Authors: Michael Holley
“We may not run away with it the way people want us to,” he said. “But we should be okay.”
Okay
was a Francona euphemism;
okay
meant “I’ll be shocked if this doesn’t happen.”
Since he was looking ahead, he first thought of maintaining the morale of both players. He knew they’d eventually hit, but he didn’t want their new lineup roles to put a drag on their spirits. He talked to both players and found that they were both fine with baseball. Like anyone else who is charged with managing people, Francona’s most challenging work would be monitoring what happened away from the field.
Overall, by Boston standards, the season was quiet. There was usually some moment—on the radio, in print, on a blog, somewhere—when the long-running local series, “Manny Being Manny,” got some attention. It could be the controversy of a Manny off day. It could be Manny not showing up at the All-Star Game. Or it could be some play in the field that is an affront to a baseball fan, a fan who never saw (insert name of 1960s player) do things like that and never saw (insert name of 1960s manager) stand for it. There were no Manny Moments in July. A week before the trading deadline, there were three major stories in town.
One was about basketball, and it got Francona’s attention. The word was that the Celtics were close to making a major trade that would bring forward Kevin Garnett to town. Francona already liked watching the Celtics, mostly because his friend Doc Rivers was the head coach. But he would obsess over the team if they
were able to have a lineup featuring Garnett, Ray Allen, and Paul Pierce.
The other two stories were related to the team that Francona managed. They were also trade rumors. Francona may have been patient with Drew, but most of the fans had seen enough. There had been talk of Jermaine Dye, struggling with the White Sox, being traded to the Red Sox. Francona was in Oakland when Dye played there, and he was confident that there would be no issues, playing time included. He considered Dye one of the best and most professional players in baseball, so he wasn’t worried about any type of sulking as he figured out a way to rotate a new outfielder among the team’s starters and young reserve Wily Mo Pena.
There were also rumblings that Texas was going to make its comic book closer, Gagne, available. Gagne had an ERA of 2.16, almost identical to Jonathan Papelbon’s 2.15. Gagne had blown one save all season and given up the homer to Pedroia; Papelbon had blown two saves and given up four home runs. The Rangers were looking for prospects, and not necessarily prospects that would be considered to be in an organization’s top five or top ten. It sounded interesting and doable. There was just one question: what would the Red Sox do with Gagne?
The proof was there for all to see. He was a closer, Papelbon was a closer, their numbers were similar, end of conversation. Gagne had never been a setup man in his career, so there was no reason to think that he would want to do that job in Boston. To make a deal even more unlikely, the Red Sox had Hideki Okajima setting up, and he was no longer a surprise to the league. He was an All-Star, and his ERA was 0.87. If Gagne were to come to Boston and set up, he’d lose out on the incentives—save incentives—that were likely to trigger his bonus. And he also had a no-trade clause.
You name it, and it was there; all the baseball reporters could call their editors on the day of the trading deadline—July 31 at 4:00
P.M.
EDT—and report that a mountain of evidence suggested that this trade was bogus. Or they could have done, unbelievably, what the Red Sox were planning to do: they could have called Papelbon and asked what his thoughts were on the potential deal.
Epstein and everyone else in baseball operations had been working the phones all day, trying to see if they could pull off the deal with Chicago for Dye—it was fading—or the one with GM Jon Daniels in Texas for Gagne—it was warming up. Gagne was represented by Scott Boras, who rivaled commissioner Bud Selig and players association head Donald Fehr for the following title: most powerful man in baseball without a team affiliation. Boras reported that his client was open to coming to Boston if he could close.
At 1:00, in one of the strangest sights of the season, four men stuffed themselves in a car and went on a one-mile road trip: Francona, Epstein, pitching coach John Farrell, and bullpen coach Gary Tuck. Francona was in full uniform. They left Yawkey Way and, after a couple of quick turns, were in Papelbon’s neighborhood. It may have been the first time that the quartet had been on the clock and on a meter at the same time.
About that meter: they were on Boylston Street in Boston, a few doors from where Francona had one of his first meals during his Boston interview. It was a busy Tuesday at midday, and finding an open meter at that hour in the city probably means that you’re being set up to be on the TV show
Punk’d
. They decided to park illegally near a steak house, Abe & Louie’s, and Francona shouted to someone inside, “Just don’t let them tow it, all right?”
It was 3 hours before the deadline, and they needed to know if their idea could be put in motion. They had no problem with Pap. They loved the guy. They thought they could shorten games the
rest of the season by throwing out Okajima, Papelbon, and Gagne in succession. They were right about the theory. But the reason they were standing on Boylston Street, with the manager in uniform, was that they knew the psychology of a true closer.
It’s hard to find a man who doesn’t mind having all the pressure on him at the end of games. The pitchers who like it love it, and they love it so much that it becomes an addiction. It’s one of the reasons Papelbon was dragging a bit in spring training. Epstein saw him as a starter; he saw himself as a closer. He liked hearing “Wild Thing” playing for him as he knocked fists with a police officer, Billy Dunn, and raced out of the bullpen door. He liked that he could just deal in short bursts: splitter, fastball, sometimes slider. He’d pound his glove at the end of it, point his finger at Jason Varitek or Doug Mirabelli, and then listen to “Dirty Water” as his teammates celebrated another win on the field. Dynamic duos for one job usually means one of two things: you don’t have one good thing (i.e., two mediocre quarterbacks in football) or you’ve got one out-of-sorts performer, used to the spotlight, now forced to sing backup.
At least they were trying. They wanted to speak with Papelbon in his condo, but there was no place to sit in private. He had several people in his place, helping him organize memorabilia for a signing, and there was stuff strewn all around. What they could do is go to a room downstairs and speak in peace. It was the building’s boiler room. It wasn’t that big, and not all of them would have the luxury of sitting in a chair, but they wouldn’t be bothered. And they wouldn’t have to strain to hear one another because the space was so tight. The five men went into the room, the key to the building, and talked to the most important member of their bullpen about the possibility of setting up games for Gagne. It was awkward. It was already hot in Boston from the recent heat wave.
And now they were a little hotter in a hot room. Furthermore, they were broaching a topic that Papelbon listened to, but it was a topic with which he wasn’t comfortable.
He didn’t know what they were coming over to talk about. Francona had called and said they’d be there shortly. “Don’t worry,” the manager had said on the phone. “You’re not in trouble and you’re not getting traded.” Improving the team made sense to all of them, and Papelbon could understand their point once they explained it. But this was one of those situations of organizational intelligence that Francona dreamed of in Oakland: The Ivy Leaguers had an idea, the player had a different idea, and the sides agreed to meet in the middle. Papelbon did appreciate the respect of a face-to-face visit, and he would tell Francona that later during a long chat.
But he wanted to close. He just wasn’t excited about anything else.
All around, it was suddenly becoming less comfortable. Two days after Pedroia’s homer off Gagne, May 29, the Red Sox were 36–15, 141/2 games ahead of the Yankees. Since then, the Red Sox were 28–27 and the Yankees were 36–20. The optimistic view was that the Red Sox had given themselves enough of a cushion to be average; the optimists were starting to get competition. The lead over the Yankees was down to seven games.
Fortunately for the traveling Red Sox, the car was still there after they talked in the stifling boiler room. They still had time to work something out with Boras. He was informed that Papelbon wasn’t on board with giving up his job, so would Gagne be interested in another role? They’d even pick up his bonus.
As the deadline approached, they were clear on this much: Papelbon was still their closer, Okajima would still be used as a setup man, just bumped up an inning, and Gagne had agreed to come to
Boston for the rest of the season—with the knowledge that he would not be the closer. On that day, the 31st, they had also gone to reserve Eric Hinske and asked if he wanted to be traded. They liked him a lot, and wanted to be sure he was happy, even if they couldn’t promise him playing time. Hinske appreciated the thought, but he enjoyed being a part of a winning group. Francona was appreciative, knowing, as he said about himself, “I didn’t wake up in the morning excited to be the left-handed pinch hitter.” Players who didn’t get as much time and were still pros about it impressed the manager.
As for Gagne, it didn’t take long for the acquisition to backfire.
He said all the right things, tried to be a great teammate, said he was happy to be close to his native Montreal, pitching for the Red Sox. He had a good attitude. His location was terrible. The fans turned on him for good during an August weekend in Baltimore. On a Friday night, he took the ball in the eighth inning with the Red Sox winning 5 to 1. He left without closing the inning, and the Red Sox lost that game. Two days later, in the series finale, he had a chance to redeem himself. He entered the game in the eighth inning in relief of Mike Timlin. There was a runner on base and Miguel Tejada was at the plate.
“There’s a long drive to left field…”
He gave up a home run, and the Red Sox lost in extra innings.
A lead that had been 141/2 was now down to 4. Four! Boston’s baseball landscape was no longer quiet; the city was angry, and there were plenty of people identified as targets. Epstein was on the list because he traded for Gagne. Francona was on the list because he called his number. And Gagne was on the list because he was the jinx perceived as single-handedly ruining the season.
Gagme
became the street name for the man wearing number 83.
One day, when the team was back at Fenway, Francona sat next to Gagne and started a conversation.
“Hey,” the manager said, “I’m no expert on pitching. But I’m here for you. If you go down, big boy, I’m going down with you.”
Gagne exhaled and went to work—hard—and it never got better for him. He was so determined to turn things around that he studied each pitch that he had thrown the entire season. That number on August 19, when he actually had a decent performance against the Angels, was 700. He sat there like a coach, trying to see a trend in some sequence of those 700 pitches. Was it his arm slot? Where he was standing on the rubber? Was it velocity? Was he tipping pitches?
Or was it in his head?
It was getting tight for all of them. There were more references to 1978. There were polls asking if winning the division was as important as getting into the playoffs. There were more talk-radio callers wondering if Francona was too loyal to his players.
The Red Sox were able to pad the cushion and get it back to 71/2 going into a series at Yankee Stadium. But all was not well. Manny had a strained oblique muscle, and the timetable on that was impossible to project. While Pedroia was still hitting—the kid was holding steady at .319—Drew and Lugo still hadn’t cracked .265. Gagne had a sore shoulder. Ortiz had a knee that was going to need surgery at the end of the season. And while there had been discussions about a contract extension for Francona earlier in the year, it had not been talked about in months.
The Red Sox had an off night in New York City on Monday, August 27, and Francona didn’t stay in his room to watch the Yankees–Tigers game on ESPN. He missed a 16 to 0 Tigers victory, viewed with interest in Detroit, New York, and Boston. He
stood by his controversial stance that he had to worry about his team, not the Yankees, so he just couldn’t spend all his energy following them pitch by pitch.
Instead, he left his room at the Westin Times Square and traveled about eight blocks with the entire family. His son, Nick, came up from Washington, where he was an intern at a think tank (he had studied Japanese in high school). The girls were there: Alyssa, who was at the University of North Carolina; Leah, who would be there soon; Jamie, the youngest, an athlete and writer; and Jacque, a nurse and his wife of 26 years. They all went to Uncle Jack’s Steakhouse in Manhattan. Francona had the surf and turf and a couple glasses of white wine; they did not talk baseball.
Even if the Yankees had won that game with Detroit it would have been all right with him. He wanted to crush the Yankees in the division just like Joe Torre and the Yankees wanted to crush him. He knew how big the games in New York were, and he’d be lying if he said the Yankees hadn’t cost him sleep. But the games, the criticism, the pressure, and the disappointment were nothing compared to what he’d been through in the past.
B
irdie Francona told her only son that it would be all right, that there was no reason to worry or fuss. They both knew that this day might have been random on other calendars, but it deserved a special notation on each of theirs. Earlier in the spring of 1988, Birdie had discovered a lump on one of her breasts. She had it checked out, and now, a few weeks later, this was the day the doctor would give her the news.
She was in New Brighton, Pennsylvania, and Terry was in Portland, Oregon. Only she could make a phone call from thousands of miles away seem like a conversation from front porch to front porch; only she could be calm and comforting when repeating the doctor’s news: she had breast cancer. It didn’t matter that Tito told a different story when he picked up the phone. “Your mother has some serious things going on here,” he said. Birdie was convincing, and if she said it was going to be all right and that he should enjoy playing baseball, he believed it.
Birdie had always found a way to adapt to the unexpected. Why would this be any different? Her first surprise as a Francona came in the early 1960s, when she and Tito moved from her
hometown—Aberdeen, South Dakota—to New Brighton. What a culture shock. She hadn’t met any Italian Americans before she fell in love with Tito—she hadn’t met any African Americans, either—and suddenly she had a father-in-law who spoke in several tongues: Italian, English, and whatever the Spirit moved him to say when he was preaching at the Italian Christian Center. She hadn’t seen anything like that church, the piano-playing and piano-tuning man who led it, or the people who lived around Honky Alley, the ethnic neighborhood that surrounded it.
Everything was just a little different about this place, about 40 miles northwest of Pittsburgh. It was a small-town melting pot and Birdie became the salt of it. Everyone loved Birdie and Tito, and not just because Tito played pro ball for Cleveland, the closest American League team in the region. They were real people who attended their churches, sent their kids to their schools, shopped at their stores (Birdie loved the meat at Pullion’s Market), and worked blue-collar jobs just like them. Tito worked part-time for the county’s recreation department to supplement the income he made from baseball. He also was a basketball official, and a damn good one, who was first assigned all the big high school games. He started to work his way up to Duquesne and Pitt games, but then Birdie told him to stop; it was too time-consuming.
Or maybe the protective mother and wife—the mother who was willing to fight all of Phillips 66 to protect the rights of her boy—was leery of her husband’s controversial calls. One night, officiating a game between Chester and Aliquippa, Tito made sure he got an emotional game under control by giving a technical to a player from Aliquippa. Terry, a basketball fan and preteen, watched the whole play and talked to his father afterward.
“Dad, you gave the one kid a technical, and it was the kid on the
other
team who hit him first.”
Tito listened to his son, paused, and said, “You’re right. I kind of thought that’s what happened.”
They looked at each other, father and son, and cracked up laughing. All of the Franconas—Tito, Birdie, Terry, and his younger sister Amy—shared a lot of laughs in that small town, tucked into the splendid Allegheny Mountains.
There was a reason Terry called his mother a saint. She was sweet, even when she was trying to get his attention. When she got mad at him, she’d still cook him dinner, but she’d make beef stew, his least favorite meal. That was a serious punishment because he looked forward to all of Birdie’s meals. Most of the time he couldn’t imagine anyone making better food than his mother. ( Jacque now has all of Birdie’s recipes.) There was the time, though, when she got a little too experimental on him. He was eating one of her creations and said, “Mom, what’s this?” Her answer nearly ruined his appetite for a week: “Tongue.” He politely asked Birdie to please, please never cook tongue again.
They shared laughs everywhere, really. Tito insisted on taking his baseball pension at 45 years old—“You never know what life will bring”—and he and Birdie used some of that money to travel to Omaha. They watched Terry play in the College World Series, fell in love with Millsie and his girlfriend Ronda, and smiled a lot, even when Terry’s team didn’t win the whole thing.
And today, like yesterday, was going to be all right. That’s what Birdie wanted Terry to believe as he prepared to play as an outfielder for the Colorado Springs Sky Sox. They were in Portland to play the Beavers in a Pacific Coast League game; that part was understandable. The puzzling part was why he was there to begin with.
He had invited himself to spring training with the Indians in 1988. He had gotten himself into good shape, the best he had felt
in 3 years. He dominated with the minor leaguers, where the Indians had put him, so they let him play with the big boys. He kept getting hits there, too. Doc Edwards, the Indians manager and one of Tito’s old Cleveland teammates, called Francona into the office.
“You’re going to have a great year,” Doc told him. “You’re going to be my number-two hitter.”
A few days later, president and general manager Hank Peters had a different idea. The story in all the country’s major newspapers began this way: “The Cleveland Indians, unwilling to start the season with the recently acquired Terry Francona as their first baseman, bought the contract of Willie Upshaw yesterday from the Toronto Blue Jays…”
It was time for another meeting with Doc.
“Terry, you’ve been around this game for a long time,” Doc said. Francona nodded. He knew this speech. He was all ready for Doc to tell him that he was going to be Upshaw’s backup. “We’re going to send you down,” the manager announced.
So he wound up in Colorado Springs, where there was a carnival and a baseball game taking place daily, both at the same time. There was one game in May when the Sky Sox gave up 12 runs and still beat the Phoenix Firebirds by 21 runs. Yes, the final score was 33 to 12. There was another time when manager Steve Swisher got so mad at Francona that he threw an entire container of beer on him. Still, Francona enjoyed playing for and talking with Swisher. He enjoyed playing there in the thin air, one call away from the majors.
That’s Americana, isn’t it? You’re always one phone call away from being discovered. Or you’re always one phone call away from hearing news so bad that it makes you think more of exceptions and hyperbole than the drudgery of the news itself:
Maybe they made a mistake; doctors can make mistakes, too; and if it is true, she’s going
to beat that disease like it stole something…cancer is not ready for my mother…
In July, it sure seemed like Birdie was right about being all right. After playing in the same area in which he had been a minor leaguer seven years earlier, Francona was deemed to have paid his dues. The Indians called him up, allowing him to play for the same team that Tito had for six seasons. He was close to New Brighton now, so if Birdie needed him for anything, it was easier to see her from fewer than 150 miles away.
This city, this stadium, and this team were mocked nationally, but it felt like home to Francona. All the mosquitoes, empty seats, losses, and incessant drum-banging, which were part of the Indians experience, didn’t discourage him. He knew old Italians in the city who looked out for his father. He knew policemen and security guards and clubbies, who all knew Tito. The first time Francona got a hit at creaky Cleveland Municipal Stadium, a man named Cy Buynak began to cry; he had joined the Indians in 1961 and remembered looking after a young Francona when Tito was busy playing.
Back in New Brighton, Birdie looked strong. She appeared to be healthy, bright, and alert as he finished the season in Cleveland with a .311 average. Not only was she there for that season, she survived the rest of his career, too.
He didn’t plan it this way, but he was now retracing some of his father’s steps. The last stop of Tito’s big-league career was Milwaukee, in 1970, and it was the last stop of his son’s, in 1990. His playing days ended with an unforgettable and nonspecific memento: an ache. It was an ache all over his body, an ache from years of playing when he wasn’t supposed to, an ache from constantly trying to show that he was physically gifted enough to play when he truly wasn’t. His career ended because he wasn’t good enough. As soon as he was released in spring training with St. Louis—Tito had
played there, too—he put all his equipment away, never to be tempted by thoughts of a comeback, and instead focused on his real life.
It became a real life fast, almost at the hour of his release in 1991. His parents needed his help in New Brighton. Birdie had chased off cancer the first time, in 1988, and she had been doing well. But cancer is a cruel disease, randomly searching for another place to establish itself in the body, and dammit, it came back. And it came back strong. Birdie’s son had no idea how sick she had been and how hard she had been fighting, fighting even as she told him not to worry. She had been able to smile while her body was at war, but the cancer was relentless, and it began to attack her cells and her spirit. She was moving slowly from chemotherapy, and now her primary caretaker, Tito, needed someone to take care of him.
Tito was coming off open-heart surgery, so he needed assistance for his wife and himself. Since there were no more games for Francona to play, he and Jacque were able to go to Pittsburgh, get an apartment there for a few weeks, and help out in New Brighton. They were able to stay long enough to see Tito get stronger, and to see Birdie, still not showing just how sick she was, pushing back as the cancer moved forward. It was one woman against an army, and she was able to delay what was slowly becoming inevitable for over a year.
In the fall of 1992, Francona was finishing up his first season as a manager in the White Sox system, with Single-A South Bend. He got a call from Tito, who told him that he should get to New Brighton the next day to see his mother. Francona had a phone conversation that night with Birdie.
“Mom, I’ll be home tomorrow,” he said.
“Okay.”
When he got to New Brighton, she didn’t recognize him. Even
sadder, he didn’t recognize her. The cancer had spread to her brain, to her face, all over her body. Whatever energy she had left was devoted to taking away that pain, that persistent pain. Her son would go into her room and check on her, and 5 minutes later, she wouldn’t remember that he had been there. Tito had taken care of her as best as he could, he and all of New Brighton. They sat with him, brought him food, did anything they could to help out Birdie. But strong drugs needed to be stronger, large doses needed to be larger, just for her to have a bit of comfort.
In the hospital, Tito finally told his son to go home. And not the home of Pullion’s, the New Brighton Hot Dog Shop, and the fields where he could always hear Tito’s whistle. He told him to go back to Tucson, because he didn’t need to see his mother like this. She was in so much pain that she was trying to do the impossible and escape her body. They strapped her to her bed to keep her calm and give her more medication.
So Francona left, knowing that he was coming back soon. He got in his car and drove from Beaver County, Pennsylvania, to Tucson, Arizona. He was always compared to his father, for obvious reasons, and that didn’t bother him; he played the same sport as his father, he looked like his father, he had the same nickname as his father, and he loved his father deeply. But now he would have to be more like his mother. He was going to have to adapt to a new reality, just as she did when she left Aberdeen for New Brighton. Her life changed and she had to figure out what that new life, in an unfamiliar place, was going to be. His life was changing, too. Birdie knew him as a baseball player, and he knew her as the saintly mother who always made everything better. These two realities were splitting, with the baseball player retiring and the mother taking her place among the saints.
Birdie died in September 1992. Just as he knew he would when
he left the hospital a week earlier, Francona boarded a plane and returned to New Brighton for the service. He saw her there in that casket and…you just have to know what it’s like to be around someone you love, that person being slowly taken away by a disease and tortured by that disease. The goal is always healing, but sometimes healing means serenity and no pain. He saw her there in that casket and he cried and smiled, too, because she finally looked like Mom again: she was beautiful and at peace.
The service was almost 10 years to the day that Birdie’s father-in-law, Carmen Francona, died after listening to a baseball game. His grandson had arrived at that service on crutches after suffering his first major injury as a professional. That day, as much as he knew Tito would miss his father, Francona knew that Tito still had Birdie; they had each other, and they’d always take care of one another. But in September 1992, who did Tito have to take care of him? His son was worried about him. He’d invite his father out to Arizona to get away for a while and relieve his mind, temporarily, from loss and loneliness. They tried doing something that both of them loved, golf, and they would play on some wonderful courses in Arizona. They would begin to play the game they loved and, unexpectedly, Tito would break down and cry. His son wasn’t the only one who knew how special his wife was.
After a few years, Tito figured out a way to forever honor his wife and her memory. He put together a charity golf tournament along with a dinner and dance, with the proceeds going to the hospital that helped him so much with Birdie. With each passing year, he was able to celebrate the entirety of her life, and not just recall the 4 years when they learned medical terms that they would have rather left to the medical journals.
One thing that father and son needed to pay particular attention to was the heart; the Francona men had a history of heart disease
and heart attacks. It wasn’t just Carmen and Tito. There were numerous cousins and uncles and brothers who didn’t make it, and they didn’t make it because of some trouble with their hearts. What made these men scary was how tough they all were; they had incredible pain thresholds, so family and friends needed to stay on them to go to the hospital. The Francona men would dismiss some things, things that would leave some men doubled over in pain, for hours at a time. Francona didn’t know if his father was joking 7 years ago after a round of golf, but the fact that he wasn’t sure how serious Tito was speaks to the strength of the man.