Francona: The Red Sox Years (53 page)

Francona called Henry multiple times and received no response.

He never spoke with Werner.

When he spoke with Epstein, Epstein said the same thing Lucchino said:
It wasn’t me.

“When all this shit came out, I felt like they were more worried about how they looked than about what happened to me,” said Francona.

“I don’t have a drug problem, that’s pretty obvious. I don’t drink that much, but I joke about it a lot. Anybody that knew me knew I had taken more painkillers in ’04, because my knees were shot, than I did in that last year.”

“The article was unfortunate for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that it threatened to taint Tito’s legacy,” said Epstein. “The nature of the article and its timing brought disproportionate focus on issues that were isolated to a difficult period when none of us were at our best and that were secondary, if not irrelevant, considering his greater body of work. Tito’s overall legacy, I think, is proving that even in a crazy place, a good man can be himself and still win. He never tried to be something he wasn’t. He always put the game—and those who played it—first. He treated people well when no one was looking. He connected with players, fans, and an organization in a simple, genuine way that left us all better than he found us. And he was the on-field leader of an organization that had a decade for the ages. Tito will have a third act—and I have no doubt he will win again—but what he accomplished in Boston was unique, unassailable, and unforgettable.”

There were two sets of snitches to chase. While Francona wondered about the “team sources” who spoke about his pain management, Sox players wondered who was talking about chicken and beer. Beckett texted more than a dozen Sox clubbies and team personnel.

Youkilis emerged as a primary suspect regarding the chicken-and-beer leakage. It was a rumor that would follow Youkilis to Fort Myers in the spring of 2012.

“I guess guys thought it was me for some reason,” Youkilis said in July 2012, after he’d been traded to the White Sox. “But I never talked to reporters after the season ended. I never talked to anyone in the off-season. I was in California. My agent declined every request after the season.”

Well aware that he would become the poster boy for chicken and beer, Beckett said, “I don’t want to be remembered as a guy who talks about what goes on in the clubhouse. There’s things that go on in the clubhouse that are nobody else’s business. That’s a sacred place to me. But I’d rather have all this stuff fall on me than some of these other guys. Some of these guys have a lot longer left to play. If that’s where it ends up being pointed, I’d rather it be that way. I don’t like seeing guys behind me—guys like Jon and Clay—go through any of this. We did everything we could to win. People can believe that or think I’m blowing smoke up their ass, whatever the fuck they want. The fact is, we all wanted to win.”

The Red Sox continued to make off-season news, most of it negative. Epstein was still on the job, but everyone knew he was going to the Cubs. Two days after the
Globe
story, Henry burst into the Brighton studios of 98.5 The Sports Hub to defend himself against comments being made by sports radio hosts Tony Massarotti and Mike Felger. He spoke of a “media riot” and made it clear that he’d opposed the Crawford signing. The owner said, “Larry Lucchino runs the Red Sox.” Henry said he’d sent an email to upper management during the season in which he suggested picking up the option years on Francona’s contract. Henry said there was never a discussion about a replacement manager, not even through the last day of the season. Regarding the
Globe
’s details on Francona’s private life, the owner said, “It’s ridiculous that people would talk about things like that. . . . If it’s someone with the team, and that’s what it says in the newspaper, then I’m very upset about it. It’s reprehensible that it was written about in the first place.”

On October 17, Lester became the first Sox pitcher to admit to having chicken and beer in the clubhouse during games, telling the
Globe
’s Abraham, “People knew how Tito was, and we pushed the envelope with it. We never had rules, we never had that iron fist mentality. If you screwed up, he called you on it. . . . Tito was the perfect guy for this team for a long time, but I think he got burnt out. . . . I should have been on the bench more than I was.”

A day later, WHDH-TV’s Joe Amorosino, citing two unnamed Red Sox employees as sources, reported that Lester, Beckett, and Lackey had been spotted drinking Bud Light from red cups in the dugout during games. This report prompted an 11:04
PM
statement in which the three pitchers, Lucchino, and Francona issued denials.

“I wasn’t even manager anymore and volunteered for that one,” said Francona. “Pam called me and told me, and I told her that in 34 years of professional baseball, I have never seen someone drinking in the dugout. That was one of the worst things I’d ever heard of. Guys don’t come down to the dugout and drink. It just doesn’t happen. Lester would come down in the first inning every night with a big cup of Coke, and I would grab it and taste it—not to check on him, but just because it really pissed him off. It was Coke, but it was in a big beer cup. I knew what he was drinking. I don’t believe there was beer in the dugout, and I never will believe it.”

On October 21, Theo Epstein officially resigned from the Red Sox.

“In a way, I’ll never recover from September,” Epstein said in 2012. “I don’t fully understand it. It was so disheartening. We were playing, I thought, world-class baseball for four and a half months. Clearly we had our vulnerabilities—the pitching attrition was real, and we were walking a tightrope—but for the wheels to fall off the wagon the way we did. . . . For us to lose not only our competitiveness and our place in the standings, but our identity as a team was painful to watch. I’ll never really ever get over that.

“When I think of my relationship with Tito and what I’ll hold on to, I think a lot of those early years, going through it together when we both had the sense that we were like kids who broke into someplace we shouldn’t have been. We were kind of together running this team and organization. We weren’t jaded yet. We were just having a great time seeing what we could pull off, having fun together, taking chances, having each other’s back, and being a small part of watching this great thing unfold that touched so many people. It was really wonderful, and that’s what I really think about. As the dynamic shifted and the Red Sox became too big, it became less fun for everybody. Tito, me. It was time to move on for both of us.”

On November 8, Francona went to Cincinnati (home of St. Louis Cardinals owner Bill DeWitt) to interview for the managerial vacancy created when Tony La Russa retired after winning the 2011 World Series. It was a formality. The Cardinals wanted to stay in-house and hired Mike Matheny, a former Cardinal catcher who’d been serving as a special assistant in the organization. Francona hadn’t expected to get the job, but it bothered him when they started the interview by asking if he could ease their apprehension about the events of September.

“They started by asking me, ‘Given what happened in September, explain why we should hire you or why we shouldn’t be afraid of you?’” Francona said. “They didn’t ask me about the chicken and beer, but the first thing they brought up was September.”

When Pedroia and Ellsbury attended the Gold Glove Awards dinner in New York, Pedroia blushed as Bob Costas told the large audience, “The bar is going to be closed now . . . except for the Red Sox.”

“I was embarrassed, man,” said the second baseman. “Being a Boston Red Sox, my name is part of that, and it’s frustrating.”

Francona spent a good portion of November swimming and getting his health back at the Canyon Ranch Hotel and Spa in Miami Beach. He was committed to not managing any baseball team in 2012.

On December 1, the Red Sox named Bobby Valentine the 45th manager in franchise history. Francona’s cell phone exploded with texts from Pedroia, Beckett, and many other Sox players. Five days later, ESPN announced that Terry Francona would join the network’s
Baseball Tonight
crew and replace Valentine as in-game color analyst on
Sunday Night Baseball.
Francona and Valentine were interviewed together by ESPN’s Karl Ravech in the lobby of the Hilton Anatole at the annual winter meetings in Dallas.

“The only advice I can really give [you] is that in the bathroom there is a mouse,” Francona told Valentine. “It’s in there every day.”

The interview was funny and cordial. When it was over, Francona stood up, took off his microphone, looked around, and said, “Is the camera still on?”

Motioning toward Valentine, clearly joking, Francona smiled and said, “I fucking hate him.”

Everybody laughed.

“When people ask me if I left the Red Sox on my own or if I was fired, I don’t even know how to answer that,” Francona said later. “I really don’t. But I know I spent a lot of my time in Boston putting out fires. I didn’t get to do as much baseball stuff as I would have liked. I love the baseball stuff. It’s a lot harder to just let these guys play the game in Boston because of all the other stuff that’s going on. You have to deal with it. Even if stuff wasn’t there, people put it there. We fought for eight years to keep stuff in that clubhouse. I tried my ass off to help put the team in position to win, and I worked my ass off that last year more than ever.

“Our owners in Boston, they’ve been owners for ten years. They come in with all these ideas about baseball, but I don’t think they love baseball. I think they like baseball. It’s revenue, and I know that’s their right and their interest because they’re owners—and they’re good owners. But they don’t love the game. It’s still more of a toy or a hobby for them. It’s not their blood. They’re going to come in and out of baseball. It’s different for me. Baseball is my life.”

CHAPTER 16

T
HE
2012
RED SOX
were a disaster. The way things ended in 2011 carried into the following season, impacting the ball club and Red Sox Nation with disturbing regularity. In September of 2012, John Henry admitted to
Sports Illustrated
(via email): “What appeared to be an outlier month in September 2011 turned out to be a harbinger instead.”

The once-beloved team morphed into one of the most disliked units in the history of New England sports. The ’12 Sox were a rare blend of entitlement, underachievement, and sloth. The Sox finished in last place for the first time in 20 years, compiling Boston baseball’s worst won-loss record (69–93) in 47 seasons. It was systemic failure from top to bottom.

The season-long collapse was unexpected. The Red Sox made multiple changes after the disappointment of 2011, but none of them improved the product.

Before the season began, the Sox issued a press release on January 19, announcing “restructuring of major league medical staff.” Dr. Thomas Gill was relieved of his duties as team medical director. The Sox also parted ways with assistant trainer Greg Barajas and strength and conditioning coach Dave Page. Trainer Mike Reinold was demoted from head trainer to head physical therapist.

Tim Wakefield retired February 17. Jason Varitek retired two weeks later.

When the Sox arrived in Florida, every media outlet wanted to talk about chicken and beer.

“People gotta eat, whether it’s chicken or steak,” said Adrian Gonzalez.

An angry Beckett complained about a clubhouse snitch and said, “Somebody was trying to save their own ass, and it probably cost a lot of people their asses.” Multiple reports fingered Youkilis as a chicken-and-beer source, and there was a Beckett-Youkilis showdown in the early days of spring training.

“I don’t know why I was the one put out there,” said Youkilis. “We dealt with it in Florida at the start. It was confronted and it was over with. If anyone asked anyone, I think I would have been the last one to say anything.”

While Beckett demonstrated little contrition and looked for leaks, Lester admitted, “We’ve got to earn the trust back from the fans.”

Lackey, who’d undergone Tommy John surgery, said, “Guys having a beer after their start has been going on for the last 100 years. It’s not like we were sitting up there doing it every night. It’s not even close to what people think.”

In a February 18 column in the
Boston Herald,
Francona told Michael Silverman, “I called John Henry seven or eight times. Never heard from him. I have not talked to John since the day I left. It makes you kind of understand where you stood.”

This got Henry’s attention. The owner called his ex-manager and said he was concerned that Francona was angry with him. He repeatedly asked the manager why he had talked about ownership not having his back.

“Like I always said, it’s not only your right, it’s your obligation to get the right manager,” Francona told Henry. “I understand that. And it’s not me anymore. But if you’re hearing what I heard before our meeting, during our meeting, after our meeting—and then reading that article—how would you feel if you were me? Instead of caring about me and my reputation, you start running into radio stations to make sure it’s not about you. I wanted you to care about me.”

Ten minutes after they hung up, Henry called Francona again.

“Tito, how about if you come back and throw out the first pitch for us on opening day?” asked the owner.

“No thanks, John,” said Francona.

“It was the same stuff as before,” the ex-manager said later. “It was like when they made us play the doubleheader and John thought he could make up for it by giving the players his boat and giving them headphones. But the one thing that did come out of that—John promised me he would get back to me regarding that Hohler story. He said the same thing Larry said, but to this day I never heard back.”

When Henry met with the Boston sports media in Fort Myers on February 25, he explained, “I wasn’t avoiding him [Francona]. . . . We had a long conversation after I found out he was trying to get in touch with me. It was a great conversation, one that we should have had prior to this. We were able to clear the air. I think there were points of view that we both had about last year when he left, so it was good.”