Francona: The Red Sox Years (44 page)

Managing the Red Sox was never independent of television ratings.

“One thing the players were always asking for at those roundtable meetings with Larry was getaway day games,” said Francona. “The owners would never go for it. They couldn’t have more day games because the ratings were already suffering, and that would have hurt worse.”

The Sox recovered from a poor April to go 18–11 in May and were wiping out inferior National League competition at the end of June when they capped a stretch of seven wins in eight games with a 13–11 victory at Coors Field in Denver. Pedroia hit three homers and went 5–5 with a walk in the Colorado finale (“Go ask Jeff Francis who I am!”).

“He was on one of those tears, getting ready to carry us for a while,” said Francona.

The next night, at AT&T Park in San Francisco, batting against Jonathan Sanchez in the third inning, Pedroia fouled a 3–1 pitch off his left foot. After writhing in the batter’s box for a moment, he got up and drew a walk. He limped to first base, then came out of the game. Pedroia was on crutches in the clubhouse after the 5–4 loss. He’d fractured the navicular bone.

It was the beginning of the end of the 2010 Red Sox season. One day after Pedroia’s season-ending injury (he would play only two more games in 2010), Clay Buchholz pulled up lame running the bases and had to come out after pitching only one inning. In the series finale on Sunday, catcher Victor Martinez fractured a bone in his left thumb.

It was too much to overcome. By the All-Star break, they were playing without Ellsbury, Pedroia, Cameron, Martinez, and Beckett. Varitek, no longer a starter, broke a bone in his foot and played only 39 games. The Red Sox had 11 players on the disabled list on July 15. Youkilis joined the disabled list in early August and underwent season-ending surgery on his right thumb.

Early birds at the ballpark got accustomed to the sight of Pedroia taking ground balls on his knees. Pedroia and Varitek regularly shucked their crutches and sat in folding chairs while their healthy teammates took batting practice.

“Pedroia and ’Tek found a way to impact the team, even on crutches,” said the manager. “It’s easier to go through it when your best player acts like that. Pedey and ’Tek were great, just being part of it, just being themselves. You can’t have enough team meetings to get that point across. But we were going down so fast, and we didn’t have answers. At first it’s almost fun trying to figure it out, bucking the odds, but it just got to be too much.”

The death of George Steinbrenner during the All-Star break inadvertently shed light on tension in the Sox front office. While the Sox called people back from vacation to compose a thoughtful tribute to their worthy rival (“A formidable opponent,” said Werner), a
Globe
columnist used the occasion to reprint remarks Steinbrenner had made about Werner and Lucchino in Bill Madden’s brilliant biography of the Boss. In Madden’s book, Henry recounted a warning he’d received from Steinbrenner when he bought the Red Sox with his new partners. “I’m concerned about you getting into bed with Werner and Lucchino,” Steinbrenner told Henry. “Those are two treacherous, phony backstabbers you’ve got there, John. You’re a pal, but I’m telling you, I’ve got no use for those two bastards.”

Thick-skinned Lucchino was amused and mildly flattered by the resurrection of the passage. Werner was furious and said, “That’s gratuitous.”

While the Lucchino-Epstein relationship continued to deteriorate, Francona’s relationship with Epstein was stronger than ever. Epstein had learned to steer clear of his manager in the early minutes after tough losses, and Francona was always careful to back up his GM even when he was not in agreement with personnel decisions or statistical suggestions. The manager and the GM had one another’s backs. Francona enjoyed the youthful exuberance of Theo’s baseball ops staff. At 50 years old, he was not above practical jokes and locker-room stunts typically reserved for professional ballplayers.

In late August of 2010, young publicist Pam Ganley witnessed a
Bull Durham
moment when she burst into the manager’s office between games of a day-night doubleheader and caught the manager mooning Epstein, Cherington, and O’Halloran. The Sox had won the first game of the twin bill, then learned that Matsuzaka was injured and would be unable to pitch the nightcap. The manager and the baseball ops executives were in a good mood after the afternoon win, and it was not unusual for Francona to engage in immature horseplay. Boys will be boys. It is the way of many baseball lifers. When Epstein made a wisecrack, Francona came out from the other side of the saloon door and dropped trow.

Unaware of the hijinks in the corner office and armed with the press release announcing that Tim Wakefield would start in place of Matsuzaka, Ganley entered the office without warning, saw the manager’s bare backside, gasped, then turned and left. Francona never saw her. He had his back to the room. But he heard the door slam while Epstein and his guys were laughing.

Pulling up his pants, the manager turned and said, “Was that Pam?”

“She just left,” said the young executives, all doubled over.

Francona bolted from his office, walked quickly across the clubhouse and down the stairs to the tunnel connecting the locker room to the first-base dugout. There he found Ganley, sitting alone on the bench, staring out at the field.

“Pam, I am so sorry,” said the manager. “We were just goofing around.”

“Don’t talk to me,” said Ganley. “I can never look at you again. I am never going to be the same.”

“There were some human resources concerns going on in the back of my brain, but it was pretty freakin’ funny,” said Epstein.

Fortunately, the moment passed and Ganley recovered nicely. No need to report to HR. Like many of the young employees at Fenway—the ones who worked long hours for little pay—Ganley was treated royally and respectfully by the manager of the Red Sox. Ever-mindful of his upbringing around big league clubhouses, Little Tito always took care of the people behind the scenes.

While folks in baseball ops and the manager’s office struggled to win games with a depleted roster, the Sox owners and folks at NESN were trying to identify why ratings were soft. On July 21, while the ball club was on the West Coast, NESN officials met at Fenway with Werner, Lucchino, and a mortified Epstein for an emergency “Viewership/Team Interest Discussion.” The young GM with two World Series championships on his résumé was forced to sit through a meeting that addressed “indicators of declining team popularity” and “possible factors to reduced interest.” The television executives agreed to hire a market research and consulting firm to “access factors contributing to lower interest in the Red Sox in the 2010 season.” The decision to hire the consulting firm “was evidence to me of the inherent tension between building a baseball operation the way I thought was best and the realities of being in a big market and this Monster which had gotten bigger than any of us could handle,” said Epstein. “I thought it was evidence that that conflict was as intense as ever and it was probably inevitable that the business of the game was becoming pretty important.”

“Theo was good about shielding me from that shit,” said Francona. “There were days when he was a little grumpy, and I could tell somebody probably hit him from up above, but he was really good about that. I don’t think he liked that shit about ratings at all.”

Back in the dugout, there was no saving the 2010 Red Sox season. From July 4 through the final day in October, the Sox were a sub-.500 team. Francona was forced to use some bizarre lineups and continued to rotate shortstops. Infielder Bill Hall played some center field. Lowell was lurching toward retirement, while kids Yamaico Navarro, Daniel Nava, Ryan Kalish, and Felix Doubront were introduced to the big leagues. The Sox finished in third place, 89–73, seven games behind the Tampa Bay Rays. They sent 19 players to the disabled list and lost 1,013 man-games to broken bones and torn ligaments.

The Lackey signing was not a hit. In his first season in Boston, the big righty went 14–11 with a 4.40 ERA.

“It was a matter of coming into this division with smaller ballparks and deeper lineups,” said pitching coach Farrell. “With the Angels, he was making 22 of 34 starts at night on the West Coast in Seattle, Anaheim, and Oakland—the three best pitcher’s ballparks in the American League. I don’t think he was any different as a pitcher. I just think there were some circumstances that changed.”

Run prevention was a bust. The Sox finished 12th out of 14 American League teams in fielding percentage. They made 42 more errors than the wild-card-winning Yankees. The Seattle Mariners, godfathers of run prevention in 2009, won a league-low 61 games in 2010.

John Henry was no longer immersed in his baseball team. The owner and his young bride welcomed a baby girl into their lives in late September, and Henry and his Fenway Sports Group were preparing to buy the Liverpool Football Club for $480 million. The Red Sox were no longer Henry’s sole passion. Henry and Werner would spend much of the next two years flying across the Atlantic to tend to matters regarding Liverpool and the Premier League.

The final weekend at home against the Yankees was a public relations disaster for the Sox. Friday night’s game was rained out, but fans were not sent home until 10:35
PM
. Saturday’s day-night doubleheader ended at 1:22
AM
Sunday morning. Sunday’s season finale was Fan Appreciation Day, and Sox players and the coaching staff greeted fans at the turnstiles. Fans were given nifty round magnetic calendars featuring the 2011 schedule.

It was not Manager Appreciation Day. Werner, privy to the results of the $100,000 study he’d commissioned to explore the Sox television ratings slump, passed Francona on the field during pregame activities and grumbled, “What a shitty season.”

“That bothered me,” said the manager. “We were up against a lot, and we ground out 89 wins. I was so proud of our guys. They played their asses off. I remember thinking,
Fuck, if this was shitty, I don’t want to be around here when it really is shitty.
”

CHAPTER 14

T
HE
2011
RED SOX
season—which would prove to be one of the most disappointing and tumultuous campaigns in the 111-year history of Boston’s American League franchise—was launched immediately after the conclusion of the injury-plagued, 89-win season of 2010. The Sox came up with a slogan that promised better days while acknowledging the disappointment of 2010:

“We Won’t Rest Until Order Is Restored.”

On Tuesday, November 2, just over a month after the Sox season ended, a group gathered at Fenway to review results of that $100,000 marketing research project the Sox had commissioned back in July. With Werner participating on speakerphone, Lucchino met with the bosses of NESN. Epstein, who’d been reluctant to participate in the study, attended the meeting.

The document distributed to all participants stated that the “research objectives” were “(1) to access factors contributing to lower interest in the Red Sox in the 2010 season” and “(2) to understand factors contributing to less viewing of Red Sox telecasts in the 2010 season.”

Listed among the reasons for “lower interest” in the 2010 Red Sox:

• Disappointing news and moves in the off-season; not spending the money to get big players
  
• The team’s positioning of itself as “pitching and defense” after not making “big” trades and acquisitions, and the characterization of 2010 as a “bridge year”
  
• Not delivering on pitching and defense in April
  
• Suffering injuries and playing with a “no-name” lineup going into and beyond the All-Star break
  

On page 28, a section dealing with male-female demographics, the report stated: “The women are definitely more drawn to the ‘soap opera’ and ‘reality-TV’ aspects of the game. . . . They are interested in good-looking stars and sex symbols (Pedroia).”

The team-sponsored survey concluded that fans were watching less because “the games are too long with disappointing outcomes.” At the top of the list of “key take-aways” was the recommendation: “Big moves, trades, and messaging in the off-season are important.”

There was little nuance in the survey. No ambiguity. NESN’s in-house memo was telling Epstein and his baseball operations staff what was needed to reverse the costly downward trend in Red Sox television ratings: star power.

Epstein was insulted, amused (Pedroia sexy?), and angry as he sat through the session.

“They told us we didn’t have any marketable players, the team’s not exciting enough,” he recalled. “We need some sizzle. We need some sexy guys. I was laughing to myself. Talk about the tail wagging the dog. This is like an absurdist comedy. We’d become too big. It was the farthest thing removed from what we set out to be.

“That type of shit contributed to the decision in the winter to go for more of a quick fix. Signing Crawford and trading for Adrian [Gonzalez] was in direct response to that in a lot of ways. Shame on me for giving in to it, but at some point the landscape is what it is. I didn’t handle it well, but that kind of explains the arc of what we were doing.”

“Theo never talked to me about any of that, and I appreciated it,” said Francona. “I didn’t want to know, and it’s good that I didn’t know.”

Pressed by his bosses and the sagging ratings, Epstein went to work to build the transcendent team, a team that could win 100 games and a World Series, a team that would boost NESN’s ratings, a team that would cement the legacies of Henry, Werner, and Lucchino as great owners. It would be a team that could make Epstein and Francona candidates for Cooperstown. Three World Series championships in eight years would make any baseball bosses Hall-worthy.

Everyone in the organization knew the Sox were going to lose two of their best hitters. They were not going to compete for free agents Victor Martinez and Adrian Beltre. The Sox did not want Martinez as their everyday catcher, and he wound up getting $50 million over four years from the Tigers. Beltre signed with the American League Champion Rangers for $96 million over six years.