Red Sox Rule (19 page)

Torre didn’t know everything that was in the cards. He didn’t know the card had a migraine and had been in the hospital. But Francona had to manage like he would normally, and Papelbon was on his pitching chart. There were two on, none out, the Sox leading 7 to 4. You can’t get greedy. Let’s say he gives up a fly ball that turns into a sacrifice fly for them. It’s okay; you’ve got an out, you’ve given up a run, and maybe Pap can get a couple of strikeouts.

It wasn’t to be. Derek Jeter singled to make it 7 to 5, Bobby Abreu’s double made it 7 to 7, and Rodriguez’s single made it 8 to 7. It’s not very often that Okajima and Papelbon don’t have it on the same night; it will probably take something as rare as Papelbon going to the hospital before the game. A six and a half game lead, which appeared to be a certainty, was down to the angry choir level of four and a half.

“Fran-coe-nuh! You suck!”

Francona often has his car radio tuned to sports talk, so his wife heard all the commentary as she drove home. She argued with the callers who suggested that her husband was an idiot, perhaps the worst manager in the game. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” she said. “He put their two best relief pitchers on the mound and it didn’t work out.”

No, it didn’t. And a Friday-night loss to New York in 2006 became connected to a Friday-night loss to New York in 2007. They
were entirely different games, but they were linked by their life spans. The more recent game was with Francona as he left Yawkey and Van Ness—there were none of his worshippers in the streets—and made a right turn onto Boylston Street. It was with him as he got to his house, found one of the kids asleep in his room, and turned on the television to see himself criticized on ESPN.

“He’s clearly lost faith in Gagne…”

He turned the channel, not in the mood to talk back, not in the mood to say that the intention was not to get Papelbon a six-out save. All he wanted to do was to get out of that inning, and he thought Papelbon was the best man for the job. He
was
the best man for the job; it just didn’t develop the way he thought it would. Man. He was racing, wide awake, even though he knew he was exhausted.

After a lot of surfing, he found a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie,
Hard Target
, and it put him to sleep. It didn’t cure him, though. He woke up the next morning physically at his house, mentally at Fenway. That game was still on him, still in his head and his heart, and he needed to get it out before he went to work.

“It’s like a hitter trying to adjust an oh-for-twenty streak by going ten for his next five—it’s impossible to do,” he said that morning. “So I don’t need to come in here today and make mistakes. That doesn’t help. It’s one game and it hurt, but it’s okay.”

He said it, but he hadn’t talked it out that easily. Those losses are hard at any time, harder in September, and hardest of all when the players, and the manager, are physically worn out. It’s hard when your best reliever has a migraine, your number-three hitter has sore knees, and your cleanup hitter has an injury that will allow him to take batting practice and not play in games. It would get to the point with Ramirez where he would tell the manager that he could pinch-hit, or even hit lower in the order, but not re
turn to his usual cleanup spot. Francona elected to wait until Ramirez could come back and fully participate.

After that tough loss to the Yankees, Francona was asked if he thought he would be perceived differently if fans and members of the media knew all of the things he was juggling daily.

“They can’t know,” he said. “But you wish that at some point, somebody would just have the confidence to say that this guy probably knows what he’s doing. But in this town, I know, that won’t happen. So we’re trying to take care of people and win at the same time.”

The manager would get some of his wish. The day after the terrible loss, Beckett took the mound and handled all of the necessary housekeeping. He shut down the Yankees, and he happened to let the ball slip out of his hands and hit Jason Giambi. It was nothing personal against Giambi, who has friends throughout the Red Sox clubhouse. In fact, Giambi probably knew the pitch was coming. It was just an easy way to answer the two flyovers from Chamberlain.

As for the other piece of the manager’s commentary, about wishing someone would say he knows what he’s doing, no chance. The lead was shrinking too fast. And the team closing the gap was not located in Baltimore or Tampa or Toronto. The September calendar was starting to taunt; it would hang innocently on the walls of offices and stores, and Red Sox fans would see it as a scare tactic.

On Sunday the 16th, the lead over New York was down to four and a half.

On Monday the 17th, it was down to three and a half.

On Tuesday the 18th…That deserves a story.

It’s a story that will seem like fiction to those who didn’t see it take place in Toronto. It will seem like fiction if you weren’t the
Boston manager, checking your e-mail and getting a direct one from Harvard: “Don’t pitch Gagne, you IDIOT. You are SUCH a f—MORON!”

The Red Sox were entering the bottom of the eighth in Toronto, holding a 2 to 1 lead. Before the game, Francona and pitching coach John Farrell decided that the eighth would be Gagne’s. The reliever, the pitcher no one in New England wanted to see, did well in the beginning of the inning. And then he walked Frank Thomas.

He changed then. At times, he had no control of the ball. He had no one warming up behind him, so this was close to the situation he had seen so many times in Texas and Los Angeles: the game was on him. He gave up a single. He gave up a walk, with some of the pitches elevating to the point where you would have screamed out, “Joba Chamberlain against Kevin Youkilis” if this had been a game of Charades. Just one more out, they were thinking on the bench. If he could get one more out, that would be a huge boost for him, and it would help them know that they had a reliever who could get hot for them down the stretch and into the playoffs.

He walked Gregg Zaun, and a run scored.

He gave up a double to Russ Adams, and two runs scored. The story got better and worse all at once: he did get that elusive third out he was seeking, but only because Zaun, who is not fast, tried to score and was thrown out at home.

The sports radio phones began ringing that night and well into the next day. What the hell was wrong with Gagne? What the hell was wrong with Francona?

On Wednesday the 19th, following a Toronto sweep, the lead was down to a slim one and a half.

To New England, it felt like a bit of fiscal recklessness. What
happened to all that money? It should have lasted an entire season, right? The team flew to Tampa virtually assured of a playoff spot, but a spot in the postseason was never in doubt. It was a psychic thing, a New York thing, a thing that went all the way back to first trips to Fenway, first jerseys that said “Rice” and “Evans” and “Fisk.” It went back to arguments outside Yankee Stadium, arguments with the hosts on WFAN—arguments that the hosts never heard—fights with visiting New Yorkers in Kenmore Square who didn’t laugh when you said “Yankees suck,” and they just knew not to laugh because you weren’t joking. It went back to the people who didn’t get it, who thought that one championship, great as it was, after 86 years would quiet the soul of a region that had been thirsty for that long.

The manager needed that off day on the 20th. He looked terrible. He wasn’t getting enough sleep and wasn’t eating the proper foods. He was coming down with something, something that wouldn’t allow him to eat his food without vomiting. He was hooked up to an IV so he could get something into his system.

He was doing what he thought was right, and he thought it was right to take care of Papelbon down the stretch and to be very careful of what he said about and to Ramirez. He leaned a lot on the assistant principals in the clubhouse, Mike Lowell, David Ortiz, Jason Varitek, and Alex Cora. They all had relationships with Ramirez, some buddy-buddy and some tough love, and they would be able to help if things got too crazy.

The player he truly got to know better during the season was Varitek. He was serious in his preparation, everyone knew that. He would come out of games mentally worn out from all the thinking and preparing he had done with the pitching staff and Farrell. But Francona also got to see a lighter side of ’Tek, a man who could surprise you with his sense of humor.

There was the game in August when Francona had left Fenway and got stuck in the traffic and construction on Route 9. No cars were moving very fast, all the drivers appeared to be aware of it, but there was this jerk behind him, inching close and flashing lights into the car. Francona rolled down his window, ready to yell at the guy, and he looked directly into the smiling face of Jason Varitek.

Now, in Tampa, Varitek wasn’t smiling. He talked with Francona about holding a team meeting. Francona told the catcher that he wanted him to understand that he wasn’t losing confidence in his team. Varitek shook his head and said he just wanted to say a few things to the players. It was a short meeting, no more than a couple minutes, and it was the appetizer for a piece of what the team had worked for since spring training.

On a Saturday night in Tampa, the 22nd, the team trailed the Devil Rays by a run, 6 to 5, in the ninth inning. Varitek, who had been in a funk at the plate, was facing closer Al Reyes. The talk must have helped him, because Varitek tied the game with a home run. That wasn’t even the most poetic storyline of the night, with the man who called the team meeting hitting a home run. The poetry came with a man on base and the former Devil Ray, the man who had tumbled like a cold stock—first in the lineup to last—at the plate. Lugo was still hitting just .239, probably not considered a threat by the Rays.

He turned on the first pitch he saw, lifted it to left field, and confidently jogged around the bases as Ramirez, watching in the dugout, threw his hands in the air.

The Red Sox were going to the playoffs.

They had a toast in their clubhouse later, and Francona and Don Kalkstein, the director of performance enhancement, drove back to the hotel and talked about how much fun winning is, but that the feeling doesn’t last long enough. Perhaps they all knew that the divi
sion mattered more than they had let on, along with finishing with the best record in the league, and they were holding out for that.

Francona was right about the fleeting feeling of victory. The next night, there was another loss for the manager to take hard. He and Epstein, back in Boston, must have seen it the same way in different states; when Francona got off the plane from Tampa, he had four messages waiting from the GM.

Four days later, they finally got what they wanted. At times it might have felt like there would be no race at all, and there were times when the Red Sox felt like they were coming from behind, even though they were leading the division. All of that changed on a Friday night at Fenway. The Red Sox had won their game against the Twins, and there were a few thousand people who waited to see the end of the Orioles–Yankees game.

The team waited in the clubhouse, and several people, including principal owner John Henry, Ortiz, and Epstein, waited in Francona’s office. They had a comment for each pitch, hoping for a Yankee collapse. It was 9 to 6 going into the Baltimore ninth, and the Yankees had Mariano Rivera on the mound. What were the odds that the Orioles would do anything against him?

Baseball was too weird: the man who tied it up for Baltimore, Jay Payton, was a former Red Sox who forced the team to trade him. He didn’t accept his role as a fourth outfielder, and things came to a head in Texas when Francona told him that he wasn’t going to travel with the team. And there was Payton with a three-run triple in the ninth.

Baseball is really weird: in the tenth, the pitcher on the mound for Baltimore was Chad Bradford, whom the Sox acquired from Oakland in the Payton trade. He wasn’t too special in Boston, but he was good enough to get out of a bases-loaded jam against the Yankees.

The game-winner had no Red Sox connection, unless you count someone in Francona’s office saying, “He’s going to bunt,” just as Melvin Mora put down a perfect one. The Orioles won it in the bottom of the tenth, and the clubhouse, covered in plastic, was full of people.

They had beer and champagne, which they sprayed everywhere. They had cigars, which they smoked and passed out. They had Alan Dershowitz, the celebrity lawyer from Harvard Law, taking in the scene and talking on his cell phone. Sitting near his office, with beer on his bald head and a cigar in his mouth, Francona smiled and watched it all. He sat there and took it when Curt Schilling emptied a can on his head, and he did the same when Mike Lowell added some champagne.

Papelbon was a few feet away from the manager. The closer sprinted to the field, wearing black biking shorts and a tight red T-shirt. Sometimes he danced, and sometimes he poured bottles of champagne onto the willing heads of those who stayed for the celebration.

It wasn’t all that late, but Francona had already shared a word with Epstein, who hadn’t done too bad on his first managerial hire. He had already spoken with his team and congratulated the owners, the scouts, the clubbies, and the policemen. He looked out on that field and said, “I’ve seen enough.” So he walked past the players, the wives, the girlfriends, the security guards, and the beer cans. He walked into the clubhouse, wiped the alcohol off his head, and found John Farrell. The feelings of euphoria are truly fleeting, because he wasn’t looking for Farrell so he could spray champagne on him. He wanted to talk about October pitching. The celebration was nice, and the silliness lasted for 20 or 30 minutes. Now he was thinking about the playoffs.

T
wo weeks earlier, in this same room, Terry Francona had been able to see the future of the Angels and Indians. He did this stuff all the time, especially in his office, where he could put his feet on the desk or stretch out on the leather couch against the wall. Here he’d become a baseball prophet without pretense, a palm reader with no interest in your money. He’d enter this room and do the verbal equivalent of what Tito always told him to do to a baseball: see it and hit it.

He’d been doing this for at least 20 years. When he played with the Reds, he and Buddy Bell would talk baseball at night through clouds of cigarette smoke and shots of vodka. Francona would tell Buddy what was going to happen in the next day’s game and Buddy would ask, “How do you know that?” It wasn’t the vodka talking; he just knew. (Fortunately, he didn’t gamble on his hunches the same way his manager, a guy named Pete Rose, did.) He called it before it happened, sometimes by hours and days, sometimes by months.

It’s the reason he was able to say of Toronto pitcher Roy Halladay, a couple weeks prior to a poor May start against the Red
Sox: “He’s hurt. He’s tough as hell—Eric Hinske says he’s off the charts—but I’m telling you he’s hurt. His arm slot is lower than normal—he’s throwing out of his back pocket. Something’s bothering him. You watch: he’ll go on the DL soon.” On May 11, Halladay complained of lower back pain and had an emergency appendectomy. He was out 3 weeks.

In that same session, Francona spoke of using closer Jonathan Papelbon in the eighth inning: “There are gonna be times we’ll do it, it’s gonna go haywire, and people are gonna call me a dumbass. I’ve already warned Theo. It’s not always gonna work. He’s a valuable weapon, but there’s gonna be some hit-and-miss when we go to him in the eighth.” Four months later, after a Friday-night loss to the Yankees in which he went to Papelbon, unsuccessfully, in the eighth, Francona would have been called a dumbass all over New England radio stations if it weren’t for 10-second delays and the FCC.

He did it again in June, a few hours before his team faced 22-year-old pitcher Matt Cain of the Giants: “Don’t believe the record. He’s two and six, but this kid’s shit is incredible; he doesn’t get much run support. I’m looking forward to seeing him up close.” Not much run support? How about zero? Manny Ramirez hit a fourth-inning homer off Cain, and that was the only run either team scored that day.

On a Sunday afternoon, 2 weeks before the end of the regular season, Francona was stretched out again on that clairvoyant couch. He occasionally glanced at the football game, Packers–Giants, playing on the small television hanging in a corner. He was one of the guys on these days, talking without worrying about job titles and sound bites. It was 2 weeks before the Red Sox had assured themselves a playoff spot and the best record in the American League. If the Red Sox did have the best record, Francona knew they’d face
Los Angeles or Cleveland in a first-round series at Fenway. He spoke of both teams and unintentionally gave a loose outline of how the pennant would be won.

The Indians were on their way to 96 wins, the same as the Red Sox. They had the top 2 starters in the league, a couple of 19-game winners, in C.C. Sabathia and Fausto Carmona. The Angels were the most aggressive team in baseball, going from first to third in an instant. They created runs that other teams couldn’t, and they ran into outs that other teams wouldn’t. Their best starter, John Lackey, was an ace against 12 teams, but he saved his worst days for Boston.

Francona: “The biggest thing, I think, is to be home. ’Cause if we have to play the Angels, Lackey has had some rough starts here. We would face Lackey twice, both times here. If we have to go to Cleveland, we’d have to face Sabathia and Carmona twice. That’s tough duty anywhere, but I’d rather do it here. Think about the Angels: they came here for three games in April and we beat them, what, twenty-five to three? They can be a hot team and look unbeatable, and they can be cold and look overmatched. How do you know where you’re going to catch them?

“Cleveland, man, they’re good. They have some weakness in their bullpen. But how do you know if you’re going to get there? They might not necessarily get exposed. The one thing that jumps out is this: They’re not experienced in the playoffs, and you don’t know if that will affect them. But they have good players.”

He was full of playoff ideas and opinions then, 2 weeks before he had to be. So when it all became official at the end of September, it was like going over a remedial worksheet. The Red Sox did finish with the best regular-season record, and they were going to begin the playoffs against Lackey and the Angels. The Yankees, who had dominated the Indians in the regular season, were matched up with them in the other first-round series.

For Francona, this was a continuation of high school and college. Then it was never a good time to stop practice. Even at Arizona, where Jerry Kindall’s practices sometimes lasted from 1:00 in the afternoon to 6:30 in the evening, Francona never got tired of being around the game.

As a manager, his “practices” were the advance scouting meetings that took place before each postseason series. They went on for hours, usually three, and they included PowerPoint presentations, video examples, subjective examples, cold data, and passionate opinions from the gut. Sometimes there would be as many as 20 people there, from Epstein and the coaching staff to Allard Baird and the advance scouts he coordinated. They would all be there, a bunch of beautiful baseball minds unloading weeks of knowledge into a community pile, and then sifting through the pile for digestible gems to give to the players.

Francona loved it. There was never a lull, there were frequent disagreements, and they usually ended up with a uniform way of attacking a team. Besides, it was baseball. He had such a hunger to talk about it that he had once approached a Red Sox marketing executive with an idea for an off-season TV show: he and a few of the most opinionated members of the media could have a roundtable where they second-guessed him like they did in print and in front of microphones. And then they could sort it out before an audience, seeing if the commentators’ ideas were better than the manager’s. That would work in Boston, much more so than the cheesy dating shows that the New England Sports Network, in which the team holds an 80 percent ownership stake, sometimes put on the air.

Another subject that would make excellent TV, especially for the How Things Work baseball fan, would be the meetings before the first playoff game. You never want to be too cocky, but anyone
who was there saw how lopsided the Angels series appeared to be on paper. These were the cold Angels, broken and lost. Power wasn’t their game even when they were healthy, and they arrived in Boston wobbling. Gary Matthews Jr., second on the team in home runs, was out with a bad knee. Garret Anderson, another potential power source, was playing with pinkeye, a condition that had swollen his right eye shut. That left Vladimir Guerrero, a great player, surrounded by rabbits and doubles hitters.

As for the approach to Vlad, the Red Sox knew that they didn’t have to pitch to him. In their studies, the scouts found that he was a player who actually benefitted from swings—even swings and misses. The more he swung the bat early, the better he was with it late, each swing seemingly giving him power and increasing his vision. But Vlad was not going to win the series by himself. The Red Sox had too many things in their favor beyond the L.A. injuries.

Ramirez, who had gone more than a month between full games played, was finally back in the lineup. The Red Sox had missed him, but his absence had created an opening in the cleanup spot, and it had been filled well by Mike Lowell. When Ramirez returned to his usual slot, behind David Ortiz, the Red Sox finally found the number-five hitter they had been searching for the entire season: Lowell. The plan was to have J.D. Drew batting fifth and Lowell sixth, but Lowell had been so productive there, delivering too many hits and runs batted in to simply go back to where he used to be. The lineup looked as strong as it had in a month, so it was comically overqualified to give Josh Beckett what he needed for the first game of the series.

One run.

Actually, the lineup was more than overqualified. It was also overworked. Beckett needed just one run to feel supported, and he needed just one inning to get that support: in the bottom of the
first against the Red Sox, six pitches into his playoff start, Lackey tried to sneak an inside fastball past Kevin Youkilis and into the mitt of catcher Mike Napoli. But after the pitch, Napoli’s mitt was 3 inches from the dirt, in position to catch the ball if it had been there. It wasn’t. It was going the other way, a long way, toward left center field and gone for a home run.

Things wouldn’t be all that ridiculous for Lackey, compared to what usually happened to him in Boston. He gave up a double to Youkilis in the third, and that stung even more when Ortiz followed it with a home run to right. He walked Ramirez, threw a wild pitch, and had no answers for Lowell, who singled Ramirez home. He wouldn’t allow any other runs in his seven-inning start.

Lackey was serviceable in giving up 4 runs; Beckett threw 108 pitches, and if any of them were serviceable, they were disappointments to their master. He gave up a hit to the first batter of the game, Chone Figgins, got out of the inning, and yelled when he got back to the dugout. He always did. He yelled because of a hit, because of a ball that should have been a strike, because of a strike that should have been a
better
strike. So as penance for that hit he had allowed to Figgins, he retired 19 Angels in a row. He never gave those rabbits a chance to run. He was so good in what turned out to be a complete-game shutout that he was getting outs on pitches that weren’t even supposed to be his best, second-best, or even third.

Who knew that he had a 96-mile-per-hour cutter? He was supposedly a fastball-changeup-curveball pitcher. He gave Orlando Cabrera that bonus cutter, and people in both dugouts shook their heads. If he was going to be like this for the rest of the month, then they were all acting for the camera, weren’t they? Francona would have to act like he had some tough decisions to make in Beckett’s starts and the Angels would have to act like they had a chance of hitting his ball, a ball that looked different when it came out of his hand.

The final score was 4 to 0, and one October issue was already solved. John Farrell, who had found a kindred soul in Beckett when they first met, wouldn’t have to worry about his top pitcher for as long as the postseason lasted. The man from Texas had the right mix of anger, motivation, and mastery.

The next day, everyone talked about Beckett and how great he had been the night before. Francona was as impressed as everyone else—“that cutter to Cabrera was a joke”—and turned his thoughts to Game 2.

It would be Daisuke Matsuzaka going for the Red Sox, not Curt Schilling, and part of the reason was cortisone. Schilling had been recently given a shot, and he preferred to have as much rest as possible between starts. This would be on Dice-K and Kelvim Escobar, two number-two starters with a penchant for losing it in an instant. Francona thought there was a chance Dice-K would throw a lot of pitches, but “I don’t think they’ll knock him around. Their lineup is not the same as it was; I think they’re where we were a few weeks ago.”

As he had mentioned before, being at Fenway could change the way he managed. At home, he could go to Papelbon, even if the team didn’t have a lead. “I just think being at home and batting last is a huge deal,” he said.

He had been right about Game 2. It had a great beginning, with all of Fenway rising and cheering wildly, pointing at the manual scoreboard. The Yankees had lost the second game of their series to the Indians and were now one loss away from elimination. And there was a story to the game that the scoreboard didn’t tell. The mosquitoes that nipped at Tito Francona in the 1960s and Terry Francona in the 1980s had passed the heirloom—nuisance—to their Canadian cousins, and those cousins chased the Indians and Yankees all the way into the 21st century. They were called midges,
and they had made the short trip from West 3rd Street to Ontario Street, flustering the talented Joba Chamberlain. As for the Red Sox’s Game 2, Dice-K and Escobar were both gone after five, with the score tied at 3.

It was going to be a bullpen game, and a full-strength bullpen game at that. It was time for Francona to play cards with one of the best strategists in the game, Mike Scioscia. Scioscia’s teams had finished first or second 5 of the last 6 years, including one year, 2002, when he swiped the daily double of winning the Manager of the Year award and the World Series. In these games, when things were right, Francona always had killer cards that other managers had to account for. As he said, he had Papelbon at home, and he brought him into a tie game in the eighth after Hideki Okajima had gotten the first two outs. Papelbon was a card, yes, and the manager also had the twins that forced you to come up with managerial magic to get by them, Ramirez and Ortiz. Manny and Papi. Two dudes you didn’t want to see.

Scioscia had a bigger problem than usual and Francona, rocking away in his red fleece, knew it. The series wasn’t even two full games old, and the Angels had gotten Ortiz out just once. And that was a fly ball to center. What was going to happen in the ninth if anyone got on before him? Would the Angels manager pitch to him? Would he walk him and take his chances with Manny?

When the man across from you has to think about these questions, it’s a great night to play cards.

The house was against Scioscia, just like in Vegas and Reno and Atlantic City. Where were the cameras? Where was the dealer’s secret drawer, the secret card up the sleeve? This was insane: in the seventh, the one power threat that he had, Vlad, was hit on his already sore shoulder by Manny Delcarmen. He had to leave the game. So now he was going to have to manage his team past Papi
and Manny without Vlad? Come on;
angels
was just what people called them, not who they really were.