Red Sox Rule (2 page)

O
n the October night when most of New England directed its rage at Grady Little, Terry Francona was in suburban Philadelphia, halfway paying attention.

First he watched one of his three daughters play in a high school volleyball game. Then, grudgingly, he went home and tuned in to the final innings of the playoff series between the Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees. He certainly wasn’t excited about spending his time looking at the Red Sox, so he increased the volume on his TV. That way he could travel from room to room and listen to the game when it became too frustrating to watch. He was the bench coach for the Oakland A’s, the team the Red Sox had eliminated from the postseason, so it was hard to see Boston where he thought Oakland should have been.
I still think we’re better than the Red Sox. Hell, we were up two games on them. If we had just run the bases a little better
…Talk about impact TV: at no point did he imagine that the broadcast was about to show him something that would land him a job in Boston.

The winning team on that night would represent the American League in the 2003 World Series. Through seven and a half innings
at Yankee Stadium, the Red Sox appeared to be that team. They held a 5 to 2 lead, a cushion that would allow Little to leverage his bullpen and get the final five outs of the game. The Boston manager had his best pitcher, Pedro Martinez, on the mound. But Martinez was tired. He had allowed a one-out double to Derek Jeter in the eighth, and he clearly didn’t have a reservoir of brilliant pitches remaining, at least not enough to get through the muscular Yankees lineup.

The way Little’s bosses saw it, the manager had several favorable options among his relief pitchers. But John Henry, Larry Lucchino, and Theo Epstein, all men Little reported to, knew that the real issue wasn’t solely about a bullpen that had given up just 2 runs in its previous 25 innings of work. The issue was that in need of five outs, Little was more likely to choose instinct over science. So as the Fox television cameras were focused on the drama before them on the field, few people realized that there was also a philosophical clash coming to a head at the same time.

It was Feel versus Numbers, Tradition versus Something New, Acoustic versus Electric, Jocks versus Geeks. And it had been simmering for two seasons. Little didn’t believe that he had to apologize for his style. He was a friendly Southerner who was always ready with a story and a joke. He knew how to talk to players and tap into whatever it was that either motivated them or brought on insecurity. The numbers packets and various reports from the front office were all right, but if he had to make an in-game decision that was the difference between winning and losing, he was usually going to side with flesh and blood.

Henry, the principal owner of the Red Sox, wasn’t nearly as emotional as Little. In fact, Henry became a billionaire by creating a mechanical trading system based on following trends. He believed that no one could predict the future in any industry, hedge funds or baseball, but that there were always data that could help
one make informed choices. Little’s homespun style was fine with him, but he would have liked it more if that style had come with more solid reasons for baseball decisions.

The two men were as different as their baseball backgrounds: whereas Little’s vision was shaped by managing hundreds of personalities and 2,000 games in the minor league sticks, Henry was drawn to the sport as an owner, a fan, and a lover of computer-simulation games. He was so taken with the inventive formulas and original writings of Bill James, a true baseball outsider, that he hired him to work for the Red Sox.

Clash.

Eighth inning. The score was 5 to 3 after Bernie Williams singled home Jeter. There was still the bullpen option. Still one out. Still Feel versus Numbers. Several members of the Boston ownership group and baseball operations staff were nervous when Little jogged from the third-base dugout to talk with Martinez. If they had to pinpoint one reason he had been a good hire, they would choose what they called his “social intelligence.” They knew he had a politician’s gift for canvassing a room and a preacher’s for bringing people together. Frankly, they weren’t sure how much he was willing to apply what they deemed important.

They even had a meeting about him earlier in the season. The agenda: how to best manage the manager. The conclusion: allow him the flexibility, for the most part, to manage in that folksy style of his. It couldn’t be all bad, could it? They were on their way to 95 wins and the playoffs, and the manager deserved some credit for that. But they had to let him know, emphatically, that certain things were required of a Red Sox manager. The list wasn’t long, maybe two or three things, but the list was nonnegotiable.

The necessity of the meeting was a clue that the relationship was doomed. They had to tell him to consider all the available infor
mation and use some of it? That was trouble, long before October in New York.

Little would later explain that he felt he gave his team the best chance to win by placing the ball and season in the wiry right hand of Martinez. As he looked into Martinez’s eyes, Little didn’t just see a pitcher who on average gave up the fewest earned runs, 2.22, in the league and would one day be in the Baseball Hall of Fame; he also saw an artist. The Geeks were fine with that. Their point was that after Martinez threw over 100 pitches, he was indeed an artist—but the art was more paintball than Picasso. Martinez, with talent and competitiveness to burn, was dramatically easier to hit once his pitch count exceeded 100.

Take him out
. It was the silent scream for every Red Sox employee sitting there anxiously in the Bronx. It had to be silent. Imagine the response if the cameras had captured Epstein, the general manager, and Henry yelling at their manager. The screaming in New England, though, was real. Elderly Boston fans howled because they believed that the 2003 Red Sox were their best chance at baseball bliss before death. Some people yelled because for a Bostonian, the only thing worse than losing is losing to the Yankees. Some people shouted in the name of common sense. They waved at their TVs—
Wake up, Grady!
—as if that would snap him out of it.

He obviously didn’t hear or see them, and it wouldn’t have made a difference if he had. He appeared to be fed up with his organization’s obsession with numbers. It was their brainstorm, not his, that led to an experiment in spring training. They actually tried to begin the season without a closer, which is heresy for a true baseball man. The media tabbed it “closer by committee.” The idea was that different pitchers could get the most important outs of the game, whether those outs needed to be gotten in the seventh, eighth, or ninth innings.

Sure, it sounded fine on paper. But in the real baseball world, it was an intellectual exercise that made it impossible for him to set up his bullpen, and for his pitchers—real people, not charts on a page—to know what the hell was going on. And while the numbers detailing Martinez’s decline after 100-plus pitches had crossed his desk, he still allowed his ace to throw 130 pitches in a first-round start against the A’s. Numbers? Forget the numbers. This was insubordination.

There was a brief conversation with Martinez on the mound and then a return to the dugout. When Little walked away with his hands in his jacket pockets, he essentially walked away from his job.

His successor alternately watched and listened in Pennsylvania. He made no assumptions or judgments. It wasn’t his team, so he wasn’t familiar with all the personalities. He knew a thing or two about the silver-haired Boston manager, but nothing that would give him any insight into what was happening on the field. Pro baseball is the land of a few degrees of separation, so wouldn’t you know that Francona had played with Little’s younger brother, Bryan—nicknamed “Twig”—in the minors? Or that Grady Little and Francona had been housemates for a couple months in 1992? It was the Arizona Fall League, where future big-leaguers, prospects and managers, congregate to sharpen their games. Little and Francona held two of the coaching spots for the Grand Canyon Rafters, with Little managing and Francona in place as his third-base coach. They lived in a Mesa condo and often shared the 30-minute commute to Grand Canyon University in Phoenix. They got along just fine, but it wasn’t as if they spent hours trading baseball philosophies. What Francona remembered most about Little was that he was the pleasant man of routines who couldn’t drive by any of the desert’s 7-Elevens without stopping in and picking up some lottery tickets.

They were both a long way from the short-season anonymity
of Arizona now. Little was in a different kind of fall league, the national stage of the big-league playoffs, making managerial decisions under the Yankee Stadium lights. Francona had no idea what Little’s challenges were in New York. Was someone hurt? Was someone scared? Did Little feel that he didn’t have the matchups he wanted in the bullpen?

Once you’ve managed, you always remind yourself that there are dozens of factors of which fans are unaware. On that night, October 16, Francona was a lot like those fans. But when he actually stopped moving from room to room, he tried to think of all the options that both managers had. In other words, the A’s bench coach was thinking in depth and weighing all of Boston’s possibilities, and he wasn’t invested in the team. He wasn’t even sure he wanted to watch. He didn’t know it at the time and neither did the Red Sox management, but he was exactly what they needed.

Eighth inning. A few seconds after Little’s pep talk to Martinez, Hideki Matsui hit a ground-rule double to right field. There was still no call to the bullpen. Still one out. What was this? Before anyone could answer the rhetorical question, Jorge Posada was in mid-swing. It was a 2-2 pitch and the proud Martinez, as spent as he might have been, wasn’t giving in. He had reached 93 miles per hour on one of his fastballs to Matsui. He got up to 95 on a fastball to Posada. On the 2-2 pitch, the plan for Martinez was to deliver a fastball in on the New York catcher’s hands. The plan was successful in a sense because Posada was jammed.

“Pedro sawed him off,” said Gabe Kapler, who was a Red Sox reserve outfielder. “But Posada kept his hands inside the ball, which is very tough to do in that situation.” Posada didn’t smash the baseball, but he didn’t have to. He had enough strength to lift the ball to right-center field for a game-tying double. Kapler watched from the dugout and still insists, “I don’t disagree with leaving Pedro in the
game. I don’t think any of the guys in the dugout were saying, ‘Get him out of there.’ He threw some great pitches in that inning.”

Finally, with the score tied at 5, Martinez’s night was over. Baseball is funny sometimes: Martinez’s final pitch, his 123rd, was one of his best. But there were few people in the stadium willing to take a clinical view of that pitch, and the bosses weren’t among them. Hadn’t they warned the supervisor about the employee’s performance in overtime? It had literally and figuratively become a new day. The game was going to be extended, which meant it would end in the early-morning hours of the 17th. The stadium crowd quickly grasped how out of place, and joyous, the moment was. This had already been a fierce series, America’s version of a gritty European soccer rivalry. Less than a week earlier, in the third game, two Yankees fought with a part-time groundskeeper in the Fenway Park bullpen and were charged with assault and battery. Earlier in the same game, Martinez had aimed a pitch near the head of Karim Garcia, who was one of the bullpen fighters. The pitch eventually led to the benches clearing, and Martinez found himself playing matador to 72-year-old coach Don Zimmer’s raging bull. The angry series, from the view of New Yorkers, had suddenly turned charitable. What a country: the richest team in baseball was getting a subsidy from the manager of the Red Sox. It was as if Little had randomly decided that he was going to pick up the tab for each of the 56,000 Yankee fans in the house.

If Little had mishandled the pitching in the eighth, what made anyone think he would find the deft touch in extra innings? The only thing that would bail him out, short- and long-term, was someone hitting a home run that would carry the Red Sox to the World Series. Yet the reality was that he was boxed in. Late-inning managing is a new version of gin rummy, a version in which the object is to hold onto your cards as long as possible before playing
them at the perfect time. Not only was the man across from Little, Joe Torre, able to do that with his bullpen, he also saw that Little had misplayed his hand. In a three-run game, New York’s Mariano Rivera was not a factor; in a tie game late, he was the most devastating pitching weapon either side had. Rivera had earned his reputation in games in which the stakes were highest. Simplicity was what made him great. He threw one pitch, a cut fastball, and he mastered it. It came out of his hand with no spin, meaning the seams of the baseball offered a batter no clue of what the ball was going to do next. From a batter’s perspective, the ball would travel one distance for its first 60 feet. Then, in its final 6 inches, it would devour the barrel of the bat like a 93-mile-per-hour termite. Rivera was going to throw that predictable yet hard-to-hit pitch over and over. He knew it, and so did they.

The contrast was haunting for New England. It was the Boston manager’s rejection of simplicity—the pitcher is tired, so take him out—that pushed him and his team away from potential greatness. Little truly was facing opponents in every corner: Rivera, who was rested and prepared to pitch until last call; Red Sox owners and members of the front office, most of them furious at the manager; Little’s own strategic weaknesses, which cost him yet another late chance at tilting the bullpen in his favor; and Red Sox fans, who had already turned his name into one of the dirtiest regional profanities.

Of course, all of it was too much to overcome. New York won, 6 to 5. Rivera pitched three innings, one and a half more than usual, and allowed just two hits. The game ended in the 11th inning when Aaron Boone hit a home run off Tim Wakefield. The home run landed and, officially, Boston’s nausea turned to anger. It was the type of anger that could be reconciled one day, but not until the Red Sox won a World Series. Who in New England was going to wait ’til next year with Little? The region’s residents, religious about their
baseball team, already wavered in their faith of the manager. Now they didn’t trust him.