Francona: The Red Sox Years (48 page)

Lackey was in bad shape in every way. He had difficulty adjusting to the American League East and was on his way to a 12–12 record with a whopping ERA of 6.41. His wife was undergoing treatment for breast cancer, and their marriage was troubled. He had soreness in his pitching elbow and was bound for Tommy John surgery. He was often demonstrative on the field, waving his arms and making faces when teammates failed to make plays behind him. He was short with the media. Fans resented his $82 million contract. After a bad stretch early in the season, Lackey said, “Everything in my life pretty much sucks right now.”

In the summer of 2011, wearing their uniforms at Fenway Park, Beckett, Lester, and Lackey (along with Clay Buchholz) participated in a country-western music video shoot for Kevin Fowler’s “Hell, Yeah, I Like Beer!”

“We looked into it [video], and we found out that it was just a courtesy to them [the pitchers],” said Lucchino. “It was [approved by] someone who didn’t have the decision-making authority on this. It was all very casual and never went up the chain of command, and we weren’t aware of it until after this issue developed.”

“I never even knew about it,” said the manager.

Beer and baseball have walked hand in hand since the game was invented. Through the decades, many teams (St. Louis Cardinals, Toronto Blue Jays, Baltimore Orioles) were owned by beer companies, and no one ever objected to the name of the Milwaukee
Brewers.
Baseball players, coaches, and managers are on the road for 81 games, most of which are played at night. There is beer in the clubhouse, on the plane, on the bus, and in every major league city hotel. Baseball hours encourage the drinking life. Games are late, and participants can sleep late the next morning. Under Hall of Fame manager Earl Weaver, Baltimore Oriole ballplayers were not allowed to use the hotel bar. The hotel bar was home to Weaver and his coaches. Weaver reasoned that banning players from the hotel bar eliminated all possibility of late-night encounters between inebriated, disgruntled ballplayers and their manager. The Sox did not have any such rule.

Rules and traditions changed in baseball and across America in the 1990s and in the new millennium. Drunk driving fatalities, DUI arrests, and liability concerns prompted many major league ball clubs to limit or ban alcohol in the clubhouse. By 2011, 18 of 30 major league baseball teams had officially banned beer from the clubhouse (though it was well known that clubbies had access to beer, even in the “dry” ballparks). The Red Sox of 2011 were not among the clubs with a clubhouse alcohol ban.

Francona understood the clubhouse culture as well as anyone and believed in treating his ballplayers like adults. Privileges were extended with the understanding that the players would not take advantage of the system. The manager was proud of the fact that the Red Sox did not have a single DUI arrest in his eight seasons in Boston. He knew some of his players drank beer in the clubhouse after the game, and if one of the pitchers had a beer in the late innings of a game in which he was not involved, the manager wasn’t going to make a big deal of it.

He remembered the words of the late Chuck Tanner, a teammate of Tito Francona and a World Series–winning manager with the Pirates in 1979. When Tanner made the trip to New Brighton for Birdie Francona’s funeral in 1992, young Terry, then a first-year minor league manager, asked the senior skipper how he knew when to step in and when to look away when ballplayers misbehaved on charter airplanes.

“If I didn’t turn around, I didn’t see it,” Tanner told 33-year-old Francona.

“When would you know to turn around?” asked Terry.

“If the plane was going down, I’d turn around,” said Tanner.

Point taken. If you wanted to stick around as a big league manager (Tanner managed the White Sox, A’s, and Braves in addition to the Pirates), you sometimes looked the other way. Tanner was not going to make a big issue out of a little beer in the clubhouse.

“I’m not saying it was right,” said Francona. “But if somebody was drinking, they weren’t drinking a lot. It was more disturbing for me to think that they would not protect each other, or one guy wouldn’t tell another guy to knock it off. I wanted them to protect each other ferociously. If somebody felt that strong about it, fuck, they could have told me. Most of all, they needed to care enough about each other to stop it, because that’s what good teams do. The chicken and beer didn’t bother me, but I wanted them there together in the dugout, being all in.

“You noticed it on Sundays when football started. You’d lose the pitchers. I caught Jonny Lester one day. He came bounding into the dugout during our game, and I said, ‘What’s the score of the Jets game?’ He was mortified. It just crushed him. That’s all I had to say to him.

“They knew the rules. I always told them, ‘The day you pitch, you’re fully vested. The other days, there are gonna be days you don’t feel like coming down to the dugout. But kick yourself in the ass, because that’s the day the position player is going to need a little help.’ That’s what bothered me with this group. There was too much sitting around and not enough caring on the days they weren’t pitching.”

“I feel like I was in the dugout just as much as any other year,” grumbled Beckett. “I have a hard time grasping what everybody else thinks. Maybe I’m just not smart enough to figure that out.”

Francona knew his dugout was crowded late in the season with the September call-ups. He knew J. D. Drew, close to retirement, ever on the disabled list, was addicted to the hunting video game in the clubhouse. He didn’t mind players occasionally ordering fried chicken from nearby Popeye’s during games (a tradition started in 2010 by Mike Cameron, perhaps the best teammate and most fit player on the club).

“The fact that they ordered from Popeye’s every once in a while, that doesn’t matter,” said Francona. “The fact that maybe guys were getting heavy, that does matter.”

Late in the summer, he pulled Beckett aside for a talk—something he’d done just about every year Beckett was with the Sox.

“JB, don’t forget the leader you are,” said Francona. “Come on, man. I expect a lot from you. I know you are not going well now, and I want to make sure you are okay. You’re not going late in games. You seem mad at the world. Let’s get going now.”

“A week later, I was looking at the same things,” said Francona later. “That’s where I thought I lost my ability a little bit. That talk normally got him back on track. I used to be able to get to him, and it wasn’t working anymore.”

“I don’t think I took advantage of Tito,” said Beckett. “He may think I did, but it’s probably not coming from something that I did to him. It’s coming from somebody else telling him that’s how he should feel. I thought I was prepared to pitch every time I went out there.”

Poor conditioning shed light on the ball club’s training and medical staffs. Rising star Ellsbury was among the players who did not trust the Sox medical team, and the ball club was constantly overhauling systems of caring for the players. Dr. Bill Morgan, who performed the crucial surgery on Curt Schilling, was removed after the 2004 season. Trainer Paul Lessard was let go after four seasons in 2009. There would be a complete overhaul of the medical and training staffs after the collapse of 2011.

“We had conversations with Theo about what was going wrong before the last day,” said Werner. “And we had conversations with Terry. . . . There were certain things that I was surprised about at the end, but we were aware of certain issues, like conditioning issues and medical issues.”

“Our medical was all fucked up,” said Francona. “There were more egos on the medical staff than there were on the team. Without Larry Ronan, it wouldn’t have worked. Without him, we wouldn’t have made it. People don’t know how many fires we put out there. We tried to set this mold, and we broke it. We kind of outsmarted ourselves. It was terrible. I remember being really pissed when Paul Lessard was let go. Now they know. Some of us paid a price for that.”

Late in the 2011 season, Henry talked about the methods of Liverpool soccer strength and conditioning coaches, hoping the Red Sox could adopt similar policies.

“They were explaining how their athletes punch in every day,” said the manager. “The players recorded what they ate and how many hours they slept. John wanted to do that here. I said, ‘John, are you shitting me? You can’t do that with these guys. Just be happy they show up at the ballpark.’”

On August 3, Ortiz stepped up to the plate with runners on second and third and drove a single to left. Cleveland left fielder Austin Kearns did not field the ball clearly and Youkilis scored from second. Kearns was charged with an error, and Ortiz received only one RBI. The Red Sox won, 4–3, improving to 68–41 and holding their first-place lead over the Yankees.

The next day Francona was conducting his pregame press conference with the Boston media at Fenway when Ortiz burst through the door to the left of the stage, pointed at Francona as he was met by Ganley, and said, “I’m fucking pissed. We need to talk this out, you and me.”

“I’ll be with you in a minute,” said Francona.

Ortiz turned and left, yelling, “Okay. Fucking scorekeeper always fucking shit up.”

“I was fired up,” Ortiz admitted later. “It wasn’t like I was mad at Tito, but I needed to talk to him. I wanted him to talk to the scorekeeper because he’s my manager. They knew they screwed up. I wanted my RBI.”

Ortiz was correct in his assessment. Youkilis had never broken stride on his route from second toward home plate and would have scored on the hit regardless of Kearns’s error. Ortiz was particularly sensitive about his numbers after he had finished with 99 RBI in 2009. Ganley petitioned the league and had the decision changed.

Video of the press conference incident went viral.

“I’m glad I brushed my hair that day,” said Ganley.

Back in the clubhouse, Francona found Ortiz, and they met in his office, Ortiz taking a seat on the Pesky couch.

“David, if you want an RBI, I’ll try to help you, but you did wrong,” said the manager.

Pleading his case, Ortiz started, “But . . .”

“No ‘buts,’ David,” said Francona. “You did wrong.”

The moment came to symbolize the 2011 Red Sox. They would be remembered as individual stars who cared about themselves more than their team or their manager.

“It wasn’t the end of the world, but if that bothered him that much, that was a warning sign for me,” said Francona. “Guys were starting to think about themselves. It was a concern. I took a lot of pride in having teams where guys got mad if we lost, not if they went 0–4.”

By this time the roundtable meetings involving Lucchino and the players—a staple of the Sox structure for most of the eight Francona seasons—started to ring hollow. It became difficult for Jack McCormick to find willing participants.

“I think the players were starting to think it was a little transparent,” said Francona. “By the end, I was asking Jack to get a couple of coaches because you couldn’t get players.”

There was a long-distance player-management issue when the Sox played in Texas late in August. The Texas series concluded a stretch in which the Sox had played 14 of 17 games on the road with stops in Minneapolis, Seattle, and Kansas City. The schedule called for the Sox to return from Texas for a three-game weekend series against Oakland at Fenway, but Hurricane Irene was scheduled to slash through Boston by the end of the weekend. There was almost certain to be a rainout Sunday. Baseball ops wanted management to absorb the rain and reschedule any lost games for September 29 after the end of the regular season. The Sox did not want to lose the gate. (Lucchino was obsessed with getting all 81 home games played every season.) Lucchino called his manager and proposed that the Sox move up the Sunday game and play a day-night doubleheader on Friday.

“That was a tough one,” said Francona. “We were not going to get home from Texas until six in the morning on that Friday. I was against it all the way around. I told them, ‘This doesn’t help us. I know you have other concerns and there are revenue things to think about.’ I wasn’t trying to be a fly in the ointment, but they asked me a baseball question, and I told them. Daniel Bard got into it because he was the player representative and they wanted to have a vote on it. The players were feeling like they wanted some help on that one. We were beat up. We were tired. We were on fumes. For me, a rainout wouldn’t have been the worst thing in the world. I know it costs them some money, and I respect that, but we had a decent lead and couldn’t give the guys a blow.”

“Larry Lucchino called me when we were in Texas,” said Pedroia. “I said, ‘Larry, I don’t give a fuck. I’ll play whenever you tell me to play, but I’ve got to talk to the guys.’ It taxes the team. I would have been dead the rest of the year if we’d done that doubleheader Friday. We didn’t want to do it. We wanted to play it at the end of the year if we got rained out.”

Lucchino said, “We’d made a major investment around 2004 to change the drainage and the turf around the ballpark so that there would not be so many rainouts. We’ve had pretty good luck doing it. We’ll tell our players we’re going to play 81 home games and try to get them all in.”

The compromise was a Saturday day-night doubleheader. Sox players were angry, but won both games. It would be the last time in 2011 that they would win two games in a row.

When Henry got word that players were upset about the doubleheader, he offered them a night on his boat (no children allowed) and had a set of $300 headphones delivered to the stall of each of the players. Sox coaches were not invited on the boat and did not receive headphones.

“There was this growing sense of disconnection,” said Epstein. “The players were pissed at the world, including management. There was a sense of discord in the clubhouse. Ownership felt disconnected, and there were these nice headphones lying around. We’d done it in the past. In 2004 we gave them iPods.”

“I never got the headphones, but about 20 of us went on the boat, and that was pretty sweet,” said Pedroia. “But we started playing bad right after that doubleheader.”

“There was a conflict between pitchers and position players,” said Youkilis. “It shouldn’t be like that. Guys weren’t getting along, and we didn’t address it as players. Players wanted the manager or the general manager to do something. It just became a rift. You can point fingers all you want, but players have got to play. When you come in the door, you have to be accountable for your actions and what you are doing. It just sucked for Tito. We didn’t take care of what we needed to take care of. I wasn’t accountable when I could have been accountable.”