Red Sox Rule (3 page)

Little was gone. The players must have known it after the game when Little, in a quiet clubhouse, went to each of them and whispered thanks and encouragement. They knew it on the plane ride home, a 38-minute flight from New York to Boston, 38 minutes when no one spoke unless they were answering yes-or-no questions from flight attendants.
Sir, would you like a beer? Okay, you need something stronger?
Little’s seat on the 767 was in first class. He was a few feet away from the men who would soon decide that they wouldn’t pick up the option year on his contract. There really wasn’t much for anyone to say—in the air.

By the time the team landed in Boston early on a Friday morning, the movement among the fans was already afoot. Grady had to go. He was the number-one topic of the weekend and the week that followed. He was dragged from forum to forum: newspapers, sports-talk radio, TV opinion shows, message boards, office cubicles, schools, churches, and, of all places, the
Rock the Vote
Democratic presidential debate on CNN. The
Boston Herald
even had a story outlining the ways Little’s decision had cost the city at least $7 million. Boston would have hosted the first two World Series games, and in addition to the 800 hotel rooms major league baseball would have needed, there would have been a boost for local bars, restaurants, stores, buses, and cabs.

“Say hello to our little Grady,” wrote
Herald
reporter Cosmo Macero Jr., “a one-man local recession.”

No one wanted to talk about his fine winning percentage as a manager. Nor was there much space to discuss some of the strides he had made with the team off the field, strides that helped the clubhouse run smoothly. After all, the year before Little’s arrival, the Red Sox were just as likely to be fodder for
Baseball Tonight
as they were for Dr. Phil. The pre–Little Red Sox was a team that could be measured by games as well as episodes. They had it all: angry backup players as well as an often sour superstar in Nomar Garciaparra; an aloof superstar in Manny Ramirez as well as a gifted and temperamental starting pitcher in Martinez; a manager and general manager—Jimy Williams and Dan Duquette—who became adversaries, as well as an interim manager/substitute teacher—Joe Kerrigan—whom the players mocked and cursed; an ownership group that lacked vision and charisma; and a small, old ballpark with almost no room to think in peace. Little, Henry, Epstein, and Lucchino all arrived in 2002, and all were key figures in rebuilding the park and the relationships that went on inside it.

While the fans and front office had different views of how significant Little’s presence in the clubhouse was—insignificant to the fans, extremely significant to the front office—ultimately both groups were going in the same direction: no more Grady. The good-bye was inevitable; the streets of Boston practically cried out for it.

Maybe Little would have been given the benefit of the doubt in a different part of the country. Some cities might have blamed Martinez for not finishing the job. Or they might have pointed to Wakefield for allowing the winning home run. In another time, say the 1960s and 1970s, fans wouldn’t mention pitch counts and managers wouldn’t be vilified for working an ace to exhaustion in the most important game of the year. In another place, the words of baseball author Bill Deane might have spoken for a majority. Defending Little’s decision, Deane wrote, “Today’s managers have learned that they rarely get second-guessed when they make a substitution, only when they don’t, and they manage accordingly—not necessarily to win, but to avoid media scrutiny and justify their own existence.”

Boston’s fans didn’t want to hear any of it. Little hadn’t just embarrassed them, he’d embarrassed them in front of New York. The people hadn’t seen a baseball champion in 85 years, and in their opinion, Little was a roadblock to progress. His severance package was a pile of cash and 85 years’ worth of fury.

When Francona heard about Boston’s Little backlash, he shook his head.

“Man,” he said. “That place sounds crazy.”

He was right, and the crazy place was about to become his home.

I
t didn’t take Terry Francona long to get his introduction to insider Boston. What seemed strange to him at the time was that the introduction didn’t actually happen there. He was in another city of the powerful and connected, Washington, D.C., when he was plainly told what the decision-makers at Fenway Park were thinking.

It was three days after what was being called “The Grady Game,” and Francona was on the road with his son, Nick. Part of the family’s scouting report on Nick was that he was a bright kid who was a born negotiator. He may have been a senior pitcher at the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey, but Nick wasn’t looking for baseball to be the centerpiece of his collegiate career. He was searching for a school that could best help him get to the field of his true passion: high-level financial management. Georgetown was one of the schools that interested him, so father and son spent time on campus and socialized with other parents and prospective students.

At one point on their tour, they found themselves in a room filled with about 100 people, a mass of handshakes, nametags, and nice-to-meet-yous. As they talked with each other, they noticed
a man working his way through the crowd and coming toward them.

“Terry Francona,” he said with a knowing smile. “You’re going to be the next manager of the Boston Red Sox.”

The man introduced himself, but Francona had seen dozens of people that day. The name of this enthusiastic Red Sox fan blended in with everyone else he had met. He didn’t know that the fan, Mike Barnicle, was a longtime Boston columnist and multimedia personality. He also didn’t realize the power and reach of a Boston whisper. The city is too small and too chatty for institutions to hold on to secrets, and the Red Sox are one of the most important institutions in town.

As far as Francona knew, the Red Sox had a manager, yet here was someone saying that the job would be his. He hadn’t received a single call or message from New England, so this was obviously someone who didn’t know what he was talking about. Francona would figure it out eventually, but that day on the Georgetown campus, Barnicle knew more about his future than he did.

Francona’s view of his options was fairly simple. He wanted to manage again, as he had for four losing seasons with the Philadelphia Phillies, but it wouldn’t be awful if his best option was returning to Oakland. There were a lot of things about the organization he liked, including the way the A’s tried to work around money, their biggest obstacle. Other than wins and smarts, everything the A’s had was a fraction compared to the colossal Red Sox and Yankees: attendance, payroll, and regional sports-network cash.

The concept of getting more out of less fascinated Francona, and when he wasn’t listening to general manager Billy Beane’s ideas about baseball, he was teasing him about his fame. For weeks, Francona made sure he was close to
Moneyball,
the Michael Lewis book that made Beane a national celebrity. As soon as Beane would walk
onto team buses and planes, an already seated Francona would be near an entrance, greeting him by reading loudly from passages about Beane’s charm and intelligence. Jokes aside, he thought a lot of the ideas made sense. He also believed that an over-reliance on anything, numbers or hunches, was foolish. He had some good arguments with Beane’s Harvard-trained assistant, Paul DePodesta, a smart executive who had never played in the majors. “You know what, Paul? If you take my point of view and your point of view, and we just met in the middle, we’d have a chance to have an unbelievable organization.” It sounded simple, but he knew the Ivy Leaguers in baseball were sometimes too smart to listen to the common sense of the jocks, and the jocks were sometimes too stubborn to listen to the intellectual Ivy Leaguers. Francona was willing to question and debate any aspect of baseball, so his curiosity about the game and devotion to it were embraced by the A’s.

It also helped that his buddy Ken Macha was the manager. They were both from western Pennsylvania, so they understood the same language; it was the local tongue of
warshing
clothes and shopping
dontahn
, a rugged brand of English that sounded like it was made in the mills that also produced the steel. It was an accent that Roberta Francona—“Birdie” to all her friends—had drilled out of her only son, Terry, so much so that by the time he worked with Pittsburgh native Macha, Francona spoke in a purposeful style that made it seem as if he were checking over each word before releasing it to the world.

Anyway, he could have dinner with Macha, laugh with him, analyze each night’s matchups for him, and give him a different perspective during games. Macha had insisted on holding the job for him on his first staff, even when Francona suggested that the position might be better for someone else. Macha would hear none of it. He didn’t give in until Francona committed to be on his 2003 coaching staff.

The A’s were a fun group of guys and a good team, so Francona enjoyed himself. But it wasn’t the mental and physical grind of managing, a grind that he knew and missed. There were times, especially after tough losses, when Francona would pass Macha’s office and recognize that not-enough-sleep managerial haze.

“I’m going to head home to sleep, Macha,” he’d say on his way out. “And I know you’re not.”

He knew the job was demanding, and he wanted back in. In Philadelphia, with a night game followed by one the next afternoon, he’d sleep on the floor in his Veterans Stadium office rather than make the 30-mile drive home. He’d blast the air conditioning, wrap himself in a flimsy sheet, and collapse on a blow-up mattress. He’d instruct his friend Frank Coppenbarger to wake him up as soon as he arrived in the clubhouse at 7:00
A.M
. Coppenbarger, the Phillies’ director of team travel and equipment, always knew what to expect at 7:00 when he opened the door to that cold, dark refrigerator that Francona called an office.

“He’d have junk food everywhere,” Coppenbarger recalls. “There would be Reese’s peanut butter cup wrappers, empty bags of chips, and grape stems all over the place. And he’d wake up shivering because he’d have the AC up so high.”

He wasn’t planning to repeat all aspects of Philadelphia. He was just 37 years old when the Phillies hired him after the 1996 season, and they didn’t hire him to win. They didn’t quite phrase it that way, but everyone who was paying attention got it. The team had reached the World Series in 1993, and now it was rebuilding. “They’d finally figured out they weren’t going to be able to build anything around the leftovers from the ’93 team,” says Jayson Stark, a former
Philadelphia Inquirer
baseball reporter who now works with ESPN. “So they essentially announced, ‘We’re starting over.’ And that meant the manager wasn’t there to try to win
anything. He was there to try to build something…. But Terry’s bullpen was so bad, and his complementary parts were so mediocre, that there was no way the manager was ever going to look like [Hall of Fame manager] John McGraw.” Francona was along for the ride, a kid manager charged with raising big-league kids—even if his profile was similar to theirs: young guy trying to make it. And that included things beyond baseball.

Just two years earlier, when he was managing in the minor leagues, he and wife Jacque’s bank account dwindled until it rested on a number that was never meant to live alone: zero. He earned a $32,000 salary in his final season as the leader of the Double-A Birmingham Barons. Jacque had a job, too, working part-time as a visiting nurse. All six of the Franconas were there in Alabama—Terry, Jacque, Nick, Alyssa, Leah, and Jamie—happy and living paycheck to paycheck. They were a baseball family, and at least they had work in the industry. They had themselves a Chevy Astro van, they had a townhouse in Arizona, and they were having fun. They’d be just fine.

When Francona was closing in on the Phillies job, a man who would become one of his best friends, Bill Giles, learned of his financial situation. Giles, the team’s chairman and president, floated the young manager a $50,000 loan to help purchase a house in suburban Yardley. There was no timetable on repaying the loan. He just wanted the rookie manager to have a clear head in his new city and to have affection for it. Liking the city was not a problem for Francona. Putting together more wins than losses, unfortunately, was another story.

Shortly after Francona’s single season in Oakland ended with the playoff loss to Boston, he went on a couple interviews for manager’s jobs. He had one of those classic dating-nightmare interviews in Baltimore: after 5 minutes it’s clear that you don’t want
them and they don’t want you, so the dominant thought at the table becomes, “Exit strategy.” He knew things weren’t going to go well when, right off the top, he was asked how he felt about bringing back the entire coaching staff. He replied by saying that it didn’t sound like Orioles management was truly interested in changing the team’s culture.

Clearly, not a good fit. The Orioles hired Lee Mazzilli instead.

He had an interview in Chicago with Ken Williams, the general manager of the White Sox. They had known each other for years, so there wouldn’t be a need for any of those awkward ice-breakers. They met at a restaurant near O’Hare International Airport, where the conversation wasn’t close to the one Francona had imagined. The interview was disjointed and full of interruptions. If it wasn’t the waiter checking in to see if the men had everything they needed, it was Williams splitting and buttering a roll just as Francona was making what he thought was a key point.

No hard feelings. When you’re interviewed at a restaurant near the airport, you’re probably not the top candidate anyway. The White Sox decided to go with Ozzie Guillen.

Boston? Well, Francona had a couple of conversations about Boston with Bud Black, one of his former teammates. The rumors were that Black, not Francona, was the man the Red Sox were targeting to replace the officially dismissed Grady Little. Black, the pitching coach for the Angels, wasn’t sure if he wanted to manage on the East Coast. He had already had some lengthy conversations with the Red Sox about the job, although he hadn’t formally interviewed. He called Francona for advice, and Francona tried to persuade him to do it.

“Look at it this way, Blackie: Boston is a good job and you know you’ll have a pretty good team. If you don’t like it, you can do something else after a couple years. It’s a great opportunity.”

It wasn’t long after that conversation—it seemed like a few hours—that Francona got word that Boston wanted to talk with him about managing the team. It was the first time since D.C. that he had heard his name in a Red Sox sentence. Maybe that fan on the Georgetown campus had been on to something after all.

After the phone call from Boston, it was Francona’s turn to reach out to Black.

“Blackie, I have to tell you that I’m a little embarrassed. I was talking to you about what you should do in Boston, and they just called me to interview for the job.”

Hearing those words from his friend made Black’s decision easier. He had been going back and forth on whether it was the right time and place for him to manage. Knowing that a friend of his was also in the mix—Francona was convinced the job was Black’s if he wanted it—meant that it was time to step back. He withdrew his name from consideration. With Black deciding to stay in Los Angeles, Boston’s finalists were Francona; Dodgers third-base coach Glenn Hoffman, a former Red Sox shortstop; Angels bench coach Joe Maddon; and Rangers first-base coach DeMarlo Hale, a former Red Sox minor league manager.

Inside Fenway Park, coming up with that list had led to some considerable hand-wringing. The fans celebrated because they didn’t have to see Little anymore, but they also didn’t have to hire the next guy. As crazy as the thought might have been to the fans, finding Little’s replacement wasn’t going to be easy. His strengths and weaknesses had both been obvious, which made dealing with him simpler. He didn’t always listen to his bosses, but at least they didn’t have to cast about trying to diagnose his issues. They knew all his tendencies, and he knew theirs. Now they were on to the unknown.

Since there was such urgency to move Little out of town, many
New Englanders glossed over the fact that Theo Epstein, the Red Sox general manager, was going to be making his first managerial hire. Epstein was 28 years old when he was named GM in November 2002, making him the youngest man in baseball history with that title. Right around the time of his one-year anniversary on the job, Epstein began searching for a manager capable of leading the Red Sox to the World Series and actually winning it. It would have been a hilarious assignment if it hadn’t been his. What did he know about finding a manager?

Before his career took him to Boston, he had worked in San Diego. It seemed that Padres manager Bruce Bochy never so much as twitched in that seat as Epstein arrived in Southern California in 1995, worked in baseball operations, went to law school at night, scouted, and, 7 years later, boarded a flight to Boston to become assistant GM of his hometown Red Sox.

Funny, but Epstein had been on more rigorous GM hunts than managerial ones. In his last days as an assistant GM, he had recommended Oakland’s Beane for the opening in Boston. Beane agreed to a Boston contract and was on his way to working for an organization where
Moneyball
would take on new meaning for him. The Red Sox were so bankrolled that they could afford to pay for expensive players and pay off expensive mistakes. If spending money was the question, the answer was usually, “Yes, of course.” But Beane had doubts about leaving the Bay Area, and those doubts led to a professional U-turn back to Oakland. That’s when history and the Red Sox called for Epstein.

Epstein’s age wasn’t the only thing that made him a notable GM. Nor was it bloodlines that allowed him to say that his grandfather, a
Casablanca
screenwriter, created some of the greatest one-liners—
Here’s looking at you, kid
—in the history of American cinema. And although his good looks and savvy once had him
on New England’s list of dream bachelors, just after Patriots quarterback Tom Brady, being tall and handsome had nothing to do with sound decision-making. What made Epstein stand out was his balance, a balance that gave him permission to connect with multiple camps and have credibility in all of them.