Francona: The Red Sox Years (3 page)

“He used to kill a sinker,” said Tim McCarver, Tito Francona’s teammate with the Cardinals in 1965 and ’66. “He was a great low-ball hitter. Tito could hit anything down.”

We can’t go any further in this baseball story without some explanation of the name “Tito.” Christened John Patsy Francona, “Tito” the elder got his lifelong nickname from his dad, Carmen Francona, a steelworker, piano tuner, and minister who raised his family in New Brighton, Pennsylvania, a borough of around 6,000 citizens, many of whom made their livings at local steel, lumber, and paper mills near the Ohio River. Tito is a popular nickname for small boys in Italian households. It comes from the ancient Roman name Titus. Carmen dubbed John “Tito” when the boy was four years old, and it is the name John Patsy Francona has answered to for his entire life.

Running around big league clubhouses when he was a small boy, Terry Francona came to be known as “Little Tito.” As a grown man, a father of four, and a two-time World Champion, Terry Francona is honored to answer to the name that his dad got from his grandfather. Strangers and professional acquaintances call him Terry. His friends, ballplayers, coaches, and clubhouse confidants go with Tito.

Terry grew up in New Brighton and has fond, funny memories of his dad’s parents. Carmen was 100 percent Italian, known all over New Brighton, the steelworker/preacher who could fix your piano even though he could never read a note of music. Josephine Skubis, Terry’s Polish grandmother, grew up in an orphanage, met Carmen when she was only 14, and was tough enough to drive a crane during the Great Depression.

“They were the embodiment of all the Italian-Polish jokes,” said Terry Francona. “My granddad ran the family. He was the patriarch. Everybody in the county knew him. When I was in college at Arizona, checking out at a Kmart, somebody heard my name and said, ‘Yeah, your grandpa tuned my piano.’ He was a minister for the religious services in a part of town called Hunky Alley. My mom was from South Dakota and had never seen anything like it. The family folklore is that when she came to meet my grandmother, my grandmother offered her chicken soup and set down a bowl of broth in front of her that had a whole chicken sitting in it.”

Three and a half years after Terry was born, Tito and Roberta had a daughter, Amy, and the children were raised in a brick ranch in New Brighton while Tito was finishing his 15-year career in the majors. New Brighton is Steeler and Pirates country. It’s near the Ohio border, close to Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, where Joe Willie Namath was raised. At church services in the late 1960s, retired outfielder Tito Francona would nudge his son and say, “There’s Joe Namath’s brother.” The Franconas weren’t rich, but had everything they needed, including a vast basement that Terry converted into a baseball training multiplex. Big league ballplayers didn’t have the cachet or the cash back then that they have in the 21st century. Tito Francona’s big league salary topped out at $30,500. His big endorsement deal was $600 from Rawlings—the company gave him three cents for every G-250 Tito Francona mitt sold. When he was done playing major league baseball, Tito took a job with the local park department, but everybody in New Brighton knew him as a former big leaguer. Among the mementos in the Francona family den were a couple of framed photographs of Tito with Ted Williams.

Another reminder that the Francona household was home to a big league ballplayer: there was a spittoon in every room. Tito Francona was not one of those ballplayers who left his chewing tobacco in the dugout.

“The inside of the driver’s side door in our car was always brown,” said Terry.

Early in every major league season, before school let out, young Terry went long stretches without seeing his dad. He didn’t have a baseball practice partner, so Birdie assembled a contraption that would allow her son to practice throwing and catching by himself. Working out daily in his basement, Terry made himself the best nine-year-old ballplayer in New Brighton, and when Phillips 66 sponsored a regional pitching, batting, and throwing competition in nearby Beaver, Birdie drove her son to the competition.

“The other kids had their dads there coaching them and playing catch,” remembered Terry Francona. “I hadn’t seen my dad in three months, but my mom sat next to me on the bench and bullshitted with me the whole time.”

He won the competition easily, but he never got his trophy. Event organizers disqualified Terry Francona because his dad was a big leaguer. Birdie was livid. She gathered up her son, put him in the car, and promised to drive him for a consolation ice cream. But she couldn’t see the road through her tears and anger. She just kept driving and talking about the injustice of it all until her son noticed a sign that read:
WELCOME TO OHIO
.

A ballplayer never forgets support like that.

In the latter years of Tito’s big league career, Birdie would wait until school got out in mid-June, pack up the family, and relocate to an apartment near her husband’s workplace. The summer of 1965 was spent in St. Louis.

“My first baseball memory is living in apartments in St. Louis,” said Francona. “I was six or seven years old and we lived in these apartments called ‘The Executive.’ It’s not like a place where players would live today. They were horrendous. A lot of the other ballplayers’ families were there—Ray Washburn, Ray Sadecki, Bob Skinner. I used to play baseball with their kids every day. It was like a thousand degrees every day. I didn’t get to the park that often, I was too young. But I was there the night they opened Busch.”

“I remember Terry floating around those apartments,” said McCarver. “A lot of guys used that place because it was across from the airports. Let me tell you, there was nothing ‘executive’ about it. I stayed there four or five years, including 1967, when Roger Maris lived there, and we used to drive to the ballpark together. I remember little Terry very well.”

Little Tito got into some trouble one night when he was carpooling to the park with some of the other ballplayers’ families. Birdie Francona was at the wheel, and everyone heard the bulletin over the radio that Cardinal first baseman Orlando Cepeda had been hit in the face during batting practice and would not be in the lineup. Young Terry whooped it up in the backseat because he knew that meant his dad would be starting at first base. Birdie was mortified.

Then there was the night he showed up in the clubhouse with a fistful of dollars. Curt Simmons’s sons had convinced Little Tito that it was okay to sell players’ game bats to fans. Business was booming until Tito asked his son to explain where all the money was coming from. Fortunately, manager Red Schoendienst and Cardinal ballplayers never knew about the enterprise.

Terry started going to the park almost every day in the summer of 1967 when his dad was playing with the Atlanta Braves. He’d hitch a ride to the park with Rita Raymond, wife of pitcher Claude Raymond, then find his dad in the clubhouse and get a dollar to spend on concession food. One dollar. Every night. It was good for a 75-cent chicken sandwich, but there was nothing he could buy with the 25 cents of change. After watching the game with Rita Raymond and the rest of the wives, he’d ride home in the backseat, listening to Tito and Claude analyze what just happened.

“I heard everything they said,” he remembered. “I was the only eight-year-old who knew that you pitch guys high and tight, and low and away. I saw Bert Blyleven pitch when I was 11, and when I told my dad, ‘That guy has the greatest breaking ball I’ve ever seen,’ that’s when my dad figured out that I was really paying attention.”

In Atlanta he introduced himself to Joe Torre, the hot-hitting catcher who always had a five-o’clock shadow by lunchtime. Years later, when Francona and Torre were the two managers in the greatest rivalry in the sport, Torre would break the ice at the beginning of every series by greeting Francona with a handshake and the question, “How’s your dad?”

The final year of Tito Francona’s career was one of the best years of Terry’s life. Tito went to spring training in Mesa with the Oakland A’s, and Birdie came out with the kids for a three-week vacation. Terry was ten. It was hardball heaven in the Arizona desert. He got to be batboy every day, hanging around with Sal Bando and pitcher Al Downing. He played catch with a sculpted young outfielder named Reggie Jackson, who’d been a star at Arizona State. He took a road trip with the team on a day when his dad stayed back in Mesa. Tito had to have his knee drained and was scheduled to play in a B game. At the road game with the big leaguers, Little Tito spilled a bunch of pine tar in the middle of the game and was too embarrassed to tell anybody. He rode back home to Mesa with super-sticky fingers.

Most of the time he was comfortable around the big league ballplayers, comfortable enough to gawk at Rick Monday’s attractive young wife and tell the outfielder, “You’re my idol.”

To this day, when Monday sees Terry Francona, he laughs and says, “You’re my idol!”

“Rick says he doesn’t even remember me doing that, but I told him, ‘That’s my story and I’m sticking to it,’” said Francona.

Little Tito got an authentic green satin Oakland A’s jacket for Christmas in 1969. He wore it to school every day.

“It was the best present I ever got,” said Terry Francona.

When Tito was traded to the Milwaukee Brewers early in the 1970 season, it worked out well for his only son. Milwaukee wasn’t as hot and humid as St. Louis and Atlanta, and the Brewers in those days played in the American League, which opened up a new world of teams for Terry. Plus, he was finally old enough to go to the ballpark with his dad every day. Brewers manager Dave Bristol didn’t like kids hanging around the clubhouse, but this was Tito’s last gasp in the bigs, so nobody complained about the 11-year-old boy. Downing helped Terry hide from Bristol. The kid shagged fly balls with the big leaguers while the Brewers were taking batting practice. When the visitors took their turn in the cage, Little Tito went up into the stands to snag foul balls with the fans. After batting practice, Little Tito would make one more visit to the clubhouse to line his pockets with candy bars—like a rube traveler stuffing his luggage with the contents of a big-city hotel minibar. Major league clubhouses are well stocked with all forms of sweets, snacks, and beverages. Ballplayers support this bounty in the form of tips to the clubhouse workers, but it looks like free stuff to an 11-year-old, and Tito Francona never said a word about Little Tito raiding the candy rack. He took care of the clubbies when his boy wasn’t around. Years later, Terry Francona’s generosity toward the clubbies would become well known inside big league clubhouses.

In late July 1970, the Washington Senators, managed by Ted Williams, came to County Stadium. Two months away from retirement, Tito Francona made sure his only son didn’t miss an opportunity to meet baseball’s last .400 hitter. “Teddy Ballgame” had taken time to meet with rookie Tito Francona when Terry’s dad made his big league debut in the spring of 1956. A mutual friend asked Williams to visit with the young Orioles outfielder, and when the kid from western Pennsylvania walked into the visitors’ dugout at Fenway before his first big league game, the “Splendid Splinter” was waiting for him. If you wanted to talk hitting, Ted was your friend. The pitchers were the enemies, even the ones on Ted’s own team. Like most ballplayers of his era, Francona believed that Williams was the greatest hitter who ever lived, an opinion shared by the louder-than-life Boston batting champ. In the den of his New Brighton home, Tito Francona keeps a photo of his debut day meeting with Ted Williams.

When the Senators were taking batting practice at County Stadium in 1970, Tito Francona took his son aside and pointed across the diamond toward the big man in the visitors’ dugout.

That’s Ted Williams. Go introduce yourself.

Young Terry didn’t need his dad taking him by the hand. Father knew best. It would make a better impression if the kid walked over there by himself.

Wearing his ball cap and carrying his glove, 11-year-old Terry Francona walked across the field, behind the batting cage, and down the steps of the visitors’ dugout, where Williams was sitting.

“Mr. Williams, I’m Mr. Francona’s son and he wanted me to come over and say hello.”

Williams loved to make parents look good in front of their own kids and was impressed by the manners of Little Tito.

“Well, you are a great-looking kid!” bellowed Williams. “And your dad is one helluva ballplayer. I just want to know one thing, young man. Can you hit?”

“He was great to me,” Terry Francona remembered. “He took a minute and said hello and shook my hand. It meant a lot to my dad.”

It was “bucket list” time in Tito Francona’s career. He knew these were his final days in the bigs, so—pushing his luck a little—he went to Bristol and asked if he could take his son on a ten-game road trip through Minnesota, Chicago, and Kansas City in early August. Bristol said okay.

That was it. Birdie took Terry to buy a sport coat, combed the kid’s hair, and sent him on his way. Her 11-year-old son was going to live the big league life for a week and a half.

“I had a ball,” Terry Francona said more than 40 years later. “I’d be in the hotel room with my dad and get up early and go down to that lobby while my dad slept. All the players and coaches were coming and going. If somebody needed a newspaper or a cup of coffee, I’d get it. To this day I love hotel lobbies. I love watching the people. I think it always reminds me of those first days on the road with my dad.”

At the ballpark on the road, players would dress him in the smallest Brewer uniform they could find, then roll tape around him to tighten and tuck the billowing parts. Tito’s son was polite, respectful, and appreciative. He made it a point to talk to everyone, a quality that stayed with him throughout his baseball life.
Be nice to all the workers. Try to remember their names.
For an 11-year-old, he knew a remarkable number of people in ballparks across America.

Tito wanted to shield his young son from some things about the baseball life. Late one night, long after a game in Kansas City, father and son were sitting in the middle of the dark Brewer bus when both became aware of some X-rated talk coming from the back of the Greyhound. The Brewers had won their game, and no doubt a few postgame beers were consumed. Everybody forgot there was an 11-year-old kid sitting toward the front of the bus. Trying to drown out the racy stuff coming from the back of the bus, Tito quickly shifted into protective dad overdrive, talking loud and steadily—about anything and everything. Twenty years later over Thanksgiving dinner, Tito related the story of the night he adroitly protected his son from the nasty conversation, and only then did Terry admit that he’d been listening to the ballplayers and had heard every word. He’d respected his dad’s effort, but he wasn’t going to miss the racy tales of the young ballplayers.