From Beer to Beards: Boston Baseball's 2011 to 2013 Roller Coaster Ride

By Carl H. Johnson

Follow the Boston Red Sox on the roller coaster ride that began with the team at or near the top of their division for most of the 2011 season before crashing and burning in September, went through the debacle that was the 2012 season, and ended with an unlikely mix of a few veteran and young players and some older retreads donning beards and claiming the World Series Championship in 2013 under new Manager John Farrell.
The book takes you, game by game, through all three seasons of this unbelievable odyssey, providing information and insight regarding the events surrounding the team, players, and management as they journeyed from worst to first.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Carl H. Johnson
• Release date: Oct 28, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311569080

Carl H. Johnson

Carl H. Johnson writes a weekly baseball column, Baseball World, for the Biddeford, Maine, Journal Tribune. He also writes on baseball for the Insider Sports Network and produces a blog about Major League Baseball at baseballworldbjt.com.He has lectured and appeared on many radio and televisions programs about baseball and its history. His popular book, 'From Beer To Beards, Boston Baseball's 2011-2013 Roller Coaster Ride' follows the Red Sox from Worst to First. His new book ' Wait 'Til Next Year, 2016, From Worst To First Part II' which follows the evolution of the young, talented 2015 Red Sox into a 2016 contender is available on Amazon.He is a lifelong student of the game and resides in southern Maine with his wife.

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PREFACE

The 2011 Red Sox were in first place in the American League East on August 31 with a record of 83 wins and 52 losses and seemed to have a lock on at least a playoff spot and possibly a first place finish. In the next 27 games, they lost 20 and won just seven, falling out of first place and into third place and not even making the playoffs.

The 2012 Red Sox finished in last place in the Eastern Division of the American League with a record of 69 wins and 93 losses, 26 games behind the Division winning New York Yankees. The Sox may have folded in 2011 but they had as many wins on August 5, 2011 as the 2012 Sox had in their entire season.

The 2013 Boston Red Sox won the American League pennant and the World Series and became Champions of the Baseball World by defeating the St. Louis Cardinals four games to two in the World Series. The Red Sox finished the regular, 162 game, season with a record of 97 wins and 65 losses, tied for the best record in baseball with the Cardinals, winning 28 more games than they had the previous year.

Baseball is a strange game. Some of the greatest teams ever have had terrible seasons and some very weak teams have risen up to surprise everyone and win a pennant or a World Series. The season of 162 games is so long that anything can happen. Injuries can decimate a powerful team and make them an also ran and a team that is not expected to be competitive can have a winning season.

Nothing stranger has ever happened in Major League Baseball than what happened with the Boston Red Sox from 2011 through 2013. From the beginning of the 2011 season until September 1 and in the entire 2013 season, they won 180 games while losing just 117, a remarkable winning percentage of .606. In the period between September 1, 2011 and the end of the 2012 season, they won 76 and lost 113, a .402 percentage.

During this three year period, the Red Sox had three different managers, no super star caliber players were added or left the team, ( with the exception of the few players traded to the Los Angeles Dodgers in 2012 in what was called a Blockbuster Trade ) and no Sox player had a Most Valuable Player or Cy Young Award winning season.

What happened to turn one of the best teams in baseball into one of the worst and back to the best in the course of three seasons? How can a great team fall apart so quickly, fail miserably for a year and a month and rise from the ashes to become World’s Champions a year later?

In a game by game and day by day review, I have chronicled in this book what went on on and off the field during this period. As bad as it got at its worst and as good as it was at its best, it was always interesting and entertaining.

As a fan of baseball and as a baseball newspaper columnist, I enjoyed watching it happen and I have enjoyed writing about it. In this book, I have included some of the columns I wrote for the Biddeford, ME Journal Tribune, the Sanford, ME News and the Westerly, RI Sun during this period to illustrate my perspective and views of the events and hopefully to make the reading more entertaining for the reader.

This book is about baseball, in general, and the Boston Red Sox transition from heroes to bums and back to heroes in a little over two major league seasons, in particular. It is written as seen through the eyes of a baseball fan, not a baseball expert.

Before you begin this book, we need to get some facts straight. For the past few years, I have been writing articles and columns for newspapers and newsletters, as a hobby. I have produced a weekly column entitled Baseball World about Major League baseball for the Biddeford, ME Journal Tribune for the past two years. In that column, I analyze major league baseball teams, editorialize on their activities, sometimes try to predict the outcomes of pennant races and write as if I were an insider with access to the players, teams and fields.

With that in mind, I feel obligated to make you aware of some information about myself and my background. First, when I was fifteen years old, as a member, and not a very productive one, of a championship Junior Baseball League Team, I was on the field in the old Polo Grounds in New York City to see the Giants host the St. Louis Cardinals as a guest of our team’s sponsor. My most vivid memory of that day was seeing Stan ‘The Man’ Musial, perhaps the greatest hitter of all time, in his working clothes in his workplace.

That being said, I feel the further obligation to tell you that that visit, as awesome as it was through my fifteen year old eyes, was the only time in my life I ever set foot on a major league baseball field. Any other times that I was in a major league ballpark, and there have been literally hundreds, I bought a ticket and sat in the stands like everyone else.

Aside from the time when a friend of mine who was friendly with some Red Sox players arranged for us to visit the Sox clubhouse before a game and my youngest son and daughter, ages 11 and 5, got to see Bob Stanley and company getting ready to play and half dressed, for 30 seconds, I have met very few major league ballplayers in person.

On one of those occasions, at a spring training game in Arizona, a few years ago, my wife and I spoke with the old Yankee Star Goose Gossage who was signing autographs. That conversation ended rather abruptly when my wife turned to Goose, who by the way has a long white beard now, and pointed out to him, in her usual blunt fashion, that he had gotten old, causing Mudcat Grant, who was sitting next to a now irate Goose, to almost fall off his chair. That was the end of that brief contact with a Hall of Famer.

If you have not gotten the message from this preface , let me put it to you as plainly as I can. I am a baseball fan, not an EXPERT. I expect that most of you reading this book, that is if anybody bought it and is taking the time to read it, fall into that category, too.

I do, like many of you, consider myself a student of the game. I have probably worked harder at being a student of the game than most of you. My studies, however, have been limited to playing and coaching at the amateur level, sitting in the stands or watching games on television or listening on the radio, reading newspapers and books about baseball and exploring the game’s history and news on the internet.

I guess I should also mention the fact that I grew up in Connecticut and have been a Yankee fan since I was old enough to be a fan. In my formative years, I spent many days watching baseball in Yankee Stadium from 1945 on and no one will ever convince me that Joe DiMaggio was anything but the greatest baseball player ever to play the game.

Please keep those caveats in mind as you read the book. Also keep in mind that baseball is far from an exact science and you don’t have to be privy to all the thought and interaction that goes into decisions made by management and players to determine that the decision on the field was a good one or one that anyone could have made using a dart board. Baseball is a human game being played by human athletes, while being judged by human umpires in plays that take split seconds. Great plays and human error have much to do with the outcome of many baseball games. It doesn’t always follow that it ends the ‘way it was supposed to be played.’

The following column appeared in the September 21, 2012

edition of the Westerly, RI Sun.

Days of The Superchief and an All Time Baseball Classic

We are only two weeks from the end of the baseball season and we still do not have a clear winner in any of the American League Divisions. At this point about the only thing we know for sure is that the Red Sox will not be in the playoffs.

The Texas Rangers appear to be going to win the Western Division but, as of Thursday, they were only 3 games ahead of the Oakland Athletics. In the Central Division, thanks to the unexplainable inability of the Detroit Tigers to win big games, the Chicago White Sox are one game up. In the Eastern Division, the Yankees, Orioles and Rays have been beating up on each other and who knows how it will end.

The American League Wild Card races could have any 2 of 6 teams sliding into the playoffs by that route. No matter what happens, we baseball fans will be on the edges of our seats for the next two weeks. This is typical of baseball seasons historically and particularly the last two.

In 1951, in September, when I was 13 years old, I had an end of the season experience which, even if I wasn’t already addicted to baseball, would have hooked me for life. I grew up in Connecticut, the eldest child in a Yankee household. My father was a commercial fisherman who operated his own dragger out of Stonington, CT.

My father, like a lot of Stonington fishermen, was not doing well fishing off New England at that time and a lot of them were thinking of relocating to Florida or Texas where the shrimp fishing industry was big. My father made arrangements to go out on a shrimp boat from Jacksonville, Florida to evaluate the potential of the business.

For a reason not clear to me today, he decided to take me with him on his trip to Florida, no short drive in 1951. Having sold fish to the Fulton Fish Market in New York for years, my father was able to get us tickets from them for a double header between the Yankees and Red Sox on September 28 on our way to Florida.

Going into that doubleheader, the Yankees needed 2 more wins to clinch the American League pennant over the fading Cleveland Indians. In the first game of the doubleheader, Allie Reynolds, the Creek Indian, nicknamed Super Chief, was pitching against the Sox. The Yankees were ahead 8-0 and Reynolds had not allowed a hit, or anything close to a hit, when Ted Williams came to bat in the top of the ninth with 2 outs. If you had to pick the last person in baseball you wanted to pitch to with a no hitter on the line it would be Ted Williams.

Reynolds got Williams to hit a little pop fly foul and, to the dismay of the Yankee crowd, Yankee catcher, Yogi Berra, dropped the ball. I think that everyone in that stadium was sure that you could never get Williams out twice in that situation but that is just what Reynolds did, forcing him to hit another pop foul which Yogi caught this time to end the no hitter and clinch a tie for the pennant for the Yankees. The Yankees went on to win the second game and were American League Champs again.

For a 13 year old, who grew up worshiping the Yankees and thought, and still thinks, that Joe DiMaggio was the greatest ballplayer of all time, this game was a thrill to never forget. However, there was more to come on this trip.

We left New York and drove to Florida where, a few days later, my father left on a two day trip on a shrimp boat. We had a room in a motel in Jacksonville and my father made arrangements with the staff to keep an eye on me and for me to be able to get my meals at the motel restaurant while he was gone. He also left me a supply of quarters because the motel had television but you had to feed it quarters to make it work.

You older fans will remember that 1951 was the year the New York Giants came from 13 1/2 games back in mid-August to catch the Brooklyn Dodgers and cause a 3 game playoff for the National League pennant. The Giants won the first game 3-1 and the Dodgers won the second 10-0 to force a third and deciding game. The third game of that series was the first sporting event ever televised coast to coast and I had a television set and quarters with which to operate it.

The Giants went into the last of the ninth trailing the Dodgers 4-1. Alvin Dark singled, Don Mueller singled him to third and Whitey Lockman then doubled in Dark leaving runners on second and third with Bobby Thompson at the plate and Ralph Branca on the mound for Brooklyn and the score 4-2. Branca threw a fastball and Bobby Thompson hit it out of the park to win the playoffs and put the Giants in the World Series against the Yankees. Thompson’s hit, dubbed the shot heard round the world, has been called the greatest moment in sports history.

For a 13 year old boy, putting quarters in the slot and watching it on television, alone in a motel room a thousand miles from home, after having seen a no hitter and the Yankees clinch a pennant in Yankee Stadium a few days earlier, these events guaranteed I would be hooked on baseball for life.

The Yankees went on to beat the Giants in the World Series 4 games to 2.

I don’t know what will happen the last few days of this season and I am sure it will be exciting but, no matter how close it gets, no finish will ever top the one I witnessed in 1951.

PART I

The End of the Francona Era

CHAPTER 1

Historical Background

The Boston Red Sox have a long and storied history in Major League Baseball. With the New York Yankees, they have built and maintained the most intense rivalry in professional sports in the United States. Ironically, though these two teams have battled each other tooth and nail, often to the last days of a season before the race was settled, their overall success rates over the years are dramatically different.

While the Yankees have won 40 American League pennants and 27 World Series, the most of any team in any of the four major professional sports, the Red Sox have won only 12 pennants and eight World Series.

In 1903, the Red Sox, then known as the Boston Americans, won the first World Series ever played, beating the Pittsburgh Pirates five games to three. The Sox then went eight years without winning a pennant and then, in the next seven years, from 1912 through 1918, won four pennants and four World Series championships. In 1912, they beat the New York Giants four games to three, and, in 1915, the Philadelphia Phillies four game to one. They repeated as Champs in 1916, beating the Brooklyn Robins, who later became the Brooklyn Dodgers, four games to one and, in 1918, defeated the Chicago Cubs, four games to two.

The Sox would not win another World Series until 2004, some 86 years later and then, amazingly, won again in 2007 and 2013 to become the first team to win three championships in the new millennium. In that 86 years, between 1918 and 2004, the Sox did win four pennants, but failed to win the World Series all four times. They lost to the St. Louis Cardinals in 1946, to the Cardinals again in 1967, to the Cincinnati Reds in 1975 and to the New York Mets in 1986. In all four losses the Sox took the winner to a seventh game, losing each series four games to three.

The Red Sox as a franchise have obviously experienced some highs and lows over the years. As I noted above the Sox have appeared in 12 World Series, winning eight and losing four, a winning percentage of .667. Strangely, they won their first five appearances, lost their next four and have won their next three. A mathematician might infer that they would lose their next two appearances if the mathematical progression continues.

In the years from 1918 until 2004, the Red Sox built a reputation for folding in the heat of a pennant race and many a year started with the Sox playing like champions but folding down the stretch. ‘Wait until next year’ became the joke in Boston during the months of August of September during those lean years.

Of course the myth of the Curse of the Babe, which grew out of the Sox selling pitcher Babe Ruth to the hated Yankees before, as a Yankee, he became the Sultan of Swat and established season and career home run records that lasted for decades, was often blamed for the Red Sox misfortune.

Through it all, the rivalry with the Yankees continued and remains the biggest rivalry in all of American sport. It makes no difference where the teams are in the standings, when the Yankees and Red Sox get together, whether in historic old Fenway or the old or new Yankee Stadium, the atmosphere is like a playoff game, even if one of the rivals is in first place and the other far behind.

I am sure that there are Red Sox fans and Yankee fans that feel that winning the season series between the two is as important as winning the pennant or World Series. The fact that, while the Red Sox have been winning three World Series since 2000 and the Yankees have won just one during that same period, is not lost on Red Sox fans, who I am sure envision the Sox winning forty pennants in this century.

The series wins in 2004 and 2007, sweeping the Cardinals and then the Rockies in four games, after going 86 years without a series win, was euphoria for Red Sox fans.

After winning that second championship in 2007, the Sox finished second in 2008 and got into the playoffs as the Wild Card Team with a 95-67 record. Perhaps as importantly, the hated Yankees finished third and didn’t make the playoffs. The Sox beat the Los Angeles Angels three games to one in the American League Division Series but then lost to the Tampa Bay Rays in the League Championship Series four games to three.

In 2009, with the same 95-67 record, they again finished in second place and got into the playoffs as the Wild Card, this time finishing behind the pennant winning Yankees. They were swept in three games in the American League Division Series by the Los Angeles Angels.

In 2010, they slipped to third place finishing with a very respectable 89-73 record but did not make the playoffs.

In the four years between 2007 and 2010, the Sox had one pennant and World Series win, two second place finishes and playoff appearances and a third place finish. The Red Sox and their fans went into the 2011 season with high hopes.

The three years, from 2011 through 2013, turned out to be a roller coaster ride of epic proportions, culminating in the third World Championship in ten years in 2013 for a team that had only won five in the previous 110 years and none in the 86 years between 1918 and 2004. The events of those three years will have Boston fans shaking their heads in disbelief for years to come.

In this book, I have tried to chronicle those three years and events from a fan’s perspective. To my way of thinking, you could not produce a scenario that was more exciting, frustrating or exhilarating for the fans of Red Sox Nation. The Sox in that period went from what looked like a runaway pennant winner, to one of the worst teams in baseball, to Worlds Champions, in what seemed like the blink of an eye.

After the events of those three years, Red Sox fans had to be ecstatic with their championship but also had to be wondering, ‘ Where do we go from here?’

CHAPTER 2

Spring Training—May 12, 2011

Despite the fact that their Sox had finished in third place in 2010 with the worst won loss record in their seven years with Terry Francona as Manager, Red Sox fans were optimistic as 2011 approached. After all, they had won two World Series since 2004 with Theo Epstein as General Manager and Francona as Manager. In Terry’s seven years as Manager, they had won 654 and lost only 480 for an impressive .576 win loss percentage. Not only had they won two World Series under the current regime, they had made the Playoffs in five of the seven years, including winning the American League East, the toughest division in baseball, three times.

On March 3, ground was broken on the new Red Sox Spring Training facility in Florida. The park was to be a replica of Fenway complete with a Green Monster and include six practice fields. At the ground breaking ceremony, General Manager Theo Epstein made remarks about the facility and said, in part, ‘ … if we had that this year, it would have given Carl Crawford a chance to play a bunch of games with the Monster behind him and work on a few things. ‘ Given the experience Crawford ended up having, after coming to the Red Sox from the Tampa Bay Rays, in what was to be his relatively short tenure with the Red Sox, these words were quite prophetic.

The only players in the opening day lineup in 2011 back from the 2007 championship team opening day lineup were Kevin Youkilis, who had moved from first base to third base, Dustin Pedroia at second and David Ortiz in the designated hitter slot. Jacoby Ellsbury, who came up during the 2007 season and played sparingly that year, was in center field in 2011. He had missed most of 2010 with an injury after hitting .301 with 70 stolen bases in 2009.

Youkilis was being moved to third to make room for the newly acquired Adrian Gonzalez at first. Pedroia, recovered from surgery on his foot, was expected to be at one hundred percent by the start of the season.

Mike Cameron was in right field on opening day but J. D. Drew, who hit .279 in 137 games in 2009 was expected to get most of the playing time in right field.

Jarrod Saltalamacchia, picked up in a trade from the Texas Rangers, was behind the plate. He was expected to share the catching duties with veteran Team Captain Jason Varitek.

New faces in the opening day lineup included Carl Crawford, signed as a Free Agent for $142. million through 2017. Crawford, an outfielder, would start in left field and had been with the Tampa Bay Rays where he had hit .307 with 19 homers and 90 RBI’s to go with his 47 stolen bases in 2010. With Crawford’s base stealing ability, to go with Ellsbury’s, the Sox were expected to have a potent base running attack.

Adrian Gonzalez, a power hitting first baseman, was acquired in a trade with the San Diego Padres, and signed a contract extension for seven years shortly after the season started for a total of $154. million. He had hit .298 with the Padres with 31 homers and 101 RBI’s in 2010. Gonzalez had undergone surgery to repair damage to his right shoulder over the winter but looked to be fully recovered from that. Larry Lucchino, President and CEO of the Red Sox, on February 22, said that they expected that Gonzalez would be in a Red Sox uniform for a long time.

Marco Scutaro. another Free Agent, who had signed a two year contract at $5.5 million per year prior to the 2010 season and had hit .275 with 11 homers and 65 RBI’s in 2010 was back at shortstop for year two of his contract.

John Lester, 19-9 in 2010, Clay Buchholz, 17-7, John Lackey, 17-11, Josh Beckett, 6-6, and Tim Wakefield, nearing the end of his career, were expected to be a fairly solid starting rotation while Jonathan Papelbon, who saved 37 in 45 tries in 2010, would be the Closer. Andrew Bard, who had thrown 75 innings in 73 games out of the bull pen with an ERA of 1.93 in 2010, mostly in a setup role, would return as set up man for Papelbon.

The bullpen, which had seen the addition of Dennys Reyes, signed as a Free Agent from the St. Louis Cardinals and Bobby Jenks from the White Sox, where he averaged 55 appearances a year for the past six years, was expected to be adequate. Andrew Miller had also been impressive in the spring. Alfredo Aceves, a workhorse middle reliever from the Yankees, who missed most of 2010 with a back strain, but had pitched 84 innings in 43 games with a 10-1 record and a 3.54 ERA in 2009 had been in the running for a bull pen spot but was optioned to the minors, temporarily, as were Hideki Okajima and Scott Atchison who had pitched well in for the Sox in 2010.

Going into Spring Training, great things were expected of the team. On January 6, Evan Drellich of MLB.com said ‘ In one December week, Boston managed to pull in two of the game’s