Red Sox Rule (13 page)

Francona and his team were going to head back to Boston with Papelbon filling the spot that he had vacated in September. There had been a lot of guessing and speculating about the Red Sox and Yankees and which team, in 2007, was better. Neither team had to wait long to see how the other had managed to tighten and tweak itself since the September sweep.

Fourteen games into the season, the Red Sox and Yankees were scheduled to meet for a three-game series at Fenway. The Red Sox were 9 and 5; the Yankees were 8 and 6. And so it all returned. The nerves, the pacing, the energy: all there. Across from Francona, amazingly, was the same man who used to watch him take candy from the Atlanta Braves clubhouse in the 1960s.
Joe Torre was a player then, in his late 20s, just being nice to Tito’s boy, Little Tito. Now there was Torre, in his 60s, managing the Yankees and trying to do everything possible so his team could crush Little Tito’s.

They did this two dozen times a year, if they met in the playoffs, and the strategy never got old.

Francona has a system for these games and all the others. It usually begins the night before a game or first thing in the morning, when no players are around. He hates the thought of them coming into the clubhouse needing him, and him off somewhere doing work that could have been done earlier.

He starts with the reports from the advance scouts. He sifts through the comments and numbers and then makes himself a loaded, and succinct, scouting report to carry with him in the dugout. His system is color-coded: green means that the matchup is excellent for the Red Sox (Derek Jeter and Johnny Damon were a combined 6 for 47 against Mike Timlin going into the series); red means that there is danger for the Red Sox (Robinson Cano was 3 for 5 against Timlin); black is used for either basic information or notes.

On the left side of his reports, Francona has the team’s stolen-base stats. On the right side, he leaves spaces for pithy or abbreviated comments:

“Jeter: slightly weaker vs. rh…Giambi: struggling vs. rh (normally weaker vs. lh)…Posada: swinging very well vs. lh now…Cabrera: struggling vs. both sides…”

There are times when a number jumps out at him, and Francona will want to see the story in pictures. For example, he’ll see one of his players with huge numbers against a pitcher, but further video investigation will show that those numbers were from 3 or 4 years ago. Or that a player who happens to be 2 for 12 against a pitcher actually has hit him hard, with no luck.

He doesn’t feel the need to share his system with the players.

“No, I don’t think the players have any idea how much time we spend with the preparation,” he says. “That’s fine. We want to—what’s the word?—disseminate it so they can understand it easily and just play. We’ll handle the information. They’re good players; we just want them to go out and play.”

So 7 months later, after thinking about the Yankees, spending like the Yankees, and wondering how they matched up with the Yankees, it was time for the Red Sox to do exactly what Francona said: go out and play—against the Yankees.

H
ey, how’s your dad?”

No matter where they were or what was at stake between their teams, their conversations always began the same way. Joe Torre would ask Terry Francona about his father, and the son would tell Tito that a former teammate was saying something nice about him. Torre and Francona would have their talks on the phone or sometimes in person, but usually out of fan and media view. They knew what the script was supposed to be, and if people knew how much genuine respect they had for each other—that they actually cared about the well-being of family members—hell, that just might ruin the whole movie.

They’d check in before a series began, before all the drama and storylines sucked them in, too. They’d keep it light, encourage each other with caveats—“Joe, I don’t want you to win, but I wish you well”—and then get into their Yankees and Red Sox characters.

Torre would be sitting in the dugout with his blue Yankees cap pulled low, the brim straight-out-of-the-box stiff, and his arms folded over his chest. On warm days, when he wasn’t wearing his jacket with “Yankees” scripted across the front, you could see the
watch on his wrist; as epic as some of the Yankees–Red Sox games were, who could blame Joe for keeping track of his hours? Whenever he decided to take a trip to the mound, his steps often seemed robotic, like a machine that needs its hinges oiled.

“Joe, you look like shit,” Francona once kidded him. “You walk the way I feel.”

At Fenway, Francona could be found sitting near the dugout stairs. He’d have a huge wad of tobacco, neatly wrapped in bubble gum, stuffed in his jaw. He’d watch the game and also rock to it. He’d have on a red fleece jacket, which he wears now to stay warm, but in Philadelphia he wore it because it infuriated his critics. “It could be a thousand degrees and I’d have it on,” he said. “I wore it because I knew it pissed people off. That’s stupid, but that’s how it all began; the more it aggravated people, the more I wore it.”

Torre and Francona would take their positions and rarely glance in the other dugout. They both knew the history of the series: one Yankees–Red Sox game in 1978 capped a huge collapse for Torre’s close friend Don Zimmer, who was Boston’s manager; one game in 2003 had become the tipping point for Red Sox ownership and upper management to bring in Francona; four games the next year led to the greatest comeback—or collapse—in baseball history; and five games in 2006 had inspired the Red Sox to spend so much money that they wound up outbidding the Yankees—
outbidding the Yankees!
—by $18 million for the right to negotiate with Matsuzaka.

Neither manager ever came into these games unprepared. As friendly as they were, they were constantly looking for the edge that would make a difference in a close game or the inevitable close season series.

As they sat in their respective offices on the afternoon of April 20, 2007, they were planning to manage against one another for
the 65th time since 2004. In the previous 64 games, including the playoffs, each of them had won 32 times. What 32 and 32 proved was that any sense of breathing room was an illusion. Okay, every once in a while, the matrix would have a glitch for four or five games. But the Yankees and Red Sox are the real-life versions of that classic B-movie scene: a struggle takes place, one fighter appears to be the lone survivor, and the seemingly pummeled body springs back to life for Round 2…or Round 65.

That still didn’t stop them from trying to create even the slightest separation. The new players weren’t the only reasons the Red Sox were a little different in 2007. Francona had gotten management to agree to tweak the team’s advance scouting system. In the past, a Red Sox advance scout would watch the Yankees play the Indians, and when it was time for the Red Sox to play one of those teams, the scout would be off to Toronto or Texas or wherever. Francona thought the advance scouts, Dana LeVangie and Todd Claus, did excellent work. He didn’t understand why the scout who had studied Baltimore or New York would leave that city as the Red Sox were arriving there. Why not have them stay, be members of the coaching staff for a series, and take advantage of their insights in person?

His bosses agreed with him, and it was just one more thing that might be able to help him with his daily study sheets.

The other things that helped had nothing to do with the science of scouting. Once his work was done, he liked to make sure everyone was all right. Sometimes it meant answering a text from his daughter Alyssa, who needed his help on a crossword puzzle: “Hey Dad…lake in Nevada?” Often it was meeting up with rookie second baseman Dustin Pedroia for cribbage games in the manager’s office. Like his father, Francona is known for treating clubhouse workers well, so there were times he’d playfully spar
with worker Pookie Jackson. And before every game, he’d talk with Don Kalkstein, whom he trusted as much as anyone in the organization.

Kalkstein is a sports psychologist, burdened with the title of “director of performance enhancement.” Francona met him in Texas in 2002, and was so impressed that he told Theo Epstein he had to hire him. “He’s got a gift,” Francona says. “He’s a guy who’s able to draw people to him, no matter where he is.” It’s a special gift because he is the embodiment of clubhouse confidential: whether you play or coach, you can tell him something and it stays with him. If he had been in Boston for Francona’s first Yankees–Red Sox game, he could have calmed Francona before Francona calmed himself.

Of course, it always helps to have one of your best friends by your side as you go into an intense competition. After all these years, long after he made fun of those red Chuck Taylors in Tucson and told his friend to get ready for his first big-league at bat in Houston, Millsie was sitting next to Francona as his bench coach in Boston. It was 30 years later, and they were still boys. Millsie became family in Omaha, where Tito and Birdie practically adopted him and Ronda, his girlfriend who became his wife, at the 1979 College World Series.

There wasn’t another manager–bench coach relationship like this in baseball.

Francona had held Millsie’s first child, Taylor, the day she was born in 1981. Their families had spent holidays together and vacationed together. When Francona had sleepless nights as the Phillies manager, driving to Veterans Stadium at 3:30 in the morning, he’d call Millsie, who was one of his coaches: “Wake up. If I’m miserable, you have to be miserable, too.” They were fired together after the 2000 season, and Francona went to work for the
Indians and Millsie went to the Cubs. They were scouting in Pittsburgh in September 2001, both staying at the Doubletree Hotel, when Francona got a call from Millsie: “Get up here, now. You have to see this.” And they both stared in shock at the TV as they watched what was happening to New York City and the Twin Towers.

There wasn’t anything they couldn’t talk about, so sometimes baseball was easy compared to the real issues. They had the stamina to talk baseball all day, and sometimes they did.

While August 2006 was the worst time for the Red Sox to see the Yankees, April 2007 was the opposite. The pitching matchups were not in New York’s favor. They were starting with a veteran, Andy Pettitte, and ending with two 24-year-old kids, Jeff Karstens and Chase Wright. The Red Sox were throwing their version of three aces at the Yankees: Curt Schilling, Josh Beckett, and the coveted Matsuzaka, who was known by his Americanized first name, Dice-K.

It was Yankees–Red Sox, and even 14 games into the season, it had the event feel of baseball’s Opening Day and a Hollywood premiere’s opening night. According to the stats, the leading hitter at the start of the series was J.D. Drew, who was hitting .375, but everyone’s eyes saw a different story. Alex Rodriguez was hitting .371, which sounded low, because he seemed to be on everything. He already had 10 home runs, his swing looking more like June than April.

As the managers took their seats, immediately thinking three or four innings ahead of the crowd, the game began. Francona walked into the dugout with a secret card up his sleeve, holding onto a piece of information that wasn’t known to a lot of people. He was already thinking about protecting that right shoulder of Jonathan Papelbon’s, so since the closer had thrown 47 total pitches the previous
two nights in Toronto, Francona had made a decision 5 hours before game time.

“He’s not pitching tonight,” he said in his office. “I don’t care what the score is, he’s not pitching tonight. It wouldn’t be smart. He threw forty-seven pitches in two nights. He needs a night to regenerate.”

Francona was so conscious of the shoulder that the night before, he called the bullpen and told coach Gary Tuck, “If we take the lead, Pap is pitching. But don’t warm him up until we get the lead.” Every pitch counts, even in warmups. If the Red Sox’s half of the inning had ended too quickly and Papelbon didn’t have enough time to get ready, Francona was prepared to go on the field and start an argument with umpires in order to buy a few more pitches.

Since Papelbon wasn’t going to close in the first game of the Yankees series, Francona and pitching coach John Farrell huddled before the game and looked over Farrell’s pitching charts.

“Do you know who’s going to get a save tonight?” Francona said, wondering if Farrell had the same thought that he did.

“Hideki Okajima,” Farrell responded.

“You got it,” Francona said with a smile.

Okajima’s first big-league pitch was blasted out of Kansas City’s Kauffman Stadium, but since then his unusual style had been a marvel to opponents and teammates alike. The reliever would release the ball with his left hand and turn his head to the right, like a visionary point guard throwing a no-look pass. He didn’t always see where his pitches landed, but neither did right-handed hitters, who found it difficult to get a good view of his curveball, which was superb, or his splitter.

The only issue with Okajima was that in his first year in the States, he wasn’t used to the rhythms of a typical big-league reliever.
In spring training, he told Francona and Farrell that he needed two innings to get ready, which, in many cases, is about one and one-third innings more than he would normally have. They were able to work his two innings down to one by the time they broke camp.

All the talk of Red Sox saves seemed presumptuous with Rodriguez at the plate in the second inning. He was making a hard game look easy, even when pitchers got him out. When pitchers talk of making mistakes, they’re usually talking about 2 or 3 inches. If Schilling happened to miss by that much, he knew that A-Rod was in such a groove that he could take a 3-inch mistake and send it 400 feet in any direction. Schilling got him to fly out to center in the second, but the hitter didn’t appear to be fooled.

He came up again in the fourth, the Yankees leading 1 to 0, and he hit another fly ball. But this one was to left field and out of the park. What a pain. With the score tied at 2 in the fifth and two men on, the Red Sox and Schilling had a few things to worry about: the batting talent of Rodriguez and the sign-stealing ability of Rodriguez. Sometimes catcher Jason Varitek and Schilling would change their signs up to three times an at bat when facing Rodriguez. They didn’t begrudge him for it; they did the same things.

“Everybody tries,” Francona explained. “We try to steal third-base coaches’ signs. They try to get ours. That’s part of the game. You need to be good enough not to put down the first sign and let somebody know what’s coming.”

Even if Rodriguez knew exactly what Schilling was going to throw with his next pitch, what he did with it was scary. Schilling threw a fastball and missed by 2 inches, the width of a typical cell phone. Rodriguez, a right-hander, hit the ball like a left-handed pull hitter. Home run.

The wiseguy answer to Francona’s pregame question—Do you know who’s going to get a save tonight?—seemed to be New
York’s distinguished closer, Mariano Rivera. The Yankees led 6 to 2 in the eighth, and that’s when both managers began to give glimpses of their game theories.

Honestly, Torre surprised Francona in the bottom of the eighth. Scott Proctor had been on the mound, and he was taken out and replaced by Mike Myers. Francona didn’t expect his buddy to bring out lefty specialist Myers to begin the eighth to face David Ortiz in a four-run game. He rocked and thought to himself,
This might be good, if not for today then for the next two games. Deception is how Myers gets guys out. Even if David doesn’t get a hit here, we get a free look at Myers…

The thoughts happen fast. The action is fast and intense: pitchers grunting with each ball thrown; the herdlike rumbling when a player is busting to beat a throw to first. Decisions must be made fast; if you feel that something is in your favor, you have to know how to take advantage of it quickly. It helps to have Ortiz on your side. His swing is as quick as a thought, so it didn’t take long—two pitches—for Ortiz to see what he wanted from Myers and line it into center field for a double.

Old Fenway started to shake. Torre got up from his seat and took that mechanical walk to the mound. Myers was out, Luis Vizcaino was in. Francona looked at Millsie, just a look, and they both knew what it meant.
I think we’ve got something here
. Manny Ramirez walked, and the oldest and smallest park in baseball shook more, getting louder by the pitch. The fans in Boston mess with your mind, and they don’t do it on purpose. They get a slight opening in an inning and they start thinking of the manager’s ally, the crooked number, the big inning. They make you feel like you’re losing when you’re up 6 to 2…or 6 to 3 after a Mike Lowell single.

It was time for Torre to walk again, and this time he was as
serious as he had been all night. He was bringing out the King to put a stop to the nonsense. The ball was in the hands of Rivera. The Red Sox had to respect him and the greatness of his cut fastball, but they didn’t fear him. They had faced him a lot, which meant that they had been trailing against the Yankees a lot. But because they had some familiarity with his stuff, they had a game plan against him. Varitek lined a run-scoring single, and the score was 6 to 4.