Red Sox Rule (21 page)

The Red Sox won Game 5, 7 to 1. Beckett gave up a run and five hits, and struck out 11. There are few certainties in sports, but Beckett was one in October 2007. He was not going to lose, to the Angels, to the Indians, or to the Rockies if the Red Sox were fortunate enough to get that far.

Back in Boston, the feeling was that the Red Sox, trailing three games to two were now the favorites. Schilling was scheduled to face Carmona in Game 6, and Dice-K would go against Jake Westbrook in Game 7. The logic was that Schilling, a terrific pitcher in the postseason, would display enough stuff and know-how to get by the nervous kid. And in Game 7, the Red Sox could always call on the emergency team, which included Beckett, if they ran into trouble.

Fenway is often called a magical place, which it is, with its old-style pinball machine angles, expanse of green, and quirks, like seats not facing the field, that let you know that it is not from this era. It is magical and old, but it is modern America in the sense that it’s not obsessed with institutional memory. This can be a disheartening thing when you have a body of work that is good, and are suddenly out of Fenway favor because of a patch of bad
performances. It can be good, or at least amusing, when you have done poorly for a season and then are forgiven—a curtain call?—with a single surprising act.

And so that was the big story, the only real story, of a runaway Game 6. Before it ran away, there was tension in the park from the knowledge that the season could be over in a few hours. The tension intensified and peaked at game time. Minutes later, plans were being made for Game 7.

It started in the Indians’ first, when Schilling tore through the first three batters in 11 pitches, getting Hafner, hitting .130 in the series, on strikes to complete the 1-2-3 start. Carmona, though, didn’t appear to have any confidence or ability to locate. He quickly loaded the bases, giving up singles to Pedroia and Youkilis, and walking Ortiz. He almost got out of it when Ramirez struck out and Lowell hit a fly ball that wasn’t deep enough to score a run.

At the plate: J.D. Drew.

Many of the people at Fenway had watched him come up short all season when they had expected so much more. He had been so average that even his average season stats—.270, .373 on base, 64 RBIs—seemed inflated. They weren’t good stats, but he hadn’t been that good, had he? This was on Theo. You heard that a lot after Game 4, with J.D. often the final point in the debate over whether Epstein was a good GM.

What Epstein loved and fans hated about Drew was his approach at the plate. He was a skeptic, daring a pitcher to throw three strikes on him. He did a lot of watching, and there were many times when he took a seat without moving the bat with aggression. The hope in Game 6, with Carmona scuffling, was that Drew could salvage the inning and draw a walk.

He was well on his way, three balls and a strike, and all the crowd needed to see was another ball.
Don’t swing if you don’t have
to, J.D.
Turns out that he had to. The pitch was just too fat, catching too much of the plate. He got it and he put a charge into it, driving it to center field. Carmona’s shoulders slumped, right there on the mound. Grand slam, J.D. Drew. The park of forgiveness, giddy and stunned, called for him to come back out because they weren’t through thanking him.

This series was going to Game 7 because the Red Sox scored six more runs in the bottom of the third, leading 10 to 0. Carmona left and was replaced by new mop-up man Perez. The reduction in Perez’s role had meant an increase in Betancourt’s. It could play a factor in Game 7, which always had a chance to be the ultimate bullpen game. When the Red Sox won, 12 to 2, no one called for Drew to be replaced, for Pedroia to drop down, or for Francona to get a clue. In fact, there were a lot of people sounding like managers going into the seventh game. They wanted to know who was available in the bullpen and the minimum number of innings they could get out of Dice-K.

But in moments like these, who cared what the fans thought? Francona had always maintained that managing was not a Top 40, pop-music type of industry. You didn’t go with what was hot, you went with what was right, if indeed you had a process that let you know it was right in the first place. It all went back to the first interview he had done with Epstein; he had a process. You don’t panic when an entire region is trying to figure out who’s most to blame—before a series is over.

If they had known how he felt before Game 4, they would have panicked that he wasn’t panicking. Then he played cribbage with Pedroia and talked with Ortiz in the manager’s office at Jacobs Field. Before the game he spoke of how relaxed he was. “It’s as relaxed as I’ve ever been, going into games,” he said a few hours before his team lost Game 4. “I love this time of year. I love the
games. Sometimes you have to be confident in your preparation, relax, and wait for the outcome.”

That would have been a controversial quote immediately after Game 4, the emotion of being up or down 3 to 1 clouding the judgment of both Cleveland and Boston. But prior to Game 7, it had a different interpretation, even though the speaker didn’t change; the situation did. He was relaxed when he was down 3 games to 1, and he was relaxed when the lights on the stage changed, bigger, brighter, hotter for Game 7.

He called it before it happened: the Indians were a good team, extremely talented, but maybe they would perform differently under these circumstances. In the first few innings of Game 7, nerves didn’t seem to be a factor for either side. The Red Sox had three runs off Westbrook by the third, but the pitcher didn’t give in. He forced the Red Sox to ground into double plays in the first two innings, with one of the double-play balls scoring a run. Another run scored on a Lowell sacrifice fly in the third. It was 3 to 2 Red Sox after five, when Francona felt that he had gotten all that he could out of Dice-K: six hits, no walks, two earned runs.

The manager had Beckett available, but he didn’t have to be that radical; he had two pitchers in his bullpen, Okajima and Papelbon, just like the old days of June, who hadn’t given up a run in the series. If he needed to, he could use them both for the remaining 12 outs and drink even more champagne. Okajima had no problems in the sixth, 1-2-3, and was a witness when the Indians’ season collapsed in the seventh. When Francona had spoken of inexperience, he presumably meant the inexperience of kids named Sizemore and Jhonny Peralta and Carmona. Did Lofton, the oldest Indian at 40, cross his mind?

Lofton made a play, or didn’t make one, that turned out to be the biggest of the series. Never mind that he shouldn’t have been
on base in the first place: he popped up to shallow left, and Lugo waved off Ramirez because he thought he had it. He dropped it. Lofton was on second with one out. He could have scored easily when Franklin Gutierrez singled to left. The ball hit the third-base photographers well and rolled into left. Ramirez had essentially conceded the run by the time he got to it, but third-base coach Joel Skinner had held Lofton at third.

Was it the player’s fault? The coach’s? As all of Cleveland thought about it, along with wondering how Jordan had been able to score over Craig Ehlo at the buzzer to win a series over the Cavaliers…and how Elway had driven his team from its own 2 to tie an AFC championship game against the Browns…Casey Blake grounded into an inning-ending double play.

It was 3 to 2, and it was going to get bad fast for Wedge and his team. He had gone to Betancourt once too often, and finally the Red Sox were going to make him pay for it. Wedge must have felt he was all right with the matchups in the seventh. Betancourt was facing the bottom of the Boston lineup, which on this night included rookie Ellsbury batting eighth, Lugo ninth, and then back to the top with Pedroia.

Soon it was a case of one rookie helping out another. Ellsbury reached on an error, and the player from Arizona State whom Jason McLeod loved so much and campaigned for, Pedroia, put that big swing to work and had himself a two-run homer. It was 5 to 2, and it was going to get even worse for Betancourt the next inning. He threw it, they hit it to center field: Lowell, Drew, Varitek, Pedroia…they were pelting him, and when he left it was 9 to 2. When a fresh-faced kid named Jensen Lewis replaced Betancourt, Youkilis hit a home run off him.

It was okay to say it aloud, even though the game was not over. The Red Sox, on their way to an 11 to 2 win, were going to be
hosting the Colorado Rockies in the World Series. When they finally got done hitting, and were able to hold in smiles for three more Cleveland outs in the ninth, the Red Sox, for the third time in less than a month, cracked open a few dozen cases of champagne. They threw another public party for their fans, complete with beer and cigars and the pennant that had seemed so unlikely a few days before.

Francona celebrated with the players, but he was thoughtful during these times, too. He liked to win, and he loved to win with people he respected. There was obviously Millsie, who didn’t have to worry about hurting his feelings and didn’t get sensitive when Francona snapped during games. There was also Hale, whom Francona trusts so much that their first conversation about the job went something like this:

 

H
ALE
: What do you need me to do here?

F
RANCONA
: Coach your ass off. I know what you can do. That’s why you’re here.

 

In Farrell he has a pitching coach who has the skills to be a general manager. He didn’t know much about Luis Alicea as a coach, and he grew to respect the way Alicea taught Pedroia to turn double plays. He laughs when he speaks of Magadan, because the hitting coach is someone he never sees; you’re not supposed to see the hitting coach much if he’s doing his job, hanging around cages and computers.

The season was coming to a close, probably sooner than they all imagined. The Rockies had been the hottest team in baseball for a month, but the story hadn’t changed: whether the opponent was a baseball team or a baseball front office trying to bring about nostalgia—or disappointment—regarding an ex, Beckett was going to
be better than anyone else’s number one. So if need be, he was worth three victories in a series.

All he needed was one. He began the World Series the same way he had begun the first round and the league championship series. The Red Sox scored 13 runs, the Rockies scored 1, and a nation could see where this was going. It was going to be a championship that everyone in the organization could feel, from ownership for spending the money, to the baseball operations people for knowing how to spend it on the minor leagues and scouting. The organization got a win in Game 2 when a piece of information from those long advance scouting meetings was put into practice.

By the World Series, the Red Sox scouts had analyzed everything there was to know about all teams in baseball, including their own. They knew that the scouting report on Papelbon was that he didn’t hold runners well on base, and that the Rockies’ Matt Holliday would take a sizable lead against him. So when Holliday got on in the eighth, with Papelbon on the mound, Millsie gave a signal to Varitek: Tell Pap to throw over to first.

The signal was delivered, Papelbon threw over, and a scoring threat was snuffed. Two college friends, from 30 years back, looked at each other and one of them—Millsie—sniffed and smiled. It was out of character for the man who never celebrates himself, but it was the World Series, and it was a lot better than the old days. They both remembered them. They remembered playing golf each year at the end of the season at Saddlebrook, and each year they’d run into a fired pro coach. One year it was Wayne Fontes, the former coach of the Detroit Lions, and one year they looked around and wondered where the fired pros were. They laughed; it was
their
year. They had just been fired by the Phillies.

Philadelphia had made Francona wonder. The experience made him better, but it cut deep, too. “It’s not just sour grapes,”
he says, “but I never felt that I belonged there.” People would walk up to him on the street after he had been fired and ask him why he was still in town. He went to an Eagles–49ers game when Terrell Owens was still with the Niners and he was on the field near a few Eagles players. They were interested in baseball and he wanted to hear about football. They talked, but they were drowned out by a chant that they thought was “T.O. sucks…” They looked around and saw no T.O. They were talking about him: “Tito sucks…” It just wasn’t the place for him.

Going into Game 3 of the Series, in Denver, he wouldn’t allow himself to think of stats that the people of Philadelphia never thought he’d achieve. He was 6 and 0 in the Series, and two wins away from his second championship in four years. He tried to stay in his normal routine, joke with the players, and abuse Pedroia in cribbage. He then wrote Pedroia’s and Ellsbury’s names at the top of the lineup and watched them combine for seven hits. If you add the hit of another rookie, Dice-K, it was eight hits from the rooks in a 10 to 5 win.

The guys tried to talk about it the next day, but Francona wouldn’t let them. Lowell and Pedroia were in his office, and they talked about how crazy it was that the season could be over that night. Francona changed the subject. He didn’t want to think about being 8 and 0 on the Series stage, where the elite card players congregate, or the possibility of an eight-game winning streak in one postseason and a seven-game streak in another.

With that said, he was happy to see the look on Jack McCormick’s face during the Series. McCormick’s official title was traveling secretary, but Francona wasn’t much for official titles. He trusted McCormick, a former Boston cop who seemed to know anything and everything about the city. McCormick had patrolled Kenmore Square, the Back Bay, and the South End in
the 1970s and 1980s, when those areas weren’t nearly as trendy as they are now. Francona knew McCormick had witnessed a lot of painful Red Sox history up close, and he was glad to see the Commander—his nickname for McCormick—glowing with the team on the cusp of another championship.