Francona: The Red Sox Years (42 page)

The Red Sox had already been burned by free agency. In exchange for a relatively low yield, Epstein had spent more than a quarter-billion dollars on the likes of J. D. Drew, Daisuke Matsuzaka, Edgar Renteria, Julio Lugo, Matt Clement, and Brad Penny. In the wake of the “bridge remark,” it was going to get worse before it got better.

A week after making the bridge remark, a week after taking a beating in the Boston media, in a two-day spree that looked like bridge backlash, the Sox signed Angel righty John Lackey to a five-year, $82 million deal, then inked soon-to-be-37-year-old outfielder Mike Cameron to a two-year, $15.5 million contract.

It was staggering. Lackey was a proven starter who’d won the seventh game of the World Series when he was a rookie in 2002. He was fiery and durable. The widely respected Angel manager Mike Scioscia regularly gave Lackey the ball for the first game of any playoff series. Lackey was no $82 million pitcher, but he was the best available starter on the market, and the Sox wanted to show their fans that they were serious about winning in 2010. The Sox forgot what they had been about. They lost their patience.

“The Lackey signing flew in the face of everything Theo believed in,” said Mike Dee, who worked with Epstein in San Diego and Boston and was chief operating officer of the Red Sox from 2004 to 2009. “Theo must have been tied down to make that deal. That was all about television ratings. They were panicked about the ratings.”

Cameron was coming off a 149-game, 24-homer season with the Brewers. He was a three-time Gold Glove center fielder and had been an All-Star with the Mariners in 2001. He was a clubhouse leader who spent a lot of time in the community and was considered one of the nicest men in baseball. He’d stolen almost 300 bases in the bigs. Francona remembered managing young Cameron in Birmingham when the Georgia native was a rising star in the White Sox system in 1995.

“He had long, graceful strikes and was built for center field,” said Francona. “He had all the things that you wanted your center fielder to have. He was going to be a good, solid veteran presence for us.”

“Cameron was still showing up as a really good center fielder,” Epstein said later. “Little did we know—and we probably should have known and should have seen it—he was literally falling apart from the inside. He had hernias in both groins. It was really bad.”

Lackey and Cameron weren’t the only new starters who came at a cost. The Sox also signed free agent shortstop Marco Scutaro and agreed to a one-year, $10 million (“make good”) deal with free agent third baseman Adrian Beltre.

It was a great deal of money, and it was all pitching, defense, and television ratings. Lackey would provide the manager with another top-of-the-rotation starter who could eat innings. Scutaro and Beltre would shore up the left side of the Boston infield. Cameron would play center field. And Sox fans would get the message that ownership was not giving up on 2010.

Putting Cameron in center required moving Ellsbury to left to replace Jason Bay, who was allowed to walk away to the Mets. Ellsbury was only 26 years old, coming off a season in which he batted .301 with 70 stolen bases and only two errors. Ellsbury was clearly a future star center fielder, but Cameron had played only three big league games in left field. The kid was asked to move. Francona and Hale called Ellsbury to inform him of the switch.

“Jake was initially quiet when we told him,” recalled the manager. “We told him this was not any kind of indictment, but that we’d gotten a veteran guy who’d only played three games in left field. We told Jake it was short-term. I don’t think he was doing any cartwheels, but he said, ‘Okay.’ He said he understood why we were doing it and was willing to go forward with it.”

“He didn’t like it, but he accepted it,” said Hale.

Everything about the Cameron signing proved disastrous. Ellsbury never openly ripped the decision to move to left field, but he was clearly not enthused and wound up getting hurt, colliding with Beltre under a pop-up in the sixth game of the season. Cameron played only 48 games in 2010 and went to the disabled list twice with a lower abdominal strain. He hit .259 with four homers and 15 RBI. In June of 2011, with Cameron batting .149 in 33 games, the Sox designated him for assignment, then traded him to the Marlins for a player to be named later or cash considerations.

Epstein took the media hit. He was the one who wanted to sign Cameron. Henry took the financial hit, paying $15.5 million for virtually nothing.

Francona did not hide from his participation in the Cameron experiment.

“It just made sense for our team,” said the manager. “Ells was very fast and could outrun some of his mistakes, but Cam was the best when he was healthy. He had a better arm than Jacoby. It was just going to be for a year, and Cam had never played left. We thought Ellsbury in left for a year could have been like what Carl Crawford was in left for Tampa. That’s how we viewed it. We were trying to win now, and that would have been a dynamic outfield. But then Cam showed up and was not healthy right away and Ells got hurt. So much for the best-laid plans.

“I respect how hard those decisions were for baseball ops. They were already thinking of Cam as maybe a fourth outfielder in the second year, and when you are in Boston, if somebody gets hurt, you want to have a good player. As a manager, you can’t sit there and say, ‘I don’t think this is going to work.’ The manager and the GM have to try to communicate where you get to the same page. Even when we didn’t get to the same page, I still understood why we were doing things.”

“We overthought it,” said Epstein. “We relied way too much on the impact of defense and looked past the simplest explanation, which was that you don’t want old guys playing in the middle of the field. They get hurt. That was my fault.”

The push for more defense came from Carmine and from the 2009 season summary questionnaire filled out by all Sox field staff.

“You could see the game trending toward Texas, Tampa, Anaheim, teams that wanted to run,” said Francona. “If the ball didn’t end up where it’s supposed to, you were getting yourself in trouble. Back in ’04, we were kind of slow and plodding at times, but we had so much offense it didn’t matter as much. By 2009, we were extending innings and not finishing plays. We could see it was getting tougher to win that way.”

“If we bring back the same pitching staff and the same defense, we are going to have trouble preventing runs,” said Epstein. “Last year was bad, any way you look at it. We were really bad turning balls in play into outs. It’s remarkable we allowed the third-fewest runs in the league. That’s a testament to our pitching staff and some good situational pitching. You saw Jon Lester early in the year hurt by balls that got by the left side of the infield and by double plays that were not turned. It’s the same stuff that the numbers will tell you if you look at it.”

Defensive metrics—ultimate zone rating, defensive efficiency, plus/minus—were all the rage at the start of the 2010 season. The Seattle Mariners were a trendy division-winner pick by many experts because they’d played sensational defense in 2009. It was a new frontier of
Moneyball
mania. The Red Sox joined the chorus, but rejected the controversial UZR system popular with stat geeks across America.

“We don’t use UZR,” said Theo. “We use our own data. We have guys who do it internally. It’s been refined. There’s been a lot of progress in this area over the last few years. I think if you make any decision exclusively based on what some numbers say, you’re taking an unnecessary risk. It’s the same way we evaluate guys offensively. If we’re going to rely on data, we go through lots of stuff to make sure it’s pretty accurate. The same way we know a guy’s on-base percentage is accurate. If you’re going to trust a defensive number, you’ve got to make sure you know what it means.”

As much as he liked Carmine and all the help from the data, Francona was dubious about defensive stats.

“I didn’t need those numbers to tell me that balls were getting through the infield,” he said. “Trying to quantify defense is a good idea, but it’s not correct yet. They haven’t come up with a way to do it. There are too many variables. I’d look at something on an outfielder and say, ‘Does this take into consideration where the outfielder starts?’ And they’d say, ‘No.’ I’d say, ‘Does it take into consideration the quickness of that particular field?’ And they’d say, ‘No.’ And I’d say, ‘Then don’t send this down to me.’”

O’Halloran understood the skepticism regarding defensive metrics.

“We knew the analytical world wasn’t there yet,” said the assistant GM. “We absolutely felt there was and is no defensive statistic that will tell you a guy is a plus-fielder. We know the data isn’t perfect, and we can’t really rely on it. It really is just a piece to the puzzle. It does help, and sometimes it raises questions. Maybe there is a bias because a guy has great hands and looks dazzling, or maybe he was great ten years ago.”

Going into the 2010 season, Francona’s daily dilemma was the Lowell-Ortiz platoon. Beltre was going to play third every day, and Youkilis would move back to first full-time. This meant that veterans Lowell and Ortiz would have to share designated hitting duties. Both were accustomed to being full-time players. Both had helped win the Red Sox a World Series (two in Ortiz’s case). Both were proud and easily wounded by any suggestion of old age or eroding skills. Both were making more than $10 million per year. Both were enormously popular with Red Sox fans.

Thirty-six-year-old Lowell was in the final year of a three-year, $37.5 million pact that was struck after his MVP performance in the 2007 World Series. He’d recovered from his 2008–2009 winter hip surgery to hit .290 with 17 homers and 75 RBI in 119 games in ’09.

Thirty-four-year-old Ortiz batted only .238 in 2009, but hit 28 homers and knocked in 99 runs. He expected to be in the lineup every day. He was making $13 million. In the 2009 playoffs, he was 1–12 with four strikeouts. Epstein had called him out after the 2009 season, saying, “If he’s going to be the DH on this team, we need him to be a force. We’re a different team when he is that force.”

Lowell batted right, Ortiz left. On paper, it looked like a strong combination.

It was not. Ortiz looked badly overmatched at the start of the season and hit only .143 with one homer in April. Lowell hit .250 with one homer in April and wasn’t moving well. Both players felt disrespected, and it affected their clubhouse comportment.

For the first time in his career, Lowell was difficult to manage. He knew the Sox had traded him to Texas in December, only to get him back when he failed a physical due to a thumb injury. Throughout the 2010 season, Epstein assured Francona that he would trade Lowell. It never happened.

Ortiz, meanwhile, became more self-centered than at any time in his Sox tenure. He challenged scoring decisions, complained about where he batted in the lineup, and recoiled at the notion that his manager would ever send someone up to hit for him.

Things boiled over in Toronto in the 21st game of the season on April 27. The Sox were 9–11 coming into the game, and Ortiz was enduring one of the worst stretches of his career. There was rampant speculation that Big Papi might be all done, and he was agitated when reporters came to him to gently ask him about declining skills.

The Sox and Jays were locked in a 1–1 game with two out and two aboard when Toronto lefty reliever Scott Downs prepared to face J. D. Drew in the top of the eighth inning. Slotted behind Drew as the sixth batter in the Sox lineup, Ortiz got ready to leave the dugout for the on-deck circle. Before Ortiz left the bat rack, Francona put his arm around Ortiz and told him to check with the dugout before going to home plate after Drew hit. The manager wanted his slugger to know that this was a situation in which he might pinch-hit for him, and he did not want to embarrass Ortiz. Papi nodded and went to the on-deck circle. Meanwhile, Lowell put on a helmet, grabbed a bat, and started to get loose in the dugout runway.

When Drew walked on a 3–1 pitch, Ortiz strode toward the plate with his bat in his hand. He never looked back. The bases were loaded. There were two out. The game was tied. Big Papi was going to hit. He was The Man. This was the kind of situation Ortiz thrived on throughout his Red Sox career. He’d carried the Sox with his bat in the 2004 championship run, and Henry loved him so much that he’d had a plaque made anointing Ortiz as the greatest clutch hitter in Red Sox history (a distinction challenged by some Carl Yastrzemski fans).

But Ortiz was not the batter Francona wanted facing Downs in April 2010, not with Mike Lowell in reserve. Francona was hearing a lot of noise from his bosses, especially Henry, regarding Ortiz’s struggles against left-handed pitching. With Ortiz already near the plate, Lowell popped out of the dugout, called to Ortiz, and went toward the batter’s box. Proud Papi trudged back to the dugout and disappeared into the tunnel that leads to the clubhouse. Then he took his bat to a water cooler and other nearby inanimate objects. Players in the Sox dugout heard the commotion as Toronto manager Cito Gaston summoned righty Kevin Gregg to face Lowell.

Lowell walked on four pitches to force home the winning run, but it was not a happy night for the manager or his Ruthian slugger.

“Everybody on the bench knew what was going on,” said Francona. “There wasn’t a lot of sympathy for David because he didn’t look. We had that policy the whole time I was there. If we were going to pinch-hit for somebody, we’d ask ’em to just give us a look before going up to hit. You can’t yell from the dugout, especially at Fenway because it’s so loud. One time in Tampa I wanted to pinch-hit for Mikey, but I didn’t tell him to look over, so he got into the batter’s box and I just let him hit. I hadn’t told him, and I wasn’t going to pull him out of the batter’s box. That’s my fault. He came to me the next day and said, ‘I didn’t do that on purpose,’ and I said, ‘I know. I wouldn’t pull you out of the batter’s box.’ But everybody saw us tell David that night in Toronto, and everybody knew Mikey was ready to hit. It was kind of surreal because David was so mad he was beating up the runway. You could hear David’s bat splintering when Lowell drew the walk to win the game.