Red Sox Rule (11 page)

“I’m not going to take your money,” Jordan said. “But this is what you’re going to do: I saw two silk golf shirts I liked in the pro shop. They’re one hundred dollars apiece. Go pick those up for me.”

Jordan’s competitive light was always on, and these small victories in anonymity were fun, but they were not satisfying. They were refreshing. He needed stakes, a stage, critics, drama. He was the best basketball player in the world, so he was going to return to being an NBA star and champion. For Francona, all he needed was a good opportunity. When he got it, he’d become a champion, flawlessly managing the stars.

T
wo hours was about all he could handle. Two hours of sleep—one hour for each of the previous night’s games—and it was time to wake up and do something. Anything. Terry Francona couldn’t sit still, even if he had told himself that he would.

His two youngest daughters, Leah and Jamie, were downstairs. For them and everyone else in the Franconas’ Chestnut Hill house, it was a lovely Saturday morning, August 19, 2006. For him, who knows, it could have still been Friday night at Fenway. He could have been in the seventh inning of either loss to the Yankees, sweating and rocking in his dugout seat. His nerves were jumping again, as they had before the five-game series started, because he knew it was a bad time for the Yankees to be in town. The teams were separated by two games in the American League East standings when the series began, and two games in, the Red Sox were already slipping.

It’s the strangest thing: you can go outside the morning after a game against the Yankees and feel what happened the night before. It’s as if all of Boston is a weathervane, pointing in the general direction
of the Red Sox. On this summer day, it was a straight shot to the south. The Yankees had swept the doubleheader, 12 to 4 and 14 to 11. Their lead in the division was three and a half games. It was being written about in the papers, talked about on the radio, rehashed and agonized over in checkout lines.

That’s how it works with Yankees–Red Sox, which has the DNA of a high school rivalry and the cash of Wells Fargo. Each team makes a move with the other one in mind, so every meeting during the season is an unofficial poll to see which team is superior. Overreaction and pettiness are to be expected. It happens year after year, and the fact that the Red Sox won the World Series in 2004 didn’t quiet the competition; it intensified it.

Since 2004, Francona’s first season with the team, he had become more knowledgeable about the city and what makes it tick. In the beginning, he may have believed the post–World Series fantasy peddled by outsiders: things would be kinder and gentler in Boston once the angst of not winning for so long was taken away. There was happiness over winning, but it didn’t mean that the manager was suddenly elevated to hero status and couldn’t be second-guessed. No Red Sox manager will ever be an unquestioned hero. It’s New England baseball, the ongoing dialogue, so there are thousands of at-home managers out there, convinced that they would do this or that differently and better. And it’s like that when the Red Sox are winning.

There are many days when Francona goes to the office and finds e-mails telling him what a terrible manager he is for, you name it, taking a pitcher out too early or leaving him in too long. There are days when he turns on the radio and hears that old insult from Philadelphia: “Fran
coma
! I’m telling ya, this guy should be fired…” He’s not shaken by the criticism, not just because he feels that it’s a natural flip side to passion, but because his handling of the criticism
is one thing that heightens his credibility and trust with his players. He won’t crack publicly, no matter how rough a slump, so they know he’ll never try to make himself look good at their expense.

The more time Francona spent in Boston, the more he understood Red Sox–Yankees. It was exhausting and nerve-racking. It was fans reacting to each pitch, each throw over to first, and each managerial move. Francona felt the Northeastern frenzy the first time he managed in a Red Sox–Yankees game. He was so energized by the atmosphere that he talked to himself in the dugout: “Come on, you big dumbass, take a seat and relax.”

He was going to need a similar pep talk on this Saturday morning, working on two hours’ sleep. He left the house, drove to Starbucks for the usual, egg salad sandwich and a large coffee—and headed to Fenway. Who cares if you talk with your mouth full when you’re alone? He had that talk as he ate the sandwich. There was no way he could go into the clubhouse and let anyone see last night’s losses still showing on his face. He had talked so much about not letting the losses linger for days and weeks, he had to live up to his words. After he arrived at the park, he went straight to the weight room to lift and run away the stress.

The season was becoming a mess.

The Red Sox had been on pace for 100 victories, and then they started to break down in July. Jason Varitek got hurt on the last day of the month, the day of the trading deadline, and the team was forced to acquire a catcher, Javy Lopez, whom they didn’t want. They hadn’t received favorable reports on his personality, and they didn’t think he would be a good fit for the team. They were right, he wasn’t ideal for them, but they didn’t have a lot of choices. Pitcher Tim Wakefield got hurt two weeks before Varitek, and no one knew when the knuckleballer would be ready again. Manny Ramirez, supremely talented and maddeningly unpredictable, was
having a great season. But…you never know with Manny. Sometimes he’ll give you a look, which means it’s probably time to give him a day off. Sometimes it’s better to give Manny a rest before he takes one on his own.

It was getting to the point where no one was capable of running into the manager’s office and surprising him by blurting out, “You won’t believe what just happened…” Yes, he would believe it. Whatever it was, it was plausible. It was quickly turning into that kind of year. So it wasn’t enough that the Red Sox would lose their Saturday-afternoon game 13 to 5. Or that they had given up 39 runs in the previous 24 hours. The surprise of the day was starting pitcher Josh Beckett, who packed nine earned runs, nine walks, and 121 pitches into five and two-thirds innings. Beckett’s season ERA was approaching the mid-fives, meaning that he was slumping at the same time one of the players for whom he was traded, Hanley Ramirez, was making his push to be the National League’s Rookie of the Year.

After that game, with the Red Sox now four and a half games back, Francona was convinced that he was going to be in the paper. Not just him, but the coaching staff, baseball operations, ownership, everybody. It just happened to be the weekend that John Henry, the team’s principal owner, had long planned to throw Theo Epstein an engagement party. The party was on Henry’s boat, which was docked in Boston Harbor. They had lost three consecutive games to the Yankees and now they were having a party on the water. Francona didn’t major in journalism at the University of Arizona, but he knew enough about New York tabloids and Boston dailies to understand that they would have fun if they ever got hold of a picture. What would the irreverent headline writers at the
New York Post
do with this one?

Boston Flee Party
?

Three Sheets to the Wind
?

They never got that picture, but any analogy connected to sinking still fit. There were two more games and two more losses, both contributing to the rare final total for the Yankees: a five-game sweep. It’s something that doesn’t happen to good teams, and certainly not at home. The Yankees had won the latest leg of the high school competition, valedictorians for the weekend, while the Red Sox—in the front office—were already thinking about how to beat the Yankees in the off-season.

As embarrassing as the losses on the field had been, the news away from the games was much more important and serious. In late August and the first week of September, the following happened to Red Sox players:

 

• Jon Lester, a 22-year-old rookie pitcher, was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a treatable blood cancer;
  
• David Ortiz, the team’s leading home run hitter and run producer, was hospitalized with heart palpitations;
  
• Ramirez, who had taken himself out of the fifth game of the Yankees series with a sore hamstring, played just 10 more games the remainder of the season. His official injury, according to the team, was patellar tendinitis;
  
• Curt Schilling, the team’s most productive starting pitcher, missed 3 weeks with a muscle strain;
  
• Jonathan Papelbon, the dominant rookie closer with the sub-1.00 ERA, walked off the mound holding and shaking his right arm. Later, he was diagnosed with a shoulder subluxation, which meant his shoulder had slipped forward slightly, away from its socket.
  

 

For the Red Sox, the 2006 season had become about prayer sessions, not playoff pushes. They weren’t going to catch the Yankees, and they didn’t have enough healthy players to make a wild-card run. On the day that the team lost its fourth straight game to New York, Epstein talked with reporters on the field. A kid who grows up in Boston and then goes on to become the GM of the Red Sox understands the mentality when things go wrong in August, especially if they go wrong against the Yankees. There has to be a reason for the team being engulfed in flames, and the reason can’t be too civil (i.e., “They’ve got good players, too”) or too abstract. Some years it’s the players, often it’s the manager, and in 2006 it was Epstein. He was receiving most of his criticism for not making a move at the trading deadline. The names most often mentioned were Bobby Abreu, who went to the Yankees, and Roy Oswalt, the Houston pitcher whose name had been floated in a trade before he re-signed with the Astros.

Asked why the team didn’t go after Abreu, who would have been costly, Epstein said, “We have tremendous resources, don’t get me wrong. But that’s not something we can do. We have a plan. We’re in a position competing with less resources [than the Yankees].” Epstein did have a plan, and part of his plan may have begun with that quote. The Yankees really weren’t going to fall for the sympathetic public service announcement, were they? The only thing missing was,
Please, you can make a difference: no amount donated is too small
…

No team generates income like the Yankees, but the Red Sox have a high-profit cable TV network and the richest radio deal in baseball. They’d be all right. By the time Epstein told a truth that couldn’t have been more correct, his listeners had reached shutdown mode, believing that they had come to the corporate-speak section of the interview. If they had been in a boardroom rather than on a
baseball field, they would have started to draw stick figures in the margins of their legal notebooks and jotted down players they wanted to draft for their fantasy football teams.

“There’s a lot of great development that’s gone on this year,” Epstein said to symbolic eye rolls. “And I think it will bode well for the future.”

What he didn’t mention was that some of the development had taken place in Rhode Island and Maine, where Dustin Pedroia and Jacoby Ellsbury were lunching on minor league pitching. Epstein was high on both of them, and he was counting on Pedroia to be his starter at second base in 2007. But no one wants to hear about next year in August, following a Yankee sweep. And when Pedroia did make his big-league debut a couple days later, he didn’t appear to be anything special. He was barely 5 feet 8 inches, he had the swing of a man a foot taller, and he finished the season with an average of .191. Then again, it wasn’t fair to judge anyone, kid callups included, on the way they looked at the end of the season. The Red Sox won 86 games, a low total by New York–Boston standards, and limped to the finish 11 games behind the Yankees.

The Yankees went on to the postseason, installed as favorites against the Detroit Tigers, and lost the first-round series in four games. Since Detroit was the American League’s representative in the World Series, it would be natural for all teams to measure themselves against them. Not in Boston. Not in New York. Even when neither of them won, they were still occupied with each other.

The good thing about the competitive obsession between the Yankees and Red Sox is that the obsession often leads to self-criticism, which leads to action. When the Red Sox were embarrassed in the Grady Game, for all of New York and America to see, it led to an aggressive off-season in which Francona was hired,
Schilling and closer Keith Foulke were acquired, Ramirez was placed on waivers—remarkably, there were no takers—and Alex Rodriguez was pursued. Maybe Epstein had the information in his back pocket the entire time he was doing his interview with the reporters; maybe he knew then that he would be authorized by ownership to push the budget envelope if he thought a player was worth it.

He had some names in mind, of course, but first he had to play out free agency inside the Red Sox offices. Having magnetic strips with the names of free agents on a big board was not good enough. Not this year. He wanted to be certain that he and his staff understood the free agency landscape, globally and in the States, better than anyone else in baseball. So he went to members of baseball operations like vice president Ben Cherington and assistant general manager Jed Hoyer, vice president of international scouting Craig Shipley, and director of baseball operations Brian O’Halloran. There were about 20 employees, all of them assigned teams and agents to “represent” in a simulation. One of them would be superagent Scott Boras, others would be GMs such as the Yankees’ Brian Cashman, White Sox’s Ken Williams, Mets’ Omar Minaya, Giants’ Brian Sabean, Angels’ Bill Stoneman…all of them were at Fenway to give the Red Sox a sneak preview of what might happen once free agent contracts were extended.

They all spent several days studying the needs and financial restrictions of their teams-for-the-week. Once they began competing for players in their virtual baseball world, they saw just how thin pitching was, and that teams desperate for pitching actually did have the resources to acquire it. They predicted free-agent pitcher Barry Zito’s 7-year, $126 million contract to the letter. They were dead-on with Gil Meche, the former Mariners pitcher who signed a $55 million contract in Kansas City. They were within 5 per
cent of most of the real contracts, which sounds like good news, but what it told them was that they had a lot of competition for the pitcher they really wanted.

His name was Daisuke Matsuzaka, and they had been studying him for years. Shipley and Pacific Rim scout Jon Deeble had seen him pitch in Japan for the Seibu Lions. He would be perfect for the Red Sox; how often do you get the chance to sign a 26-year-old pitcher with star potential for reasonable dollars? They had heard how smart and durable Matsuzaka was, but that’s not the report that most got their attention. They were hearing that Matsuzaka was so eager to pitch in the States that if he had been able, he’d have done it for $3 million a year. They knew that wasn’t going to happen, not with Boras—the real one or the one in role-play—representing him. The point was that they could be dynamic and
needed
to be dynamic in their bid for the pitcher.