Authors: Michael Holley
There were times when she would visit him in the hospital, and just as she was about to leave, the man whom she once thought was too much of a jokester to be serious would say, “Please don’t go. I feel so much better when you’re here.”
He was determined to have his life back. All the Francona men he knew had been strong. He knew Grandpa Francona was strong and full of energy, to do all the jobs that he did. He knew that his father was, because he had felt those hands on him, pulling him through the house after that night of underage drinking. He was strong, too. He knew it. It took some type of strength, mental and physical, to play baseball for 10 years, when at least half of the time he shouldn’t have been out there.
At one point he called fellow western Pennsylvanian Ken Macha, the manager of the Oakland A’s, and told him that he couldn’t be counted on as bench coach in 2003. Macha wasn’t going to let him off the hook like that, and it was a good thing, because spring training was a carrot in front of him. He pushed for it. On Christmas Eve, he got strong enough where he could walk the 40 feet from his bed to the nurse station. It was that performance that allowed him to leave the hospital the final time for home—and it had all started so routinely with that arthroscopic surgery in October. He got stronger. He didn’t get better as quickly as he got sick, but he could see progress.
Terry Francona doesn’t like the idea of pushing his beliefs onto anybody. His prayers are his prayers, and yours are yours. But his prayers were answered; he was not given more than he could handle.
He has several reminders now of what happened then. He has
the scar on his leg. He has a stocking he wears on his right leg to stimulate circulation. He has what appear to be varicose veins close to his navel.
Baseball does become overwhelming to him at times. It’s his job, and a job that has its share of stress. But there are few situations on a field that he sees as hopeless, and few situations that he hasn’t prepared himself to handle. You can count him out or his team out, but after what he’s experienced in hospitals and on fields, he would never do that to himself.
T
hey’re called flyovers. They usually come from fighter jets named Falcon or Tomcat, and they are frequently seen at the beginning of big sporting events. You hear the national anthem and near the end you wait for it: the grumble in the distance, the sudden appearance of the jets, and the amusement and fear of the G force awakening your sternum.
Flyovers. There were two of them on August 30 at Yankee Stadium, but they were different from the others. They happened in the ninth inning instead of before the first. And they didn’t come from a jet; they came from a 230-pound Yankees pitcher named Joba Chamberlain. At the moment of the Joba Flyovers, the Boston Red Sox knew what their metaphor would be for the rest of the 2007 regular season: heat. It would be similar to the midday heat in the Bronx—85 on this day—but more personal. It would be confrontational and uncomfortable, and it wouldn’t always be as simple as Us versus Them.
So the Red Sox had their metaphor for all of September. That wasn’t the problem.
The issue on a Thursday afternoon in New York was that Cham
berlain was not holding a literary device in his right hand when he sent his message. He was holding a baseball, which he could throw at speeds tickling 100 miles per hour. Twice, Chamberlain threw baseballs over the head of Red Sox first baseman Kevin Youkilis. After the first one, players in the Boston dugout swore that they saw Chamberlain glance at New York third baseman Alex Rodriguez as if to say, “What did you think of that?” After the second one, an identical pitch aimed a foot over the first baseman’s head, Youkilis threw up his hands as if to say, “What the…?” Chamberlain was thrown out of the game, and the Red Sox had a bitter chaser for their three games against the pursuing Yankees.
They were swept, their division lead was down to five games, and they were being thrown at by a 22-year-old pitcher who was ascending as quickly as they were falling. Chamberlain began the season in Single-A Tampa, was promoted to Double-A Portland, and after an exhilarating stretch of pitching in which he had 125 strikeouts to just 27 walks, the Yankees plucked him from Double-A. Anyone who can deliver five strikeouts for every walk knows how to throw a baseball with precision, so the chances of the ball twice slipping out of his hand were unlikely. Chamberlain threw at Youkilis. Why he did it is unclear, but the act was an official torch-lighting, the beginning of September’s heat 2 days early.
The Red Sox knew they would see the Yankees again in 2 weeks, so somebody was going to get hit in one of those three games at Fenway Park. That was the unspoken yet clearly understood law of baseball. The question was, how would the Red Sox travel through those 2 weeks, running or on their knees?
They were the equivalent of the quiet kid sitting in the corner: he doesn’t say much at first, but the more he hangs around the more you learn, and sometimes you learn too much. Whatever happened to those peaceful days of double-digit division leads and no big stories?
Now, Manny Ramirez was a story once again. He hadn’t played in New York, and his injury, a strained oblique, was just ambiguous enough for people to question how hurt he was. Eric Gagne’s performances had been so bad that he was a story even when he wasn’t pitching. The two ex-Dodgers, J.D. Drew and Julio Lugo, were stories because they hadn’t come close to delivering what was expected.
Since they were all talking points, so were the people responsible for signing and managing them. The first day of September was an aberration for Theo Epstein and Terry Francona. On that day, all anyone wanted to talk about was the kids and how great they were. That was the day a skinny pitcher from Texas, Clay Buchholz, turned his second career start into a 10 to 0, no-hit win over the Orioles. It was a day for Mike Hazen and Jason McLeod and Ben Cherington, all the people responsible for scouting the players, preparing them to play for the Red Sox, and educating them about the extra weight of playing in Boston.
They pumped a lot of time and thought into the best way to raise young Red Sox, so no-hitters were the public pats on the back that they rarely got. They loved to see a game in which second-round pick Dustin Pedroia made a diving play in the seventh to preserve a no-hitter from a first-round pick. They knew what they were doing, but it let everyone else in on the secret when another first-rounder, Jacoby Ellsbury, could make a contribution in the no-hit game and play just as well as regular center fielder Coco Crisp. The first day of the month belonged to Buchholz, but it was a part of them, too, and that’s why many of them smiled afterward as much as Buchholz did.
But Epstein knew Boston, and Francona was beginning to know it. They both knew all the talk of kids and development would be quickly pushed aside if the lead dropped below five games. There were certain things that everyone in the city understood, and it
started with the division itself. The reality was that if the Red Sox lost the division in the final month of the season, Epstein and Francona wouldn’t be recognized as the men who once put a team in position to be up 141/2 games over the Yankees; they’d be the ones who couldn’t hold a lead when it mattered most.
They both arrived at work each day in September knowing that they’d either be all right with a win or New England’s biggest morons with a loss. They were in a city of baseball extremists, quick-trigger lovers and haters, and in a strange way, the atmosphere was addicting. It was high-stakes baseball, and the love of all the heat and action was one of the things Francona had in common with the biggest star he ever managed, Michael Jordan. Some days Francona would steer his black Cadillac Escalade out of the players’ parking lot at Fenway, and fans would playfully bow all the way down to the ground at the corner of Yawkey and Van Ness. “Fran-coe-nuh! You the man!” Some days they’d whack the vehicle and hold up their fingers. He understood it and expected it.
“You can’t have fans be that interested in a team without getting reactions like that,” he says. “I don’t think you can have that much passion without also having the capacity to go the other way. There’s going to be a backlash. I don’t think you can have one without the other.”
It would be that way for all of September and whatever the Red Sox had to give in October. It was either win or be shouted at by an all-ages New England choir, featuring grandmas and frat boys alike.
But first there would be more heat.
A week after the no-hitter over the Orioles at Fenway, the Red Sox traveled to Baltimore for a weekend series at Camden Yards. The Orioles starting pitcher was a tower of a man, 6-foot-7-inch Daniel Cabrera. He was not a control tower: he walked more batters than anyone in baseball, gave up more earned runs than any
one in the game, and had a reputation for being volatile when things didn’t go his way. They weren’t going his way in the top of the fourth inning, when Crisp, standing on third base, began to dance between the base and home.
Cabrera was distracted by Crisp, and it showed when he made a move to the plate and then stopped, resulting in a balk. Now the big man was irritated, and he would take it out on someone a foot shorter. Dustin Pedroia was at bat, and Cabrera’s pitch didn’t sail over his head as Chamberlain’s to Youkilis had; this was a fastball of frustration, fired behind him at eye level.
Players in both dugouts were on their feet, and soon the bullpens emptied for what amounted to a sketch of a brawl. Cabrera, his black Orioles jersey becoming unbuttoned, motioned for several Red Sox to come get him as he was held back by teammates and coaches. Catcher Ramon Hernandez also could be seen exchanging profanities with Red Sox players. Francona would eventually talk with home plate umpire Mike DiMuro and insist that Cabrera be ejected, since DiMuro had initially given both teams warnings. But the manager also found time to visit with Miguel Tejada, one of the players he got to know when both of them were with the Oakland A’s.
“Miggy,” Francona said, calling Tejada by his nickname. “That was bullshit.”
“I know,” the shortstop said.
“Miggy, we’ve got Josh Beckett pitching on Sunday, and he throws real hard.”
“I know,” he repeated.
After about 10 minutes, the game was back to normal, and the Red Sox won, 4 to 0. Sure enough, on Sunday, with Beckett on his way to his 18th win of the season, an Oriole was hit in the sixth inning. It was Ramon Hernandez.
The division lead remained in a zone, five and a half games, that was acceptable to most New England critics. Anything less, especially with the Yankees scheduled to be in Boston in 5 days, would wake up the choir.
As the Red Sox were beating the Orioles, the New England Patriots were less than 200 miles away, opening their season in New Jersey against the New York Jets. Francona and every other fan who watched parts of the game thought the story was the performance of receiver Randy Moss. He seemed to run effortlessly behind defenders, two, three, four of them at a time, and sprint to the end zone. The Patriots won, 38 to 14, and Moss caught nine balls for 183 yards. But that wasn’t the story a day later.
The Patriots had a camera, which they used to record the defensive signals of Jets coaches. The camera was in an illegal position, and as the story gained momentum during the week, it was clear that the Patriots were going to have to pay heavily for the violation.
Each day brought speculation about what the penalty would be. Each day there was talk of asterisks being attached to what the Patriots had accomplished, that three Super Bowl victories should all be questioned, that they were no different than a juiced-up baseball player or some superhuman track star whose “supplements” allowed him to outrun the horizon.
Scott Pioli heard all the news and commentary, mixed together into a media cocktail, and the force of the opinions, from all directions, made him dizzy. He had shared a lot of laughs with Francona as well as some serious discussions. So as the cocktails kept coming, followed by the commissioner’s decision to fine the Patriots $250,000 and revoke a first-round pick, Pioli picked up the phone, looking for someone who would just listen. He dialed Francona.
As Pioli began to speak from his office, 30 miles south of Fenway, Francona interrupted him.
“Scott, come on up.”
Pioli was unsure. Francona had work issues of his own. A few days earlier, no one in the organization had been able to get in touch with Ramirez. They didn’t doubt the severity of his injury, but they were finding it difficult to communicate with him, and between his two agents, neither of them could seem to track him down. How could Pioli ask for anything right now?
“Scott, come on up.”
The Yankees were back in town, and Francona would soon have some specialty fan cocktails named after him. It didn’t bother him. Pioli was a friend, and when your friends need you, you find a way to help them out. There were certain things in their sports that didn’t translate—baseball was fairly open about its sign-stealing and football wasn’t—but they could both relate to working for high-profile organizations that are expected to be at a championship level year after year.
It was situations like these that amazed Jacque Francona: how did her husband manage to maintain so many relationships and still do his job so well? One day he is making Pioli laugh when Pioli hadn’t laughed much in the middle of what was being called Spygate. One day he is talking to one of his former coaches in Boston and Birmingham, Mike Barnett, who is having a disagreement with another friend, Buddy Bell, in Kansas City. He understands that Buddy probably knows that he’s talking to Barnett, so he sends Buddy a text: “I’m just listening!” He is trying to find things for Drew Szabo, his high school golf coach. A former teammate from Double-A needs tickets—tough tickets—but Francona still feels it’s his obligation to help.
On the Friday afternoon that Pioli visited him at Fenway, September 14, Francona had to consider how he was going to set up the bullpen. Earlier in the day, Jonathan Papelbon had a migraine so severe that it landed him in the hospital. The closer was treated,
told the manager that he was okay to pitch, and asked if he could keep the hospital thing under wraps. Papelbon didn’t look like himself, but he said he was ready.
This would be the last Red Sox–Yankees series of the season, and since Boston’s lead was five and a half games, the only realistic chance New York had of winning the division was by duplicating the sweep from 2 weeks earlier. But then, a Red Sox sweep of the series, just as they had done in April, would crush any East hopes for the Yankees.
The game began perfectly for the Red Sox. You never get ahead of yourself in baseball, and you slap yourself for the thought against the Yankees, but the game was looking like a win in the top of the eighth inning. It was 7 to 2 Boston, and Francona had the managing essentials at that point: a full deck. In managing, you have those relief cards for specific matchups, matchups that you have played out in your head the night before. He had Okajima to start the eighth, after facing just one batter in the seventh. He had the controversial Gagne available if he needed him. And he had Papelbon, fresh from the hospital, yes, but Papelbon knew himself; if he wanted the ball, it meant he was capable of doing something with it.
What a game. Baseball can turn on you so quickly, so cruelly, that as a manager you learn to take nothing for granted. Nothing. When you manage a baseball team, you pull into a gas station thinking about what you’ll do if all 14 pumps are out of petrol. On this night, in this inning, Okajima lost it quickly. In just 13 pitches, he had given up two home runs, a walk, and a double.
Here’s the rub about card-playing. A card on the table has to do something; it has to produce some type of action, even if it advances your plan ever so slightly. It turned out that Francona didn’t have a full deck after all. Okajima couldn’t give him an out, so now the
man in the other dugout, dark circles under his eyes, a man who actually played baseball-card games growing up in Brooklyn, was sitting there with the advantage. He knew Francona could do what the sabermetricians—baseball’s statistical analysts—wanted, and go to his closer in the toughest spot of the game. Which was that moment. Francona wasn’t opposed to that, and when he mentioned it to Epstein when they were just talking the game, the general manager said he loved it when he went to Papelbon in the eighth.