Red Sox Rule (5 page)

“I don’t need the manager to make decisions that I agree with, but I have the right to know why something happened—and vice versa,” Epstein said to Francona. “And if we can’t get to that point in our relationship, then I think we will fail.”

Francona was relieved. He saw it the same way, so they shook on it.

N
o one knows when it happened exactly. It’s one of those cultural shifts that make it seem as if the world changes overnight: one day you’re insensitive and inappropriate, and the next you’re a comic with your own HBO special. Or you go to bed as a veteran senior analyst and wake up as the old guy who is forced to take the corporate buyout. Maybe you were the one “telling it like it is” before the curtain fell, and when it was raised again all your lines called for less vinegar and more diplomacy.

One night baseball drew the shades, and at daybreak an old job description—manager—had a brand-new glossary. And a handful of management styles went on the same list as the dodo.

It’s not that Earl Weaver, Walter Alston, Dick Williams, and Sparky Anderson couldn’t have handled the strategy of today. They’re all in the Hall of Fame; the strategy of baseball Now would be a breeze to the men of baseball Then. Weaver was celebrating on-base percentages, obsessing over matchups, and despising bunts in Baltimore at least 30 years before those were principles in Oakland. Alston was one of the early arrivals on the first floor of social and athletic adaptation: in 1946, he was the
minor league manager of African Americans Roy Campanella and Don Newcombe, a year before the Dodgers integrated the sport; and in 1971, his Dodgers were among the first teams to scrap the four-man pitching rotation in favor of the now-modern five-man staff. They’d all figure out the baseball. It’s the language that would drive them crazy.

What, exactly, is “creating an atmosphere in which a player is comfortable”? Why does a player hitting .233 need an “explanation” for why he’s not in the lineup tonight? What’s this drivel in the newspaper about “showing up a player” by calling him out within earshot of teammates, fans, and media? Alston was a lamb compared to the late Billy Martin, but even he challenged his players to fights and followed them to their hotel rooms when they came in past curfew. Do that now and you’re taken through a media assembly line: The writers will throw their ink on you, they’ll pass you off to be yelled at on talk radio, they’ll kick you into the land of TV debates and 24-hour “Breaking News” crawls, and they’ll let you come to in a room where you can watch the original incident online because a fan put it on YouTube.

Then there’s the matter of your team. That is, you wouldn’t have one. This is the culture of comfort, so much so that even confrontations have to be handled with peace in mind. It’s neither good nor bad; it just is. A manager who cannot adjust to “building good relationships” with players and overseeing an environment in which “players hold each other accountable and police themselves” will not make it. He can’t. The game has too many powerful tentacles attached to it: agents, lengthy and lucrative player contracts, and a multibillion-dollar television deal that spans free TV as well as cable. This is no kind of town for a counterculture sheriff.

“There’s no way in hell I could manage in today’s game,” says the 78-year-old Williams. “The players are making so much
money today that they’re the ones calling the shots.” It probably seems that way to Williams because he’s from the school of misnamed “managers”; he didn’t manage as much as he directed. He wasn’t an imposing man, or at least the stat sheet said he wasn’t supposed to be. He stood 6 feet tall and weighed 175 pounds. It didn’t matter. He was demanding when he was talking baseball; if the subject was anything else and Williams had been drinking, players learned to avert their eyes when he walked toward the back of the plane. He could be scary.

As a player, Williams spent the final two seasons of his career as a utility man with the Red Sox. Three years later, in 1967, he became the 37-year-old manager in Boston. In between, he managed the Red Sox’s Triple-A team in Toronto. In his ironically titled memoir,
No More Mr. Nice Guy
, he recalled how he came to be known as a managerial fighter while in Canada. One of his players, Mickey Sinks, asked Williams if he thought the pitcher deserved to be called to the big leagues at the end of the season. Williams answered no; Sinks answered with a fist to the manager’s right eye. Predictably, a scuffle ensued and the men wrestled until a trainer heard the commotion in Williams’s office and broke up the fight.

“Apparently, I’d strained so much while bear-hugging Mickey Sinks that I’d shit my pants,” Williams wrote. “Ruined that $49.95 seersucker suit…I called a clubhouse meeting the next day and brought out the pants. Let them see where I strained. Let them smell the stench. I told them: ‘You mess with me, I’ll shit all over you.’ Then when they finished laughing, I added: ‘If this is what it takes to win, everybody in this room will be wearing diapers.’ They didn’t laugh then.”

In 1967, Williams was given a three-year contract to manage the Red Sox. His baseball and his Boston were less complicated
then. There was media interest in the team, but it was nothing like the 135-person horde that covers each Red Sox game today. Williams joked that he had “four writers covering us—two for me and two against me.” Curt Flood hadn’t yet challenged baseball’s reserve clause in court, so players were still a decade away from free agency. Under those rules, neither the players nor their union were powerful enough to prevent Williams or any other manager from ruling with a heavy touch. That’s not to say that all successful managers of the era were similar to Williams. Red Schoendienst, the manager of Williams’s hometown team, the St. Louis Cardinals, was as cool as Williams was intense. The difference, then, was that he wasn’t required to be. If you had strong personal relationships with players, it was more choice than job requirement.

Williams couldn’t wait to get his hands on the 1967 Red Sox. They had finished 9th in the 10-team American League in 1966. They averaged 10,000 fans per game. And Williams, of course, thought they were soft.

“It was a country club,” he says from his Las Vegas–area home. “I tried to change the whole complexion of what that team was about.”

He started by stripping the captaincy away from future Hall of Famer Carl Yastrzemski. It was nothing personal toward Yaz. The manager didn’t think a ninth-place team needed to have a captain, plus he didn’t believe that his talented left fielder had the makeup to be a vocal leader. Williams told general manager Dick O’Connell what he had in mind and went from there. He explained his thinking in his memoir:

 

Everyone wanted to know how I would break the news to owner Tom Yawkey’s favorite player. What would I tell the
legend? Hey, I didn’t tell him squat. I recognized no captains, so I had no reason to speak to him as a captain. I told O’Connell there would be no captains, and that was that.

 

The Red Sox didn’t have a lot of love for Williams, but they played well for him. His team went from ninth to first, winning the pennant on the final day of the regular season. They lost the World Series to the Cardinals in seven games. That team, with Triple Crown winner Yaz and Cy Young winner Jim Lonborg, was credited with more than a great ride. It’s the team that regenerated Boston’s dilapidated baseball spirit. It’s the team that spawned a generation of Fenway preservationists; they so believe in the magic of the 96-year-old park that they’d rather suffer through the wrong-way seats and poor sight lines than start over with something new.

Unfortunately for the men who followed Williams, who was fired in September 1969, the 1967 team was the last New England would simply thank for the journey. The region had seen too much, come too close, and been empty-handed too long to say thanks for baseball seasons that produced no championships. The 1967 team got a pass because it was a generation’s first love. Just over 10 years later, that innocent generation of lovers was introduced to bitterness and couples counseling. They didn’t praise Don Zimmer’s Red Sox for 99 wins and making it all the way to a one-game playoff against the Yankees; they immortalized their pain with an angry acknowledgment of the player who beat them: Bucky (Bleeping) Dent.

Williams had gotten his championships years earlier, managing the Oakland A’s to two of their three consecutive titles in the early 1970s. In 1975, while managing the Angels, Williams made a point to introduce himself to Jerry Remy, his 22-year-old second baseman. Remy was a long way from home, a New Englander
from Somerset, Massachusetts, playing for a man he feared. It was a nice spring day in California, and Remy was making his major league debut against the Kansas City Royals. His first big-league hit was an RBI single off Steve Busby, and he stood at first base feeling good about what he’d done.

Well, back to that introduction: Busby picked Remy off first.

“Hey,” Williams barked at Remy. “Sit your ass down! If that ever happens again, your ass will be back in Salt Lake City so fast you won’t know what hit you.”

Remy sat and listened. Williams’s plan, admittedly, was to either motivate through fear or to create an unlovable villain—himself—whom players hated so much that they actually played hard for him. Initially, he was able to hold Remy’s attention by threatening to send him back to the minors in Utah. Later, after the manager developed some confidence in the kid, he gave him permission to steal bases on his own. That worked well until the day Remy was caught stealing and ran the Angels out of an inning.

“You’re off your own,” Williams announced.

He didn’t speak to Remy for two weeks. Then one day after batting practice, Williams let it be known that they were talking again and that the second baseman was back on his own. “Did you learn your lesson?” he asked, knowing that an answer was unnecessary. The manager set the rules, and if you were a young player looking uphill at service time, you didn’t question it.

That’s the way it was when you played for Williams, Martin, Zimmer, and Gene Mauch. Those guys always seemed to outnumber the managers of the era whom the players were able to overthrow. The Washington Senators did have their “Underminers’ Club,” which they put together in hopes of running their manager, Red Sox icon Ted Williams, out of town. The Senators were so bad that no one knew the difference between their attempts to sabo
tage and their attempts to play baseball. The plan worked a bit too well: Teddy Ballgame was gone to Texas—along with the franchise, which moved there.

By the time Remy was traded to the Red Sox after the 1977 season, the phenomenon of free agency was in place. So was Zimmer, a hydrant of a man dually nicknamed “Popeye” and “The Gerbil” because of his bulging cheeks. The players may have been on the verge of a financial revolution, but that didn’t mean Zimmer was going to be run over by them. In fact, that was the story around the majors. The game was going to have to dictate what happened to the feisty manager, because those men had no plans to change their personalities. They were going to keep doing what they did until evolution and/or losses spun them out of the dugout.

Remy remembers arriving at Fenway for a game and learning that he wasn’t in the lineup. He had been struggling against lefties, but he had still expected to play. His disappointment was obvious, because he was told to “go talk to Zim.”

“I hadn’t walked two feet into his office before he lit into me,” Remy says with a laugh. “He said, ‘You want to know why you’re not playing today? Because you suck against lefties, that’s why.’ And he said some other things, using ‘Zim language’ the whole time.”

Zim may have used Zim language, but he was letting other voices creep into his head, especially in 1978, when the Red Sox held a 14
¹
/
₂
-game lead over the Yankees in mid-July and let the lead slip away. Baseball was changing and so was the sports atmosphere, so when Zim left the ballpark he wouldn’t listen to music on his radio or 8-track tape player. He and his wife, Soot, would tune into WITS, the team’s flagship radio station. The host, Glenn Ordway, had a call-in talk show from 8:00
P.M.
until midnight. After games, Ordway and his callers would question some of the manager’s choices.

Those questions usually had something to do with the daily decision to leave an injured-and-playing-like-it Butch Hobson at third base. Hobson had bone spurs in his right elbow, and he could be seen shaking his arm into place on the field. At the plate, he would literally adjust the loose bodies in his elbow until he found a position that he liked. Then he would lock in and try to hit a baseball. It wasn’t a surprise when he committed a staggering 43 errors in 1978, while his fielding percentage of .899 was well below the league average of .954. He could get to the ball, but he couldn’t throw it cleanly, often botching what should have been ordinary plays. Ordway and the fans called for backup Jack Brohamer to play. The more they pleaded, the more Zim dug in, and the more Hobson continued to play and short-arm those throws.

Zim was the manager of the team. He clearly knew things about the game and his players that no fan or member of the media could. Yet he couldn’t pull himself away from the radio, a medium that he gave power by refusing to dismiss it. It was a routine: he and Soot would put on WITS, wince with the jabs, and Zim would confront Ordway the next day.

“He hates Ordway to this day,” Remy says. “It’s human nature: people can say whatever they want, but nobody enjoys getting ripped.”

If managers weren’t going to adjust to the players who played for them, they would have to make space for the writers and talkers who didn’t. The talkers would call them idiots when certain players would just think it. The writers would call for their jobs when the players could only dream of it. Yes, the media were changing, too. In the old days, a lot of the writers had been unpaid team hands. They traveled with the players, ate with them, boozed with them, played cards with them, got enough scoops to satisfy the bosses, and
turned their heads just at the right time so they could say, “I didn’t see it” in good conscience. They knew all the secrets and kept most of them out of the paper. Everyone was happy.

But a couple of things got in the way—journalism and innovation—just as the toy department was about to get a new shipment of fluff and games. Some of the young journalists decided that they were going to be more than the paper’s guilty pleasure. They weren’t going to safely fill space in order to maintain ballpark status quo; they were becoming influential stars themselves, especially in New England. The renewed interest in the 1967 Red Sox had coincided with the rise of Tom Winship, a
Boston Globe
editor who preferred flowers on his bow ties, not in the paper. He was energetic and bold, constantly searching for ways to shake up the newsroom and the city. He was in charge when the
Globe
hired three baseball-loving sportswriters—Larry Whiteside, Peter Gammons, and Bob Ryan—who would all become Hall of Famers (Ryan, who briefly had the Red Sox as his primary beat, is in the Pro Basketball Hall of Fame). In some cases, they would become as popular and as recognized as the players they covered.