Francona: The Red Sox Years (5 page)

Francona made his big league debut, leading off the ninth against Dave Smith. He grounded to Houston first baseman Cesar Cedeno. Dick Williams was not impressed. A couple of days later, Little Tito led off, went 0–5, and got thrown out at the plate in a 1–0 loss. Williams liked the kid’s enthusiasm, but never shed the veneer of toughness. When Francona failed to get a bunt down, Williams let him have it.

“I was thinking,
This guy hates me.
”

But Williams did not hate Little Tito. After days of silence, the kid saw some approval when he hit a routine single down the right-field line, noticed All Star outfielder Dave Parker jogging after the ball, and stretched his hit into a double. As he got up from his slide into second, Francona looked out of the corner of his eye and saw Williams jumping out of his seat. Williams immediately gathered himself and sat back down, but he’d made a statement.

Those who spend time around baseball come to appreciate the difficulty of making it to the major leagues. Millions of young boys dream of playing big league ball, and most of them play some form of Little League, where the process starts of kids moving ahead and kids being left behind. In America the best players advance to Babe Ruth, Legion, high school, AAU, maybe college ball. If you are the best of the best, you get signed to a professional contract, then face more years of trying to move up the system. It takes talent and mental toughness. Some prospects can make it on sheer ability; others move past more talented kids because of their mental makeup. By the time a young man makes it to the major leagues, he’s vaulted past hundreds of thousands of ballplayers who started off thinking they would play baseball for a living.

Terry Francona is self-deprecating when he talks about his baseball career. It’s the way he was raised. But it’s a lie. A gap-hitting corner outfielder, equally effective against righties and lefties, he was a superstar at every level of amateur baseball. He swung at almost everything, and he almost never struck out. (“As soon as I saw anything straight, I swung—I was the anti-poster-child for
Moneyball.
”) He was the best player in the NCAA and later named a member of the College World Series Legends Team. In parts of ten seasons in major league baseball, he hit .274 with 16 homers and 143 RBI, playing 708 big league games for the Expos, Cubs, White Sox, Indians, and Brewers.

“There’s one other stat that nobody knows about,” said Dustin Pedroia, who was born in California in 1983 and would become Francona’s favorite player as a Red Sox. “He is the only player with a minimum of 1,000 plate appearances to never work an 0–2 walk. How awesome is that? He had no fight in him. None! That’s unbelievable.”

Kidding aside, Francona might have evolved into a star at the big league level, but his career was derailed in his first full season in the bigs in 1982 when he crashed into a wall chasing a fly ball hit by Julio Gonzalez at Busch Stadium in St. Louis.

“I was playing left field,” he said. “I went back on the ball and went to jump and planted on the warning track, and it gave way and I felt my right knee explode. My momentum took me into the base of the wall. When I hit that wall, I thought my life was over. It looked like a cartoon. They had to peel me off. I’d never felt pain like that. It was completely torn. Every time I went to Busch Stadium after that, we’d stay at the Marriott, which had a view of the field. I could look out my hotel window and see where I left part of my knee.”

Francona was 22 years old, playing every day, and hitting .321 when he tore his anterior cruciate ligament and meniscus. He was never the same player. In June 1984, he blew out his other knee, running down the first-base line, avoiding a tag by John Tudor.

“From then on, my career was trying to hang on,” he said. “I couldn’t hit for power, and I couldn’t run. As much as I wanted to be a good player, I wasn’t. I realized at an early age that you have to produce, and I couldn’t. I wasn’t helping the team. I think maybe I started to get the message in 1989 when Rawlings sent me a right-hander’s glove. I’m left-handed!”

No one tried harder. Francona needed as many as ten rolls of tape just to get himself on the field. But his legs were gone, and so was most of his game.

His ball-playing days were almost over by the time he first saw Fenway Park when he was with the Indians in 1988.

“The first day of that series I came to the ballpark with Bud Black,” he remembered. “The cab let us off, and we worked our way in from some gate in right field. We walked under the stands, go to the tunnel that connects the clubhouse to the dugout, across those clattering boards. I always remember those clattering boards. Everybody who ever played at Fenway knows what I’m talking about. They fixed a lot of things in the ballpark over the years, but those boards always sounded the same. You could hear somebody coming from the dugout. I bet Babe Ruth walked on those same boards. It was a thrill for me.

“When I got to the dugout and looked out and saw the park, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. I hit against Mike Boddicker in that series. And against Roger Clemens. I pinch-hit, and I fouled off a ton of balls. He finally got tired of it and threw one about 100 miles an hour, and I struck out. A year later, when I came back with the Brewers, I went out to left field early in the afternoon when we were taking early hitting and climbed up that ladder that they used to use to retrieve the home runs that landed in the net. This was before the Monster Seats were up there. I just wanted to go to the top, and it was stupid. The thing is like 37 feet high. You know how high that seems? When I was climbing down, Robin Yount and B. J. Surhoff were throwing baseballs at me. I was like, ‘Hey, fuck you guys, man. I’m scared up here.’”

“He was a great teammate, always positive and witty,” said Black. “He always had something that would lighten the mood, and that’s important in a 162-game season. Plus, no matter how bad his knees were, you could see he was a hitter. He always put the bat on the ball.”

“It was always an easy conversation with Tito,” recalled John Farrell, a pitcher with the ’88 Indians who would be the Red Sox pitching coach under Francona for four seasons (2007 to 2010). “There was a lot of commonality with us. For some reason, it seemed like he gravitated towards pitchers. There was no direct competition on the roster, and it just clicked. We’d grab lunch before games and have a beer after games. I never saw him before he was hurt. With us, he was a bench player who could hit righties and lefties. All of our conversations centered around the game. He knew the game. He taught me a lot. A lot of things were new to me then, and Terry was always helping someone. He was a guy you felt comfortable being around because of his experience and his willingness to share that. He has a keen, intuitive feel for the game, and he had it even then.”

Francona enjoyed his final days in the majors playing for young Brewers manager Tom Trebelhorn. He knew he was the 25th man on the roster, so he did all the little things. He pitched an inning against Oakland (“I struck out Stan Javier on a knuckleball”) when Trebelhorn ran out of bullpen arms. He strapped on catcher’s gear and volunteered to work behind the plate, which would have made him one of the few left-handed catchers in baseball history.

He played in 90 games for the Brewers in 1989, including an early-season game in which he got himself ejected after he was intentionally walked.

“We’d had a dispute with Ken Kaiser early in the season,” Francona remembered. “About two months later, he was working home plate for one of our games against the White Sox. I was sent up to pinch-hit, and first base was open, so they ordered an intentional walk. Kaiser and I were yelling at each other the whole time. Every pitch. Carlton Fisk was catching, and he couldn’t believe it. Finally they threw ball four, and as I was starting down the line to take my base, Kaiser said, ‘I make 3,000 calls a year!’ and I hollered back, ‘And 2,000 of them suck!’ That did it. He tossed me.”

Trebelhorn didn’t mind. Late in the season, he used the oft-limping Francona as a pinch runner.

“That was Trebelhorn being nice,” Francona remembered. “With about ten games left, I’d mentioned to a couple of guys that I needed to get in eight more games to trigger a $25,000 bonus. The next day I pinch-ran. And again for another bunch of games. I remember thinking that Trebelhorn was crazy, but then I pinch-ran in the next-to-last game of the season and got my number. I mentioned something to Trebelhorn about it, and he said, ‘It’s my way of saying thanks.’ That went a long way with me.”

The non-stars notice the small things. That’s why they often become the best managers.

In April 1990, Francona stepped to the plate in the eighth inning of an 18–0 Brewers rout of the Red Sox. It was Marathon Day in Boston, the only 11:00
AM
start in baseball every year. Facing right-hander John Leister, Francona went out on a sinking liner to center. A few days later, Trebelhorn called him into his office and told him he was being released.

The fly ball in Boston was Terry Francona’s final major league at-bat. He’d finished his playing career on the same diamond where his dad made his big league debut after meeting Ted Williams in 1956.

But that harmless fly ball to center in an 18–0 ball game was not Terry Francona’s final deed at Fenway Park. He was just getting started. He was going to earn a place in Boston baseball history.

CHAPTER 3

J
UST A FEW MONTHS
removed from his final big league game at Fenway Park, Terry Francona was climbing his way down the ladder of professional baseball. He still enjoyed the game, but knew there weren’t many more days of seeing his name in any lineup. In the summer of 1990, Terry and Jacque had three small children and lived in a townhouse in Tucson while he made $15,000 playing right field for the Louisville Cardinals. There were plenty of signs that his playing days were almost over, like the time he wiped out his first-base coach as he tried to beat out an infield hit, pulling a hamstring. Francona’s minor league skipper, Gaylen Pitts, pinch-hit for him on multiple occasions, a slight that would have provoked a tantrum from most players with almost ten years of big league experience. Instead, Francona did everything he could do to help the team. He warmed up pitchers and counseled slumping prospects. When Louisville ran out of pitchers, Francona toed the rubber, compiling an ERA of 1.17 in seven and two-thirds innings on the mound.

There were no complaints from the ex-big-leaguer. He was happy to be playing baseball every day, and he was learning new skills. He was also starting to think like a manager, evaluating the young players who were hoping to make the big leagues.

Rare is the player who knows when it’s time to quit. You always think there’s one more season in your broken-down body. After playing the 1990 season in the minors, Francona went home and had surgery on his knee, shoulder, and wrist. He was going to give it one more shot in 1991.

He went to spring training with the Cardinals minor leaguers in 1991, but it was obvious that he was through. Playing in a “B” game on a back field in Dunedin, Florida, he hit an RBI single and a fluke triple (“The ball bounced off a pole and rolled forever,” Francona explained) before coming to bat one last time. Batting with the bases loaded in the sixth inning, he fouled a ball off his right knee and felt it balloon instantly. He hit the next pitch over the fence and could barely stagger around the bases before coming out of the game.

Cardinals GM Ted Simmons called him into his office the next day to notify him that he’d been released.

“I was pissed,” Francona said. “They gave me a ticket to Phoenix, and my home was in Tucson. And they knew they were going to release me before I played in that last game and I hurt my knee badly. I never would have been able to play again after that contusion.”

The cold manner in which Francona was released stuck with him. He pledged to do it more gently and generously if he ever found himself in a position of baseball power.

Unlike many athletes whose careers are cut short by injuries, Francona didn’t waste time thinking about “what might have been.”

“I always felt everything was an opportunity for me,” he said. “Even when I had to go back to Triple A. I always felt like, if I was good enough, I would have found a way to be good. In Montreal, I stood in the training room with Andre Dawson, and we used to get our knees taped in an identical way. He went out and played and was an All-Star and a Hall of Famer. I’d sit on the bench and get released. I never felt like it was unfair. I changed my goals and tried to be valuable enough to be on a team, but I never felt bitter. When something else happened, I’d move on and look at it as an opportunity. At the end, I looked around and realized I really wasn’t that good. There were guys there that I thought were better than me that hadn’t sniffed the big leagues. I figured I should just count my blessings.”

Done with major league baseball, he went home to Jacque and the kids, flopped on the couch, and started watching reruns of
Gilligan’s Island.

“I had $80,000 in the bank,” he said. “I figured we were all set.”

Jacque did not think they were set. She talked Terry into taking a real estate course. It was a bad fit. Francona is not a salesman, and he is not a negotiator. He enrolled in night school, a six-week course that met for three hours twice a week.

“I was just busying myself,” he admitted. “I had no intention of ever being a real estate agent. I was prepared to do something else when it was over, but one night during a break I called home and Jacque said, ‘You’d better call Buddy [Bell]. It’s pretty important.’”

Bell offered him a job as hitting instructor for the White Sox Gulf Coast Rookie League team. He didn’t ask Bell how much money the Sox were paying. He went back to real estate class, dumped his books on the teacher’s desk, and recommended he give the texts to another student.

“No one’s going to buy a house from me anyway,” Francona added.

He flew to Florida the next morning. The White Sox paid him a total of $9,000 for the next three months.