Francona: The Red Sox Years (38 page)

CHAPTER 12

T
HE MANAGER OF THE
Red Sox was comfortable.

This is not a statement made lightly. The man working in the corner office of the home clubhouse at Fenway Park is traditionally paranoid, besieged, anxious, and ever-ready to be fired. Comfort and stability are never part of the job. A sample of the manager’s mailbag or a Google search would make even the most secure man cringe. It was Terry Francona who opened his mail in his first year on the job and noted, “Some of the things they ask you to do are impossible. I mean, you can only stick that lineup card so far up your ass.”

In spite of the never-ending pressures and expectations, Francona was surprisingly peaceful as he got ready for the 2009 major league season. He was making $3 million per year and had four playoff appearances in five seasons, two World Series rings, and a contract that carried him through the 2011 season. He was easily the most decorated manager in Red Sox history and already had the second-longest tenure of any Sox manager since Prohibition. The years of hunger and uncertainty were behind him. Three of his four children had graduated from high school and moved out of the house. He was at peace with the fans of Boston and found himself almost as popular as Bill Belichick or the late Red Auerbach. Nobody laughed when fans or writers anointed him as the greatest manager in the history of the Red Sox.

As much as New Brighton, Tucson, Yardley, Pennsylvania, or Chestnut Hill, Fenway Park was Francona’s home. He loved his job, and he loved the people who were part of his everyday routines. He had his best friend Mills alongside him in the dugout for every pitch of every season. He had former teammate John Farrell as his pitching coach. He had traveling secretary McCormick and team doctor Larry Ronan on speed-dial. He trusted a handful of the longtime Fenway clubhouse workers as much as he trusted members of his own family.

“They were like my little brothers,” he said.

Fenway Park’s clubhouse workers of 2009 were baseball descendants of the men who’d allowed Francona to hang around clubhouses in Oakland and Milwaukee when he was a little kid and his dad was a big league outfielder and who’d let him steal candy from the ballplayers’ stash. Often referred to as “clubhouse kids,” the Red Sox clubhouse managers were grown men, some with wives and children. They all had bills to pay, and no one lined their pockets more freely than Terry Francona.

Edward Jackson, aka “Pookie,” was a Francona favorite. The Red Sox found Pookie (nicknamed by his grandmother) when he moved to Fort Myers from Jacksonville in 1994. Affable and quick with a smile, Pookie was the go-to guy for clean socks, food runs, practical jokes, and red fleece tops. Jackson was an agent of change for the clubbies in 2002 when he temporarily worked as a driver for new owner John Henry. Afflicted with allergies, Jackson coughed and wheezed while he drove Henry around Boston. The caring owner asked Jackson why he didn’t have medication for his condition, and Jackson told the owner that the clubhouse workers did not have health insurance. Henry called Fenway and directed his assistant to include the clubhouse workers in the Red Sox employee benefits program. He told Jackson to see a physician immediately and put the bills on the owner’s desk until the insurance kicked in.

Jackson was always in the Sox clubhouse.

“Pookie was almost assigned to me,” said Francona. “I’d come in some morning and Pookie would be scrubbing my shower down.”

Tom McLaughlin and Joe Cochran were another pair of loyal lifers in the clubhouse. Tall and hilarious, Brighton native McLaughlin started with the Red Sox as a batboy in 1986 and served as visiting clubhouse manager in all the years that Francona managed in Boston. Cochran, who grew up on Cape Cod and started with the Sox in 1984, often worked inside the left-field wall for longtime groundskeeper Joe Mooney. Cochran was the home clubhouse manager during Francona’s tenure. McLaughlin traveled frequently, and Cochran was on every road trip. They knew all the locker-room secrets and gave up nothing.

“Clubhouse guys survive by not letting anything get out,” said Francona. “And they know everything. If we traded for a guy and I knew the clubbie on that guy’s team, I would always call him. You could get information from a clubbie that a scout could never see on a field.”

Steve Murphy and John Coyne were additional clubhouse assistants and Francona confidants. “Murph” was the one who prepared the manager’s chew and bubblegum concoction. Coyne was a Boston College graduate who looked a little like Pedroia and, according to Francona, could not be trusted mailing packages.

“Pookie walked into my office one day with a wedding present that I’d sent a year earlier, and it had come back to the ballpark unopened,” said the manager. “I said, ‘What the fuck happened with this?’ and he said, ‘I told you not to let John Coyne send it. He never writes anything down and then he forgets.’”

The routine on home dates was pretty similar. Francona would leave his Brookline home late in the morning, always on the quarter-hour. Fenway was only a 10- to 12-minute drive from his home, and each day he stopped at the Starbucks on the corner of Route 9 and Hammond Street for an egg salad sandwich. He finished his drive heading eastbound on Boylston Street, turned left onto Yawkey Way, and proceeded to the giant green door near Fenway’s gate D. After turning into the underbelly of the ballpark, he’d weave his vehicle around the poles under the stands toward the clubhouse door on the first-base side. The clubhouse door was invariably locked because of the early hour. Francona had keys but never remembered the security code, so he’d open the door and let the alarm go off. Then he’d throw his keys to the clubbies and tell them not to ask if they wanted to use his car.

“Go shopping, go for lunch, I don’t care,” he’d say. “Just don’t fucking ask me if you can drive it.”

Francona also had an open wallet policy. During the afternoon, the manager’s black billfold sat on the corner of his desk, and it was understood that any of the clubbies or coaches could take out a loan. No need to ask. Twenties came and went without conversation or suspicion.

“I went into that wallet about once a day,” said Jackson.

Japanese chef Iso Kosaka, a Dice-K favorite, was working for the ball club by 2009 and prepared Francona a daily lunch of rice, vegetables, and noodles. After eating, Francona would go upstairs for a 20-minute swim in the Swim-Ex machine. Mills would often join him.

“That made for a lot of jokes,” said the manager. “Here you got two bald men in bathing suits going upstairs to work out in a little 10-by-12 pool. You can imagine how funny everybody thought that was. It was like we were dating.”

After his workout and a shower, Francona would begin poring over data on his computer or perhaps summoning video master Billy Broadbent to fix something on his laptop.

The clubbies were ubiquitous in the early afternoon hours before the clubhouse door was opened to the media at 3:30. Pookie, Murph, or John would make runs to the dry cleaners or to pick up prescriptions at CVS for the manager. McLaughlin would often come over from the visitors’ room to shoot the breeze while Francona read printouts and scouting reports.

The door that connected his office to the clubhouse was almost always open. Francona did not believe in sealing himself off from the locker room. He wanted his players and coaches to feel welcome to come in and talk at any hour of the game day. Mills and Hale (Hale had known Francona since their days on the coaching staff of the 2002 Rangers) came into the manager’s office every afternoon to go over the night’s lineup and matchups. The manager and his coaches wanted to have everything done long before the media entered, long before players started getting ready for the first pitch. He wanted to be free for a game of cribbage with Pedroia before the players went out on the field for early stretching.

“Tito needed that time, by himself,” said Hale. “He bounced things off me, asked my opinion. He liked to be there early and not be interrupted. He’d ask what I thought about things. Tito wanted time with his bench coach, then his pitching coach.”

The manager-GM relationship was stronger than ever.

When Francona interviewed for the Sox job in 2003, he and Epstein talked about the ideal manager-GM relationship. Epstein had admired the dynamic in San Diego between Bruce Bochy and Kevin Towers, who worked together from 1995 to 2006.

“They could talk about anything, anytime, without threats to one another,” said Epstein. “There was an implicit understanding that they were in it together. If there was any probing question or issue to be explored, it was for the good of the organization and it wasn’t any kind of personal threat whatsoever, and they had a ton of fun together.”

By 2009 Epstein felt that he and Francona had evolved to this level. They protected one another when interacting with the media. Francona always went through Epstein with any questions or frustrations with ownership. Epstein had pulled back from some of the day-to-day suggestions and postgame analysis. It was a marriage that worked.

“Theo taught me a lot about the caretaker part of the organization, and I hope I taught him about the player’s side of it,” said Francona. “We were meeting in the middle on a lot of that, which was good. I knew when things were getting hot for him, and I knew where I could go. We had the ability to yell at each other and we could move on. One thing I wasn’t good at: if I had the rotation set up and he wanted to change it, inevitably there would be an argument and I would tell him a day later, ‘Theo, if you give me a couple of days, I’ll get around to it. Sometimes it takes me a while to get to the right answer, but I’ll get there.’ And he understood that. We had a real good understanding of each other, and the one thing that I liked—when things were going shitty, I went right to him and he’d fix it.

“There were things I really appreciated. In eight years, not one time did Theo ever come down during spring training and be pissed that we lost or that somebody didn’t run a ball out. That’s rare. He never, ever yelled at me about somebody not hustling. He knew I cared, but he was smart enough to pick his battles, and I always appreciated that.”

“We were partners,” recalled Epstein. “We were really connected in a pretty natural way. There were always issues that would come up where we were at opposite ends of the table, and I thought we did a pretty good job of handling those issues with care so the relationship continued to grow. Our relationship was really important to both of us and it grew, but it wasn’t this pat thing. I really respected Tito and tried to put him in a position to succeed and tried to always have his back, and I got to know him really well, to know what he’s all about. So it was easy to be there for him in ways that were important to him. He’s really good at reading people. He could see through some of my gruffness or some of my moods and connect with me in an important way too, so I think we were there for each other.

“We talked so much baseball. We were trying to build an organization, scouting, player development, major league team. His approach in the clubhouse and on the field was fundamental in that, so we had to talk about it and make sure we were on the same page and make sure he was empowered to do what he wanted. He had so much going on, to balance all those constituencies, it helped him to have a touchstone to bounce things off. It really worked in that respect. Tito wants nothing more than to have people around him who don’t annoy him, that he believes in, that he won’t have conflict with, and that he can have fun with. I could be that guy, up to a point. Ninety percent of the time, I could be that guy.”

Adding to Francona’s comfort level was the presence of 30-year-old Pam Ganley in her first year as club public relations director. Francona was a dream manager for any baseball public relations department. He was always on time (invariably early), cooperative, and funny, and he never said anything controversial. Through the decades, the Sox had been well served by public relations directors Tom Dowd, Bill Crowley, Dick Bresciani, Kevin Shea, Glenn Geffner, and John Blake, who worked at Francona’s side for three seasons before departing for Texas after the 2008 season. This paved the way for Ganley to become the first female public relations director in Sox history—no small accomplishment in the ultimate old boys’ club of Boston. Ganley grew up in Burlington, Massachusetts, went to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and worked at Dunkin’ Donuts in high school. She joined the Red Sox as an intern in 2000. Only seven years older than Francona’s oldest child, she was already one of the manager’s favorite people around Fenway when she assumed PR director duties. Like the manager, she did not suffer fools. Sifting through requests, maximizing the manager’s time, and sparing him frivolous or unnecessary interviews, Ganley made Francona’s life easier. Best of all, she was tough. Ganley did not blush at the colorful language of baseball, and she had a sense of humor.

The 2009 Red Sox were a tad boring for media members looking for traditional Fenway hijinks. Five years after the success of the Idiots, the Sox had gone from an everyday outfield of Manny Ramirez, Johnny Damon, and Trot Nixon to . . . Jason Bay, Jacoby Ellsbury, and J. D. Drew. Awesome talent, long hair, and combustibility had been replaced by slow and steady fires. The ’09 Sox were built according to the Epstein blueprint, and it did not allow for an abundance of noise and personality. The Sox were still a 95-win team, but they were less interesting to gossip columnists and tabloid headline writers.

“I loved the ’04 team, but you can’t imitate something else,” said Francona. “It goes back to what I always said about Jeter and Manny. Every time Jeter had something to do with the outcome of a game, it made me nervous. Manny could hit .450, but when he wasn’t hitting, all bets were off. So I told Theo, maybe we were a little bit lucky, but we were trying to find guys that cared about winning and cared about each other, but when things got tough, we weren’t just waiting for somebody to hit a home run. And I thought Theo did a really good job of that. Every team has individual personality. We were integrating guys like Ellsbury, Youkilis, and Papelbon, and I loved that. Jacoby Ellsbury is quiet. That’s okay. He’s a good player. If they just play the game right, I don’t care about the decibel level in the clubhouse.”