Francona: The Red Sox Years (7 page)

He stayed up all night. In the morning he rode on an exercise bike in the hotel fitness room and did a few push-ups. He arrived at the interview 90 minutes early, but the pain and the flop-sweats came back when he started answering Gillick’s questions. Several times he asked Gillick to repeat himself.

“He interviewed all day, half-dead,” said Jacque.

“To this day I tease Gillick that his questions almost killed me,” said Francona.

It was no laughing matter. Francona’s multiple knee surgeries had left him with blood clots, staph infections, and internal bleeding. When he had both knees scoped to alleviate staph infections in October after the 2002 season, the procedure led to a pulmonary embolism on each side of his lungs. Within a month of the Gillick interview, he was in the hospital and doctors were considering the amputation of his right leg. After a major surgery in which his leg was split open to reduce pressure and allow fluid to drain, he spent three weeks at home in bed, unable to go downstairs or to make it to the bathroom by himself. There was massive clotting. He stopped worrying about the Mets and the Mariners. He worried about walking with a limp for the rest of his life, losing his leg, or dying.

“I think I probably should have died with all that happened,” he said. “There were a couple nights in the hospital where I was thinking,
I can’t take this anymore.
The nurses would come running in because I’d stop breathing. I was in bad shape. There were people around who did not think I was going to make it. I know I came real close to losing the leg. Sometimes stories get enhanced, but that one actually gets downplayed.”

Pain medication was a critical part of recovery.

“I lived on it at that time when I was in the hospital,” he said. “I learned every trick in the book, getting a lot of help from the nurses. You keep giving yourself a blot to get through the next 20 minutes. When I left the hospital, I was on heavy-duty drugs, and it was tough.”

In recovery after Christmas, able to walk around a little again, he heard from new Oakland manager Ken Macha. Francona and Macha had first crossed paths in Francona’s final spring training with the Expos in 1986. Macha was a roving coach/instructor with the Expos and was sympathetic toward Francona, a fellow western Pennsylvanian. Francona was cut loose before the start of the season and eventually signed with the Cubs, but Macha never forgot about him. When they managed against one another in the Arizona Fall League in 1994, Macha told Francona that he’d keep him in mind if he ever had a chance to manage in the majors. Francona didn’t think much about it at the time. A lot of friends talk that way. It seemed unlikely. But when Macha got the job in Oakland, he called Francona and offered him a job as bench coach.

It was a good offer. Francona knew he wasn’t going to be managing in the majors in 2003. Sitting alongside Macha with the playoff-bound A’s looked a lot better than lingering in last place in Arlington, Texas. But Francona wasn’t healthy, and his recovery was slow. A couple of weeks before spring training, Francona called Macha to remove himself from the Oakland coaching staff. He told Macha it wouldn’t be fair. He was unable to walk to his car. How was he going to help Macha in his first managing gig with the contending A’s?

Macha told Francona not to worry. The A’s didn’t need Francona to throw batting practice or hit grounders to infielders. Macha wanted Francona for his baseball mind and his positive attitude.

“He saved me,” said Francona. “He said, ‘I don’t give a shit. Just come out and be my bench coach.’ You have no idea how that made me feel. I hung up the phone and told my wife, ‘I’ve got to get healthy enough to go out there.’ When I flew to Phoenix to join them, the walk to the rental car was the longest walk I’d made in three months. Nobody had any idea how sick I’d been.”

At the start, he had trouble bending over to pick up a baseball. He wore a helmet while pitching batting practice. His legs would swell and stretch his pants by the end of the workouts. At night he’d go back to his hotel room and elevate his legs until morning. He was miserable, and it was hard to hide his limitations. Games at the Metrodome in Minnesota were particularly difficult because of a series of steps that led from the dugout to the clubhouse. Everybody in baseball knew about the Metrodome steps. Cal Ripken Jr. made them an Olympic event, trying to get to the clubhouse in a minimal number of strides. For Francona, those steps were Kilimanjaro. It would take him as much as five minutes to get from the dugout to the visitors’ clubhouse in the Metrodome. He’d walk three or four steps, then sit and rest. He was embarrassed.

“I was on so much pain medication,” he remembered. “Oxycontin. I weaned myself off that year, but it took almost half the season. I needed it. Anybody who had my body is going to have to have a certain amount of medication. I never took oxy again after that. It scared me. But I could see why people get hooked.

“I learned how to maintain. My right leg is so damaged, so many clots went through there. Sometimes it gets so swollen, my leg barely fits in my pants. I’ve got a degenerative hip, but that’s so far down the list I can’t even get to it. I’m cold all the time because of the blood thinners. It’s all uncomfortable, but it’s not going to make me die now. It just pisses me off.”

Francona’s health improved as the 2003 baseball season played out. Macha gave him a lot of responsibility, and the A’s of Tim Hudson, Mark Mulder, and Barry Zito were good. Francona handled charts, dealt with players, and found himself enjoying baseball again. This was the year when Michael Lewis’s
Moneyball
hit the national best-seller list, and Francona took delight in holding a copy of the tome in front of his face every time Macha and Billy Beane came aboard a team bus or charter aircraft.

Francona wasn’t with the A’s when Lewis did his reporting on the 2002 Oakland season, but he saw what it was like for Macha to work for Beane in 2003.

“I don’t think the portrayal in the book was an exaggeration,” said Francona. “There were times when I’d walk by Macha’s office after a game and Billy would be sitting there with a lot of strong opinions flying. I’d come in after and tell Ken, ‘I know what I’m supposed to be doing is cheering you up. I wish I could do a better job of it.’”

Francona’s place alongside Macha on the A’s bench gave him a firsthand look at the team he would manage in 2004. The Red Sox and A’s were first-round opponents in the 2003 playoffs, a series that unfolded in spectacular fashion, with the Red Sox winning a fifth-and-deciding game, 4–3, on a Monday night in Oakland. The A’s won the first two games at home and looked ready to wrap up the series at Fenway when bad things started happening to the Western Division champs. Baserunning blunders crushed Oakland in Game 3. (Francona was one of a group in the Oakland dugout who tried to get Eric Byrnes’s attention after Byrnes failed to touch home plate in the game’s most crucial play.) The A’s looked like they had things in hand the next night, but Oakland closer Keith Foulke couldn’t hold a 4–3 lead in the eighth, and the series went back to Oakland for a fifth-and-deciding game.

The future manager of the Red Sox got an inside look at Boston’s backdoor operations after the A’s dropped Game 4 in Boston on Sunday. It was a quick turnaround, with both teams flying coast to coast to get back to the Bay Area for a winner-take-all game scheduled to start 3,000 miles away late Monday afternoon. The A’s trip turned out to be more difficult than that of the Red Sox. Oakland’s team buses left Fenway for Hanscom Field in Bedford, Massachusetts, where they encountered extraordinary security measures. No one will ever admit it, but Francona learned later that the A’s delay might have been due to the influence of Boston’s longtime traveling secretary, Jack McCormick. McCormick is a former Boston police officer and deeply connected with greater Boston’s security and aviation networks.

“Everybody in our party was almost cavity-searched,” said Francona. “We sat on that plane for three hours. I guarantee you the Red Sox got to the West Coast two hours quicker than we did. After I came to Boston, I realized what kind of pull Jack has. He was pretty proud of himself about that one.”

“No comment,” said McCormick. “Just a random security crackdown, I’d guess.”

Boston won Game 5 in Oakland on the strength of Manny Ramirez’s prodigious three-run homer in the sixth inning. There were some hard feelings at the finish when Derek Lowe grabbed his crotch after fanning Terrence Long with the bases loaded. Francona didn’t even notice. Francona couldn’t believe the A’s lost to the Red Sox, and it was going to hurt him in the wallet. Losing Game 5 meant his bonus check was around $20,000 instead of something in the neighborhood of $80,000.

By the time the Red Sox charter left the Bay Area, bound for an epic, fateful seven-game series with the Yankees, Francona was in his blue Mercedes sports utility vehicle, starting a four-and-a-half-day drive home to Yardley, Pennsylvania.

The soon-to-be Red Sox manager was in a cold car, outside his daughter’s volleyball practice, when he first started listening to the Red Sox and Yankees playing Game 7 in Yankee Stadium on Wednesday night, October 15. The big game was not appointment television for the Oakland bench coach and father of four. He was still mad about losing to the Red Sox and hadn’t followed the American League Championship Series very closely. He was blissfully unaware of the tension back in Boston or the nail-biting Lucchino sitting with eccentric Sox owner John Henry in the lower bowl at Yankee Stadium. This was their fight, not his.

Late in the night, the Sox were five outs from a trip to the World Series. They were set to win the American League pennant on Yankee soil. They led the Pinstripes, 5–2, going into the bottom of the eighth with Pedro Martinez on the mound. Martinez almost never spit up a lead of three or more runs. This game was in the bag. Back in Boston, members of the Fenway Park grounds crew had already stenciled the World Series logo into the grass behind home plate. Throughout New England, fans were preparing to celebrate the ultimate victory. After all the pain inflicted by New York and the Yankees—going back to the sale of Babe Ruth in 1920—winning a pennant at Yankee Stadium would be the sweetest of victories. Lucchino had dubbed New York “the Evil Empire,” and George Steinbrenner had responded: “That’s bullshit. That’s how a sick person thinks. I’ve learned this about Lucchino: he’s baseball’s foremost chameleon of all time.”

Francona was happy for Grady Little. He had roomed with Grady’s brother, Bryan “Twig” Little, when the two played for Double A Memphis. Francona and Twig Little had met Fidel Castro while playing for a college all-star team touring Cuba in 1979. During their Expo years, Francona would stop in Texas and pick up Twig for the long drive to spring training in West Palm Beach. Francona and Grady Little were minor league managers at the same time. They both won
Baseball America
’s Minor League Manager of the Year Award, Little with Greenville in ’92, Francona with Birmingham a year later. In the fall of 1992, Francona and Grady Little had lived together when Terry served as Grady’s bench coach with the Grand Canyon Rafters of the Arizona Fall League. They spent a lot of hours driving to and from the ballpark, always stopping at Circle K so Grady could buy some lottery tickets. Little had an easygoing personality and told a lot of stories about farm life, but he never scored big on any of his lottery tickets. He was not a particularly lucky guy.

The Fall League is not about winning baseball games. It’s about identifying and developing individual talent. Pitchers become shortstops, and first basemen become outfielders. There’s not a lot of strategy, and no one uses Bill James spreadsheets to prepare for the opposition. (“We didn’t even know who the hell the guys on the other team were,” remembers Francona.) Francona liked the way folksy Grady Little treated his players. He gave his young players a lot of room, and they liked playing for him.

Terry Francona had returned from volleyball practice and was padding around his house in Yardley, Pennsylvania, when Pedro struck out Alfonso Soriano with his 100th pitch to end the seventh in Yankee Stadium. Francona wasn’t glued to the game, but he liked to keep a TV on in every room in the house. Francona was at his computer, playing online cribbage, not paying much attention to the game, when Pedro Martinez walked off the mound and pointed to the heavens after fanning Soriano to end the seventh.

Everybody who watched the Red Sox knew what it meant when Pedro came off the mound pointing toward the sky. It meant he was through for the night. Lights out. Case closed. Crack open an El Presidente.

Grady Little had another notion—a gut instinct that defied the mountain of data on his desk. He was afraid of Scott Williamson, Mike Timlin, Alan Embree, and the rest of the arms in his bullpen. He wanted Pedro to give him another batter or two in the eighth, or maybe another full inning.

On paper, this was a bad idea. The numbers were clear: In 2003 Pedro turned to dust after his 105th pitch. Batters hit .370 off him after he passed the magic number. But Little didn’t like the numbers, and he resented the young executives who never played the game telling him what to do. He was amused by Henry, the stat-driven owner, and Lucchino, the hard-driving CEO, but he never confronted any of them. He just did the job the way he’d learned from managing almost 2,000 minor league games. Seasons in Bluefield, Hagerstown, Durham, and Richmond had taught Grady Little more than Bill James’s
Baseball Abstract.
All the data supplied by baseball ops was insulting to scouts and baseball lifers who beat the bushes and trusted their eyes. Little didn’t like the geeks telling him what to do.

He also didn’t think much of the alleged “pressure” of a major league baseball game. Before Game 7 Little told the media, “When you’re standing out on your porch and watching that storm coming and you know what danger your crop is in, that’s pressure.”

The cotton farmer let Pedro come out for the eighth. The storm was coming.

Pedro got Nick Johnson to pop up for the first out, then surrendered a double to Derek Jeter and an RBI single to Bernie Williams as New York cut the lead to 5–3. Pedro was up to 115 pitches when Little came out of the third-base dugout. The conversation was brief, and then, to the surprise of everyone in Red Sox Nation, Little patted Pedro on the back, turned, and went back to the Red Sox dugout.