Francona: The Red Sox Years (18 page)

Theo Epstein found another way to deal with the disaster. Slumped on the old couch in Francona’s office after the manager vacated Fenway, Epstein was rescued by Jed Hoyer, Peter Woodford, and Jonathan Gilula, three of his baseball ops clones. Concerned for his well-being, they took the 30-year-old GM back to a friend’s apartment above the Baseball Tavern, which was situated one block from Fenway, at the corner of Boylston Street and Yawkey Way. They did not want Theo to be alone. The apartment TV offered little comfort. Somebody found a replay of the Grady Little Game from 2003, and desperate Theo forced himself to watch more bad history. After five vodka tonics, he passed out on the apartment couch and slept in his clothes.

Saturday night’s thrashing was somehow cleansing. There was nothing more to lose. Abject embarrassment was all around them. No team had ever come back from 3–0 in a best-of-seven baseball series. Why not the 2004 Red Sox?

Hours before batting practice, the always optimistic Mills went around the clubhouse, stopping for private pep talks with individual players. Making his rounds, patting guys on the back, and telling them all was not lost, Mills was distracted by a screeching sound. In the middle of telling Mark Bellhorn, “We can do this,” Francona’s aide-de-camp was overwhelmed by the fingernails-on-a-blackboard sound of first-base coach Lynn Jones unrolling packing tape, sealing up cardboard boxes for transport to his off-season home.

Mills went to Jones and gently reminded him that he was trying to inspire the troops. The season was not yet over.

“Okay,” said Jones, putting down his roll of packing tape. “But it doesn’t hurt to have a few things ready.”

Kevin Millar was optimistic. He told every teammate, coach, writer, and fan the same thing: “Don’t let us win tonight. If we win, we’ve got Pedro going tomorrow, then Schilling, and then anything can happen in Game 7.”

“You can feel sorry for yourself and pack it in, or you can give it a shot,” said Francona. “Whatever they believed, I believed. Totally. Four in a row is awful daunting, but we just decided to play pitch to pitch, out to out, inning to inning. It wasn’t like we had to dig deep. It was about being the same. It’s how I’ve tried to be my whole career. The idea is to be consistent. Anything else, players see through it. I didn’t give up. Whether it was 19–8 or 0–0 in the first inning. We’re trying to figure out what we do next to put our best foot forward.

“It’s easy now to look back and say that I thought we were going to win. I just knew we were good enough. We had played as good as you can play for seven weeks. We’d put ourselves in a position where if we make another mistake, we go home. But I did think we could do it. When I walked through the clubhouse before Game 4, and they had
Animal House
playing on the clubhouse TV, I thought,
These guys are okay. They’re just crazy enough to think we can do this.
”

Sox players prepared for Game 4 the same way they had for every other game. Gabe Kapler went to the weight room, Bronson Arroyo strummed his guitar, Tim Wakefield sat at his corner stall doing a crossword puzzle, and Johnny Damon brushed his glorious hair. Jason Varitek sifted through a three-ring binder filled with details about the Yankee hitters, and Pedro Martinez arrived too late for the pre–batting practice team stretching exercise in front of the first-base dugout.

“To a man, their body language was identical to what it had been every day, and that’s what I liked,” said Francona. “You can tell when people are faking it. They were not faking it.”

Francona made sure his players saw that he wasn’t doing anything differently. His Game 4 lineup included the same nine batters who’d started the blowout in Game 3. As ever, he wanted to avoid any appearance of panic.

“When things are getting out of control, players look at you,” said the manager. “They take their cue off of you. If I’m losing it, it gives them the right to lose it. There were a lot of times when my stomach would be churning, but I didn’t want them to think that I was panicked. That’s not going to help.”

Derek Lowe was Francona’s Game 4 starter. A free spirit with a great arm, Lowe won 70 games, saved 85, and pitched a no-hitter in his seven seasons with the Red Sox after he was acquired along with Varitek in a spectacular Dan Duquette trade that sent struggling reliever Heathcliff Slocumb to Seattle. Everybody liked Lowe (six-foot-five, blond, a free spirit, Lowe was a classic “himbo”—the male version of a bimbo), but he was frustrated and anxious because he’d underachieved in the 2004 season, the final year of his contract. His ERA in his walk year was 5.42. He had an unhittable sinker, but lacked maturity and partied too hard, and his performance sometimes belied his immense talent. Francona loved Lowe’s raw talent, but wondered about his reliability.

“D-Lowe and Larry Lucchino got into it a couple of times that year, and he was upset with me when I told him he wasn’t going to be in our rotation at the start of the playoffs,” said Francona. “I told him he’d probably have something to say about the outcome, but I had no idea he’d do what he did for us. I still can’t believe more isn’t made of what he did for us in that month.”

Despite Lowe’s solid start, the Sox trailed 4–3 in the bottom of the ninth, and it looked like the ’04 season of great expectations was going to end with an embarrassing sweep at the hands of the hated Yankees. As the Sox got ready to bat against the indomitable Mariano Rivera in the bottom of the ninth, Lucchino took out a yellow legal pad in his upstairs suite and started composing his concession speech. At the same time, Francona met in the dugout with Bill Mueller, due up second, and Dave Roberts, who had stolen 38 bases in 41 tries in 2004. Millar was leading off, and Francona planned to pinch-run if Millar reached. He told Mueller he might have to bunt if Roberts was on first base with no outs. He also told Mueller he might have to hold off on swinging the bat if Roberts had an opportunity to steal.

“Hey, you’re giving me like 12 things to do up here,” said Mueller.

When Millar led off with a five-pitch walk, Francona nodded at Roberts, and the five-foot-ten outfielder started walking up the dugout steps. Before exiting the dugout, Roberts turned to his left to take one last look at the manager. Francona winked at him.

Francona was happy to see Rivera throw over to first base three times before delivering a pitch. It helps the baserunner when the pitcher throws to first. It makes it easier for him to get loose and get into the rhythm of the game.

When Rivera finally threw a pitch, ball one, Roberts broke for second. Jorge Posada, the Yankee catcher was ready. Posada’s howitzer throw was slightly to the shortstop side of second base, and Roberts, sliding headfirst, got his hand under Jeter’s tag. Second-base umpire “Cowboy Joe” West, a man who loved the spotlight, signaled “safe”—with gusto.

Sitting on the bench, to the right of Francona, Mills checked his stopwatch. The baseball term for the time it takes a catcher to catch the ball, transfer it to his right hand, and get it to second base is “pop time.” Mills clocked Posada at 1.79 seconds. Pop time was not a Posada strength, but Mills had never clocked anyone faster.

After the steal, Mueller singled to center, scoring Roberts with the tying run and keeping the Sox alive for a run at history. Francona high-fived Roberts when he came into the dugout, then went back to work.

After Ortiz popped out with the bases loaded to end the inning and send everybody into the tenth, Mills went into the clubhouse to see if his stopwatch was working correctly. He ran the video a couple more times. There was no mistake. The slowest recording he could get was 1.81 seconds. Posada had made the quickest throw of his life, but Roberts still managed to beat the throw.

Mills went back to the dugout, sat next to Francona to watch the tenth, and said, “You have no idea how close that was.”

Roberts lives forever in Red Sox lore.

“When we got him, we hoped that he would accept being an extra outfielder and help us win games off the bench,” said Francona. “That’s a little bit tricky, but he accepted it about as professionally as I’ve ever seen. You tell guys, ‘Stay ready, you might be able to impact the game.’ And he was the ultimate example of that. You can’t do more than he did.”

Three innings later, at 1:22
AM,
Ortiz crushed a two-run homer off Paul Quantrill in the bottom of the 12th, and Fox’s Joe Buck told America, “We’ll see you later today.”

Game 5 started less than 16 hours after the stirring conclusion of Game 4. It didn’t leave much time for sleep or introspection. After a few hours at the Brookline Courtyard Marriott, Francona was back at Fenway at 10:30
AM
, getting ready for Game 5, sitting in front of a chalky glass of Metamucil, joined by his still-hungover 30-year-old general manager. Solidarity? More like superstition. Anything to prolong the series.

“Theo would do anything for luck,” said Francona. “If he thought we could win, he’d have drank that stuff until he wasted away.”

Game 5 turned out to be the longest postseason game in history, a whopping five hours and 14 minutes over 14 innings. Wakefield pitched the final three innings for the Sox, holding the Yankees scoreless, but he was throwing to Varitek instead of Doug Mirabelli, and Varitek was not accustomed to catching the knuckler. Varitek allowed three passed balls, including a pair that moved Matsui to third in the 13th inning.

“I kept asking ’Tek, ‘Are you okay?’” recalled Francona. “You’re asking a guy to do something he hadn’t done all year. You don’t want to embarrass him, but you want his bat in the lineup because he was an offensive force that year. When your captain says, ‘I can handle it,’ you let him go. My heart was in my throat, but I trusted him so much. I figured he’d put his face in front of it if he had to. We all thought we were going to win that game. We weren’t sure how, but we just believed we were going to win. That was the feeling that permeated the rest of the year.”

Ortiz won it again, dumping a single into center in an epic ten-pitch, six-foul at-bat. Appropriately, Wakefield got the win.

They flew right to New York to get ready for Game 6 the next night. And there was hope that Curt Schilling might be able to start Game 6.

Schilling was a Francona favorite long before the infamous Bloody Sock Game of 2004. As a high school pitcher and junior college pitcher in Arizona, he was tracked by Red Sox scout Ray Boone. Ray Boone was the father of big league catcher and manager Bob Boone and the grandfather of Aaron Boone—who ended the Grady Little Game in ’03. Ray Boone finished his 13-year major league career with the Red Sox in 1960, then went to work as a scout for the Red Sox. He signed young Curt Schilling out of Yavapai Junior College in 1986, and the Sox wound up trading Schilling (along with Brady Anderson) to the Orioles for Mike Boddicker in the summer of 1988. Schilling was an underachieving, ordinary pitcher over the first half of his career, but blossomed with the Phillies in the early 1990s, and when Francona came on board to manage the Phils in 1997, Schilling was the Phillies’ ace.

Schilling’s ego and outsized personality never bothered the manager. “He says stuff once a week that he shouldn’t and he takes it back,” admitted Francona. “He knows he talks too much, but he’s always prepared. The things that irritate other people—his face on TV and his politics—I didn’t care. I respected him a lot and have as much affection for him as any player I’ve ever had. He always had respect for coaches. We’d have arguments. But I respected how he competed. He wanted the ball, and he wanted to be in the big games. I never worried about Schill. Guys would poke fun at him when he wasn’t around, but he had the ability to laugh at himself. I don’t think any of it was malicious. They liked him on the mound, and so did I. When he was surly, he was ready to go. He expected everybody else to be ready to go.”

Schilling also protected his teammates. Francona never forgot a game in Philadelphia in which Schilling threw a 100-mile-per-hour fastball at Deion Sanders, then asked, “What is he going to do about it, arm-tackle me?” In another game, Schilling gave up a certain victory when he was ejected in the fifth inning of a game in which he had a comfortable lead. He gave up the win because he was defending Scott Rolen, who’d been hit by a pitch earlier in the game.

Only Francona could call Schilling a “fat-ass” in front of other players. He could make fun of the big righty in press conferences. But he could not shake the image that Schilling was running the team. The thick-skinned manager was stung by the words of Philadelphia radio shock jock Angelo Cataldi, who wrote, “The running joke in Philadelphia is that Curt Schilling was the first player-manager in baseball since Pete Rose.”

“It was one of the few times I wanted to punch somebody,” admitted Francona.

The Sox got everything they wanted from Schilling in 2004. He led the majors with 21 wins and finished with an ERA of 3.26. The Sox went 25–7 in his 32 starts. Everything was going according to plan until he hurt his right ankle in the first game of the playoffs at Anaheim. He was routed by the Yankees in Game 1 of the ALCS, surrendering six runs in three innings of a 10–7 loss. It was his shortest outing of the season, and Schilling was depressed after the game. He was pitching with a torn tendon sheath and could not push off the rubber. A painkiller shot did not help.

Before Game 5 in Boston, Dr. William Morgan performed a 20-minute procedure on Schilling’s ankle, stabilizing the flapping tendon by attaching the skin around it to the deep tissue, creating a makeshift sheath to hold the tendon in place. A day later Schilling arrived at the visitors’ clubhouse in Yankee Stadium and found a pearly white game ball in his left shoe.

“Schill gets a lot of needless flak, but that night was as legit as they come,” said Francona. “I expected him to pitch well, and that wasn’t fair. He was a mess. He had wanted this moment so bad. He wanted to be on that stage and be the guy. We all talked, and I said, ‘Schill, this will probably hurt your career.’ He had no business pitching that game, let alone winning. You can’t get enough superlatives. When he was warming up down in the bullpen, I kept waiting for the phone to ring because the stitches were popping. He had to break one on purpose because it was pinching him. I know some people poke fun and say the blood on his sock was ketchup, but it was legit.”