventh spot in the order for the third game. The Rangers outscored the Sox 26–11 over the three games and hit 11 homers.

It did not change when they moved on to Cleveland. The Sox were swept by the Tribe, losing the series finale, 1–0, on a suicide squeeze in the eighth inning. Matsuzaka and Varitek got into a verbal dustup in the dugout in Cleveland. The 0–6 start was Boston’s worst start since 1945, when Ted Williams and friends were still at war.

“It can’t get any worse than this,” submitted Kevin Youkilis.

The 100th Fenway opener was scheduled for Friday, April 8. Epstein and Francona both addressed the team before the players took the field. It was an interesting juxtaposition for Sox players. The Yale-educated GM dazzled players with Churchillian rhetoric, then yielded the floor to the tobacco-spitting manager, who peppered his rant with F-bombs.

“I tried to keep it simple and direct,” said Epstein. “I just tried to appeal to the belief that we can and will get back in this and that adversity is an opportunity for us to define ourselves by how we respond.”

“Sometimes I wasn’t sure how I felt about the GM speaking to the team, but anytime there’s a show of support I’m okay with it,” said Francona. “Theo started off, and he was really good. He was more comfortable around the players at this point, and he did a good job. Some of it went over my head. A lot of stuff about ‘the measure of a man.’ He was up there quoting Martin Luther King. It went above me. When he got done, I stood up and I was just up there dropping ‘fucks’ on everybody. I guess you could say I wasn’t quite as eloquent as Theo.”

“It was classic,” said Pedroia. “Theo just up there talking about historians and I didn’t even know what was happening. I needed a five-minute break to put it all together. For players who are uneducated like me, Tito’s speech was better.”

“Going 0–6 in Boston was unacceptable, and I knew that,” said the manager. “I knew they were going to be hearing it. I told them, ‘Hey, you’re going to look up at the scoreboard for a while and not like what you see. You have to be patient. People are going to be asking you every day, and it’s going to wear on us if we let it. We’ve got to be strong enough to fight through it. Right now, everyone is taking their shots at us. We’ll pull through this, but you’ve got to be patient.’”

The Sox responded with a 9–6 victory over the Yankees. Carl Yastrzemski, the greatest living Red Sox player, a man who played dozens of games against Tito Francona, threw out the ceremonial first pitch and was gone before John Lackey took the mound to face the Yankees. Yaz was famous for throwing out a first ball, then bailing before anyone could bother him.