Francona: The Red Sox Years (51 page)

“Do these guys want me back?” he asked his general manager. “Cuz I don’t think they do.”

“No, probably not,” Epstein said softly. “But you need to think long and hard about whether you want to be back. If you really want to be back, I will go to battle for you. We’ll make this happen, but you need to go home and think about whether you want to be back. They said they want to talk with you. We have a meeting with them at nine tomorrow morning.”

Armed with this information, Francona marched upstairs with Epstein to answer media questions about the collapse. It was part of the job, even when the job was coming to an end. There was always a need to explain what happened, especially after an awful finish. The 33-minute question-and-answer session was broadcast live by NESN.

Asked if he wanted to return as manager of the Red Sox, Francona said, “Theo and I talked a little bit. I think we’ll continue to talk tomorrow. Maybe it’s best today to stay with where we’re at. It’s still pretty fresh and pretty raw.”

“I was so disinterested in that press conference because I had a feeling we were going to be having another one,” Francona said months later.

In the wake of the collapse, there were already multiple media reports citing clubhouse drinking and other player misconduct.

“The way the clubhouse culture has evolved, and this falls on me ultimately as the general manager, we need to be more accountable,” Epstein admitted to the press. “In some small ways, we’ve gotten away a little bit from our ideal of what we want to be on the field and off the field. It’s our responsibility to fix it. . . . We’re less than 24 hours removed from the end of the season. We need some time to calm down, get objective, and look at ourselves, look at 2011, look ahead and make the best decisions for everybody.”

Shortly after the awkward session, NESN, the Red Sox–owned flagship station, cut away from postconference analysis to air a replay of a Premier League soccer match involving Wolverhampton. Rival station Comcast Sportsnet New England stayed with Sox analysis.

In less than 24 hours, Francona would no longer be the Sox manager and “clubhouse culture” would be cited as a major contributor to the Sox collapse. Francona and Epstein forever would point to the woeful starting pitching in September, but Red Sox Nation and the media beast wanted more. Reports of clubhouse drinking, Popeye’s takeout, and unprofessional behavior leaked from every crevice of ancient Fenway. “Chicken” and “beer” were destined to stand forever as the bookends of Boston’s epic fold.

After the press conference, Francona went back to his office, sorted through some bills and personal mail, and visited with Pookie, Murph, Tommy, Joe, John, and the rest of his favorite clubbies. Then he went to the Courtyard Marriott and tried to keep his television tuned to a Sox-free zone. It was not easy.

He knew John Henry had been critical of him for several years. The owner could not tolerate decisions that flew in the face of the data. No doubt Werner was thinking of this as another “shitty season.” Francona knew Lucchino would need someone to blame. They weren’t going to sacrifice Theo Epstein, Adrian Gonzalez, Carl Crawford, or Josh Beckett. Not yet. Not after one bad month.

Early Friday morning, when Francona wheeled his Cadillac Escalade into Fenway for his final day as manager of the Boston Red Sox, there were multiple television crews camped out at the intersection of Van Ness and Jersey Streets.

He met with Epstein before going upstairs to meet with the owners.

“Theo, given everything you’ve told me about them not wanting me back, why are we even having this meeting?” Francona started. “I told you from the get-go, it was not only their privilege but their responsibility to get the right person. And if they don’t think I’m the right person, there’s not much to talk about.”

“I think you need to recharge,” said Epstein. “You need to get away. Go reconnect with who you are. If you can do that, you can come back with a new voice. You might be able to come back with a new voice. I don’t want you to come back either unless you can commit to doing that. You have earned the right to do that.”

At 9:00
AM
(“Never be late, never be early,” was a favorite Lucchino expression), Francona and Epstein went to the third floor and sat at the large oak table in the meeting room connected to Lucchino’s office. Also at the table were Cherington, Henry, Werner, and Lucchino.

It was an awkward, passive-aggressive session lasting almost an hour, accomplishing little. Francona knew the owners didn’t want him back, but no one was willing to express this uncomfortable truth. All the men were exhausted, still hurting from the shocking defeat in Baltimore less than 36 hours earlier. The manager said that the players didn’t care about one another or protect one another. In Francona’s mind, that was the worst part about the locker-room drinking: players were not looking out for one another, and they were telling stories behind one another’s backs. He admitted he was bothered by things that hadn’t bothered him in the past. He did not tell them that ownership interference was one of the most difficult parts of his daily life, but he was pretty tired of emails about Ortiz batting against lefties.

Henry, Werner, and Lucchino all took turns speaking. None would voice the plain truth that Francona was not being offered the extension. Henry and Werner routinely recoiled from confrontation, but it was unusual for Lucchino to hold back. The CEO traditionally played the heavy in awkward situations and had a Rolodex of enemies to prove it. Not this time. Nobody wanted to be the man who fired the two-time World Series winning manager, not even after the worst collapse in baseball history. They knew they were not going to bring him back for two years for $9 million. He would never be presented with that option. But appearances were top priority for this group, and it would be much easier to sell the story if the popular manager simply asked to leave.

Exasperated with the conversation, Francona finally said, “If you don’t know what you are doing about me, why am I here? This is a silly meeting. You guys know me. I’ve been here eight years. If you don’t want me, just tell me.”

“We want you to wait and think about it,” said Lucchino. “Take the weekend. Sleep on it. See how you feel.”

“It was a sentiment that we all felt,” Lucchino said later. “That there be an orderly process to this and that we have time to think about it.”

“We had not come to any conclusion about whether to move forward with Terry or not,” insisted Werner. “I was very clear about it. I thought we needed to have a conversation with Tito about what went on in September and how it happened and how we were going to move forward in the future. It was at that meeting that Tito said that he had lost control of the clubhouse . . . he was very forthright about it, that he was not the right person to continue as manager going forward. I had kept a very open mind about what to do going forward and was hopeful that he would be not only specific about the problems, but how to correct them. He said, ‘I’m not the guy to move forward with you.’ Given the historic collapse that we had had, you certainly would want a manager who would articulate not only what the problems were, but how he would go about addressing them. You want a guy who is going to go through a wall, and he was clearly of the opinion that he wanted to leave. His body language in that whole meeting was ‘I’m not the right guy for this.’”

“I never said I lost control of the clubhouse,” countered Francona. “I said I hadn’t been able to reach some of the guys. I was just trying to take accountability. But I kind of viewed that meeting as a charade.”

“Here’s what happened at that meeting,” said Lucchino. “We began by saying, ‘Wow, what happened?’ It was informal. He went through his analysis of how things deteriorated and things that contributed to the decline. Right after he finished, we asked him, ‘What should we do about these things, how do you propose to deal with it?’ and that’s when he said, ‘I’m not the man to deal with these things. They need to hear a different voice down there. I’m not the guy.’ We were all a little surprised. . . . It seemed to us that a little time and space would be appropriate, but that didn’t seem to be the timetable that Terry or others had in mind.”

“Down deep, I didn’t know if what was said in the meeting was everything,” Francona said later. “They basically told me they wanted me to wait and think about it before stepping down.”

“I don’t think anyone at the meeting felt it went well,” said Epstein. “There were more questions—‘Do you want me back?’ and ‘Do you want to be back?’—than there were answers. It was awkward, to say the least, and we weren’t really getting anywhere. Afterwards, Tito and I went down to his office to process the meeting. We laughed at ourselves, at how circular it all was, and how that wasn’t exactly the type of meeting you get with people who want to keep working together. As we got serious, we went back to what was the key issue in my mind, the same one we had identified the day before. Could Tito take some time to reinvigorate himself and come back as ‘the new voice’ we all agreed was necessary to reclaim the clubhouse? I’m sure the lack of an endorsement at the meeting was bothering him, because this time he was definitive: ‘I don’t think so. It doesn’t feel right. You were at the meeting. It’s time to move on.’ I asked him if he was sure, and he said he was. We reminisced, hugged, and soon Tito went home and I went upstairs.”

TV crews were waiting on the sidewalk when Francona pulled out of Fenway, bound for his family’s home in Chestnut Hill. He wanted to prepare Jacque and his children for what was coming. Youngest daughter Jamie was still at Brookline High School, and Leah was living locally while her husband was at war in Afghanistan.

Back at Fenway, Pam Ganley worked on a “Statement from Theo Epstein”:

John Henry, Tom Werner, Larry Lucchino, Ben Cherington and I met with Terry Francona this morning at Fenway Park to exchange thoughts and information on the 2011 season and discuss areas for improvement going forward. We all plan on taking some time to process the thoughts expressed in the meeting. There are no immediate plans for an announcement.

The statement was released to the media at 1:25
PM
.

Driving toward his home in Chestnut Hill, Francona became aware of an eye in the sky. He was being followed by a local news helicopter, like O. J. Simpson in his white Bronco.

Holy shit, with all the stuff going on in the world, they have a helicopter following me,
Francona thought to himself.
What a waste of money.

The manager’s cell phone rang. It was Theo.

“I talked to them after you left,” said Epstein. “It’s pretty clear that the decision has been made.”

“Okay, fine,” said Francona. “I understand. But let’s not put up a charade. Let’s just have a press conference and get it over with.”

Lucchino and Werner dispute this timetable, as well as the notion that they had made up their minds.

“That’s just not what happened,” said Werner. “. . . I would take exception to that. Theo can say what he wants. . . .”

“If Theo did that, he did it on his own motion,” added Lucchino. “He reached his own conclusions about what he thought, but he didn’t clear any of that with us or talk to us about that.”

A reasonable person would conclude that the Sox owners wanted their popular manager to quit before he was fired. That was certainly the opinion of Epstein and Francona.

“Before the meeting, I was told they didn’t want me,” said Francona. “After the meeting, I was told that there was nothing to think about. And I knew how I felt during the meeting.”

Months later, when Lucchino was asked if he thought Epstein “played” both parties against one another, the CEO paused for several seconds and said, “I feel in my bones a certainty of certain things that I don’t want to say publicly, and this is one of them.”

When Francona got to his house—the house he’d moved from almost a year earlier—there were television crews parked on the street next to his driveway. He went inside, spoke to Jacque and the girls, then went back to Fenway. It was surreal. While he drove back to Fenway to pick up some laundry and have a personal tax document notarized in the Red Sox legal department, he heard radio reports about “Francona on his way back to Fenway for another meeting.”

He called Epstein again.

“Let’s do this,” he told the GM. “Everybody’s mind is made up. Why the fuck are we waiting? I don’t want to wait through the weekend, Theo. This is getting silly. Let’s do this now.”

“I’ll get ahold of them,” said Epstein.

“It was just terrible,” recalled Epstein later. “I just tried to be as honest as I could be with Tito. He deserved the right to come back if he wanted to come back.”

“There were issues with his option not being picked up before we started playing bad,” said Josh Beckett. “It kind of looks to me like they didn’t want him to come back one way or the other.”

“It was Tito pressing for a resolution,” said Lucchino. “We didn’t. We wanted a little time and space. So much was going on. We wanted to slow the process down and do things in a more orderly way, but Terry was eager to move on.”

Was there any possibility that Francona could have been offered the two-year extension to come back?

“We discussed various options,” said Lucchino, “all of which we thought would be part of the process that sort of got truncated and never developed.”

“It’s pretty simple,” said Francona. “If they wanted me back, they’d have picked up my option.”

Back at Fenway, Francona busied himself, packing a few things in his office, while Ganley worked upstairs on a press release that would serve as the manager’s Red Sox obituary. When Francona saw Ganley’s first version, he asked her to make some changes. All parties were specific and careful with the wording of the statement.

“It was a scramble, ” Francona said. “I didn’t want it to be a charade. Pam kept coming down with statements. They were adamant about how it was worded, and I’d say, ‘Pam, this isn’t how I feel.’ She told me they were adamant about certain things [for instance, that the word “fired” would not appear anywhere in the document]. I was starting to get mad. I told her, ‘Pam, this isn’t how I feel. I know they want it a certain way, but I lost my job.’ We went through about four versions before we agreed on the last one. Whatever happened, I don’t know. I just know what I was told.”