Francona: The Red Sox Years (52 page)

The high-nuanced press release, delivered at 5:19
PM
, included expansive statements from the ownership trio of Henry, Werner, and Lucchino, plus Epstein and Francona.

From the owners: “Tito said that after eight years here he was frustrated by his difficulty making an impact with the players, that a different voice was needed, and that it was time for him to move on. After taking time to reflect on Tito’s sentiments, we agreed that it was best for the Red Sox not to exercise the option years on his contract.”

From Epstein: “Ultimately, he decided that there were certain things that needed to be done that he couldn’t do after eight years here, and that this team would benefit from hearing a new voice.”

From Francona: “After many conversations and much consideration, I ultimately felt that, out of respect to this team, it was time for me to move on. I’ve always maintained that it is not only the right, but the obligation, of ownership to have the right person doing this job. I told them that out of my enormous respect for this organization and the people in it, they may need to find a different voice to lead the team.”

Polygraphs exploded across New England while the Red Sox announced that Francona would meet with the media at Fenway at 7:00
PM
, followed by a contingent from Sox management at 8:15. Adding to the chaos was news that John Henry had been injured in a fall on his yacht and transported via ambulance to Massachusetts General Hospital. The WBZ-TV (CBS) evening news featured helicopter coverage of an ambulance parked near Henry’s docked boat at Rowes Wharf behind the Boston Harbor Hotel. Henry walked off the
Iroquois
wearing a neck brace.

On his way to the interview room, Francona remembered the winter day eight years earlier when WBZ’s Jonny Miller asked about the notion of every Red Sox skipper ultimately waiting to be fired. He had told himself he wouldn’t be one of those guys, he would leave on his own terms.

Damn, I almost made it,
he thought to himself.

Every local station covered the press conference live. Francona stayed on script for most of his session. He spoke of “a sense of entitlement” regarding veteran players, but took much of the blame:

“I felt frustrated with my inability to reach guys that I’ve been able to in the past, or affect the outcome a little bit more differently, and that bothers me,” he said. “I wanted desperately for our guys to care about each other on the field. I wasn’t seeing that as much as I wanted to do. When things go bad, your true colors show, and I was bothered by what was showing. It’s my responsibility.”

While he spoke, the clubbies stood shoulder to shoulder in the back of the room.

They heard Francona reject an opportunity to refute a
Boston Herald
report that players had been drinking in the clubhouse during games. He stated that leaving the Sox job was “my decision” and that “it was time for a new voice here.”

Gordon Edes of ESPNBoston asked, “Tito, what was it about this situation that kept you from going in this morning and instead of saying, ‘I think we need to part ways,’ instead of saying that, saying, ‘Look, I didn’t have a good year, but I’m going to redouble my efforts, and I’m going to reach those players next year.’ What is it about this situation that . . .”

Interrupting the drawn-out question, Francona said, “Well, some of it may be personal, but I just thought it was time. To be honest with you, I didn’t know, or I’m not sure how much support there was from ownership. And I don’t know that I felt real comfortable. You’ve got to be all-in on this job. I voiced that today. Going through things here to make it work, it’s got to be everybody together, and I was questioning some of that a little bit.”

When Francona was done, he left the room through the back door on the left side of the stage and walked through the empty weight room back toward the stairs that led to his (former) office. Safe in the ancient corner space with the brown saloon door fronting the toilet, he found Pookie Jackson and told him to round up the rest of the clubbies for one final night on the town. Upstairs in the media room, Epstein sat uncomfortably between Werner and Lucchino and took questions about Francona. When Lucchino was asked about Francona’s lack of “support” from ownership, the CEO said, “I was puzzled by that remark.”

“I didn’t understand why Larry said that,” said Francona. “I didn’t crush them, but they knew. Don’t do that to me. They all knew why I made the comment about support. We’d been talking about that all morning.”

“Looking back, I can understand his rationale,” Lucchino said later. “He wanted a quicker resolution, and if we were really behind him, we would have said, ‘Hey you, it was a terrible September, but you’re our guy.’ We didn’t. We sat down and said, ‘Let’s talk about it. Let’s have a process and see how this comes out.’”

After the press conferences, Francona and the clubbies went to the Red Lantern in the South End of Boston, an Asian restaurant owned by Ed Kane, one of John Henry’s best friends. When the ex-manager checked his phone messages, he had one from Manny Ramirez.

“Papi, this is Manny,” said the faint-but-familiar voice. “I just wanted to give you a call. You were an okay manager. Call me back.”

“I could hear someone in the background coaching him through the phone call,” chuckled Francona. “I could hear a voice telling him it was okay to hang up now. It was kind of funny. He was getting coached even then. But I did appreciate the gesture.”

Francona and the clubbies stayed at the Red Lantern long into the night.

The next morning, while Francona and the clubbies slept it off, John Henry’s wife, Linda Pizzuti, tweeted, “Happy John is home. He slipped down stairs, injuring his neck. Kept at hospital as a precaution, but made it home in time for the derby.”

Swell. The owner, who’d been unable to attend the press conference announcing the firing of the manager who brought two World Series titles to Boston, made it home in time to watch Liverpool beat Everton, 2–0, in the Merseyside derby. It would not be the final insult Sox management hurled at Terry Francona in October of 2011.

The Sox wanted Francona’s club-owned laptop back, almost immediately.

“I asked Brian O’Halloran, who I love, if I could keep it because I had so much on there,” said Francona. “It wasn’t like I was stealing secrets because the stuff was mine. They said no. But I knew how to run it, so I bought the same model and asked them to help me put my stuff on there, but in doing so they erased a bunch of my stuff. And they disconnected that little air card that I think costs about $6 a month.”

Five days after the 2011 Sox season ended in Baltimore,
Boston Globe
sports editor Joe Sullivan assembled a team of veteran baseball reporters in his office and put Bob Hohler in charge of a piece that would go behind the scenes to explain the Red Sox collapse. Hohler was a veteran reporter who served in the
Globe
’s Washington bureau for seven years before taking over the Red Sox beat in 2000. He was the
Globe
’s daily Sox reporter in 2004 and had a good professional relationship with Francona. Hohler left the Sox beat after the 2004 World Series and was an award-winning investigative/project reporter in his postbaseball career at the
Globe.

Hohler knew all the principals in the Red Sox front office and had additional sources in and around Fenway Park. His sources told him about Sox players drinking beer, eating fast-food chicken, and playing video games in the clubhouse during games. Anonymous team sources also painted a picture of a manager rendered less effective because of his troubled marriage and pain medication. Hohler left Francona a message, but the ex-manager was busy working in the FOX Sports broadcast booth, covering the American League Championship Series between the Tigers and Rangers.

On October 10, Francona was sitting in the broadcast booth with partner Joe Buck before the second game of the ALCS when he was approached by
Globe
baseball reporter Peter Abraham.

“Bob Hohler has been trying to get ahold of you,” said Abraham. “He’s working on a story, and I think you need to talk to him.”

Francona reached Hohler later that night. The ex-manager was surprised and furious when Hohler asked him to confirm details of his personal life and charges that his failing marriage and health issues in some way contributed to the team’s demise. Hohler was citing multiple team sources who had requested anonymity.

“I couldn’t believe it,” said Francona. “Somebody went out of their way to hurt me. You go eight years in Boston and it’s coming to an end, which is hard enough. I couldn’t digest it because I was fending off all these allegations. I was like, ‘C’mon, Bob. What the fuck?’”

Headlined “Inside the Collapse,” Hohler’s story ran on Wednesday, October 12, on page 1, above the fold, accompanied by a Reuters photo of Francona, looking dejected, standing in a dugout somewhere on the road in 2011. There were multiple examples of ballplayers behaving badly, but the ex-manager took the biggest hit as details of his personal life were uncovered.

“By numerous accounts, manager Terry Francona lost his ability to prevent some of the lax behavior that characterized the collapse,” Hohler wrote. “Team sources said Francona . . . appeared distracted during the season by issues related to his troubled marriage and to his health.”

Further down in the story, Hohler wrote, “Team sources also expressed concern that Francona’s performance may have been affected by his use of pain medication.”

There it was. Francona’s spring prediction to Dr. Larry Ronan (“This will fuck me someday”) had come true.

The ex-manager was quoted through the story, saying, among many other things, “It makes me angry that people say these things because I’ve busted my [butt] to be the best manager I can be. . . . It [pain medication] never became an issue, and anybody who knew what was going on knows that.”

The damage was done. Reaction was swift.

“He got kicked in the balls just like everybody else that ever left Boston,” said Beckett. “Why won’t they just let you leave? They did it to Nomar. Now they do it to him. He was a great manager, and all they did was kick him in the nuts when he leaves. I hope he buries all those fuckers.”

“Does anybody ever leave here happy?” added Pedroia.

“I wonder who the fuck was saying that shit,” said Youkilis. “It got put in there that I was a problem. There was a lot of stuff that was written that was unfair. We all have our personal lives. Not one person is exempt. The bottom line on that season is that we were not accountable.”

“Wherever that came from, somebody screwed up big time,” said Ortiz. “It’s a huge impact when you are playing for a guy that has your back. It doesn’t matter how tough things are for you, he still believes in you. That is huge. That will turn you into a monster. Pedroia—the reason why he is the player he is, is because Tito gives him confidence. All of us got used to that.”

Francona was especially hurt by “team sources” talking to Hohler about his use of pain medication.

“Larry [Dr. Ronan] called me right away, and I think he was as upset as I was,” said Francona. “He felt so badly. I took so much less pain medicine this year, and everybody that knows me knew it, and that’s what bothered me more than anything. Anybody that knew me knew why I was taking pain pills, but somebody was trying to hurt me. That’s what bothered me. I know I’m not perfect, but somebody felt compelled to tell that. I’d like to think that whoever did it, maybe it was a slip of the tongue, that the intention wasn’t what it was. It was said to put me in a hole. And Bob Hohler tells me it came from multiple sources.”

Larry Lucchino also called Francona.

“I thought it was sad that this story was coming out now,” said Lucchino. “There should have been a better, more positive, more orderly process for his departure I didn’t want him to think that we—John, Tom, and myself—were responsible for providing any of the adverse information. As far as I knew, I know I didn’t talk to Hohler. I don’t think anybody talked to Hohler. I think there was a limited email exchange on certain issues with Hohler by John [Henry], who is the email guy. But no one discussed these kinds of issues with Hohler at the ownership level, and I thought he had the right to know that.”

“He [Lucchino] was the only one of my bosses who called me,” said Francona. “He called to assure me that he hadn’t said anything about the pills. Larry wasn’t even supposed to know about the pain management system we had put in place with MLB. It was a good conversation, but I said, ‘Larry, do you care what they are saying, or are you just worried that people think it’s you?’ He said he’d look into it. He said, ‘Consider it done.’ But he never called me back.”

“He [Francona] urged us to make public who the person was that did this,” said Lucchino. “It was such a transgression. And I did tell him that we would look into it. I did not tell him we would do some Nixonian investigation, because I knew how impossible that kind of examination was. But I did tell him we would look into it, and we did. I talked to people in the baseball ops department in particular. I knew it didn’t come from ownership, and I was trying to find out where it could come from. The possibilities were players, who were largely gone at the time, or baseball ops. There may have been others that I hadn’t thought of. I inquired among those people and couldn’t find anything. I called Hohler to try to get some further information from Hohler, if we could get anything out of him. John and Tom talked to him, trying to get guidance. You know, ‘Was it a he or a she?’ All that kind of stuff. Hohler initially was a little bit cooperative. He acknowledged privately that it didn’t come from ownership, then he sort of backed away from that acknowledgment publicly. We were hoping he would acknowledge it publicly.”

“Larry did not contact me after the story was published,” said Hohler. “He knows as well as anyone that the
Globe
will fully protect its sources. Larry, Tom, and John each know whether or not they communicated with me for the story. Beyond that, I never privately revealed to anyone in the Red Sox organization who was or wasn’t a source for the story.”