Francona: The Red Sox Years

By Terry Francona and Dan Shaughnessy

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER. “Eloquent and dazzling,” the story of the legendary baseball manager’s tenure with the Boston Red Sox (Philadelphia Daily News).

When Terry Francona took over as manager of the Boston Red Sox in 2004, the storied franchise hadn’t won a World Series championship in eighty-six years. Led by Francona, the team won two over the course of four years. During the full eight years of Francona’s tenure, the Red Sox were transformed from “cursed” into one of the most successful and profitable teams in baseball history—only to fall back to last place as soon as Francona was gone.

Francona: The Red SoxYears lets readers in on the inner workings of the Red Sox clubhouse like no book has ever done before. From the highs of the World Series to the lows of the final months of the 2011 season—the most epic collapse of a team in baseball history—this book features the never-before-told stories about Sox fans’ favorite players, moments, wins, and losses.

“A scorched-earth memoir . . . [that] touches fleetingly on steroid use, sabermetrics, and Michael Jordan’s stint in the minor leagues . . . but saves its heaviest artillery for the owners . . . [and] Theo Epstein backs him up.” —The New York Times Book Review

“It’s not often that baseball aficionados and gossip gluttons can plunk down on a shared portion of outfield grass with the same book for an afternoon of readerly delight, but Francona can bridge those kinds of differences.” —The Boston Globe

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jan 22, 2013
• ISBN: 9780547928265

Book preview

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Table of Contents

Title Page

Table of Contents

Lineup Card

Copyright

Dedication

Can’t you guys do one thing right?

I’m Mr. Francona’s son and he wanted me to come over and say hello

They’re not going to fire a guy over one mistake

He kind of blew us away. . . . Is the guy too nice?

We’d better win

This is not acceptable

Just crazy enough to think we can do this

•  2005  • Everywhere we went, people were bowing and shit

Photos

•  2006  • We will take care of your son

•  2007  • They were all into getting the trophy and they didn’t even know I was there

•  2008  • This will not help us win

•  2009  • This is like a reality TV show

•  2010  • We need to start winning in more exciting fashion

•  2011  • I feel like I let you down

Somebody went out of their way to hurt me

•  2012  • I guess we should have won a third World Series

Acknowledgments

Index

About the Authors

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A manager at work: Terry Francona’s lineup card for a May 31, 2008, game against the Orioles. Manny Ramirez hit his five hundredth career home run in this game. At the time, the Red Sox were defending World Series champions.

National Baseball Hall of Fame, Cooperstown, NY

Copyright © 2013 by Terry Francona and Dan Shaughnessy

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

www.hmhbooks.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 978-0-547-92817-3

eISBN 978-0-547-92826-5

v4.1013

Terry Francona

To my dad, Tito Francona, who managed to always make me feel like he was nearby, even when he was thousands of miles away.

Dan Shaughnessy

To my dad, the late William J. Shaughnessy, who saved enough S&H Green Stamps to get me my first mitt, a Tito Francona glove, in 1962.

CHAPTER 1

Can’t you guys do one thing right?

THEY WERE EXHAUSTED. Empty. Six weeks of spring training had given way to six months of regular season and another three weeks of thrill-to-the-marrow playoff excitement and pressure. It was autumn 2004, and the late, late nights had blended into fuzzy mornings with folks asking, Did that really just happen? Those four wins against the Yankees—the comeback trick that nobody’d turned in more than a century of postseason baseball—were played on four consecutive days, an aggregate 18 hours and 12 minutes over 44 intense innings. That’s an average of more than four and a half hours per game. Games 4 and 5 at Fenway were actually won on the same calendar day (October 18) because Game 4 stretched past midnight and Game 5 started fewer than 16 hours later. It was something like a morning-night doubleheader.

The World Series against the St. Louis Cardinals was a blur. It was a little bit anticlimactic, if you can say such a thing about the first World Series title in 86 years for a city starving for a baseball championship. At the end, the Red Sox were an army of steamrollers. The World Series games were not nearly as exciting as those in the epic playoff against the Yankees.

Despite all the bad things that happened to the franchise after Babe Ruth was sold in 1920, there was a sense of inevitability about the Red Sox march to the finish line after they beat the Yankees in the 2004 American League Championship Series. Major League Baseball’s 100th World Series was tension-free, nothing like those Fall Classics of 1946, ’67, ’75, or ’86, all of which ended with the Sox losing a seventh game.

The carpet in the visitors’ clubhouse at Busch Stadium was still champagne-soggy when the tired, triumphant 2004 Red Sox gathered in their own ancient locker room at Fenway for the parade. The ’04 Red Sox were enjoying their first days of folk-hero status in New England. All the stuff that everyone had been saying turned out to be true. These guys would never have to buy another beer in Boston. Kevin Millar was going to be able to live off the moment for the rest of his life. Dave Roberts was going to get asked about that stolen base every day until he was 90 years old. David Ortiz was the Dominican Yaz, Manny Ramirez was World Series MVP, and free spirit Orlando Cabrera would be forever worshiped as the guy who replaced the legendary Nomar Garciaparra. Lanky goofball Derek Lowe was done pitching for the Red Sox, but he was also destined to be a trivia answer as the man who got the win in the clinching game of every round of the playoffs.

Boston mayor Tom Menino and the Red Sox brass plotted the parade meticulously, embracing the concept of a rolling rally, which would maximize fans’ exposure to the Hub’s new heroes. Red Sox players, staff, and their families would ride in Duckboats up Boylston Street, then double back down the Charles River. Fans were expected to line the route. Sox CEO Larry Lucchino grew impatient, wanting the day to unfold without a hitch.

But then no one could find the sweatshirts.

And that’s where our story starts.

The sweatshirts had WORLD CHAMPION RED SOX stenciled on the front. They were supposed to be worn by all the players, coaches, members of the front office, and the manager. They’d keep everybody warm and bring a measure of uniformity to this motley band of gypsy champions.

The 2004 Red Sox were not a buttoned-down bunch. They were players who passed paper cups around the clubhouse and took a nip of Jack Daniels before cold October night games in New York. Johnny Damon famously labeled his own team Idiots, and Sox fans embraced them for their absence of conformity. They had beards, untucked jerseys, and hair . . . down to here, down to there. Damon looked like a lead guitarist from the Woodstock festival. Bronson Arroyo brought cornrows to the mound. Pedro Martinez could barely get his cap over the crop of black roughage on top of his head. Manny Ramirez looked like he was playing baseball wearing pajamas. Theo Epstein, the general manager, was a 30-year-old rock star who wore jeans to the office most days. When the unkempt Sox fell behind the Yankees three games to zero, reporters questioned their professionalism.

The sweatshirts would have helped their band-of-misfits image the day of the parade. At long last the Sox would look like a team.

But the sweatshirts were nowhere to be found as the players and their families got ready to man the Duckboats. Lucchino, the trigger-tempered smartest man in the room, was not happy.

Standing in the doorway of his office, looking out at the clubhouse filled with happy (some hungover) ballplayers, wives, and excited little kids, first-year Sox manager Terry Francona saw Lucchino engaged in an animated discussion with one of his favorite veteran clubhouse operatives. Francona went over to find out what was happening. As manager of this bombastic ball club, he was accustomed to extinguishing fires.

What’s going on, guys? he asked Lucchino and the clubbie.

The longtime, underpaid Sox employee explained that the sweatshirts had gone missing. It didn’t seem like a big deal to Francona or anybody else, but Lucchino was fuming. Francona overheard Lucchino muttering, Can’t you guys do one thing right?

Goddamn, Larry, we just won the fucking World Series, Francona thought to himself. That should be good enough. Who cares what we wear? We could go down the street naked and they’d still clap for us. It doesn’t matter. This is the greatest day of our lives.

If you go back and look at the pictures of that day, you’ll notice that Francona is not wearing a Red Sox ball cap. On the day that Boston’s Olde Towne Team celebrated its first World Series championship in more than eight decades, the manager of the local nine wore the cap of his college baseball team, the University of Arizona.

It was my silent protest, said Francona.

Epstein said with a chuckle, I think we lost those sweatshirts on purpose. They wanted these official, marketing, licensed sweatshirts to be worn. They were going to sell them. They were hideous. They looked like ’80s Zubaz-type sweatshirts. They were this awful, faded blue. No one wanted to wear them, so I think we had the clubbies lose them.

Francona thought of Lucchino as something of a bully, but he knew the CEO was running on fumes—like everyone else—and was just blowing off steam. Still, the first-year manager wanted to make a point. Being a team wasn’t about wearing the uniform hoodies, cropping your hair in standard fashion, or tucking in your shirttails. It wasn’t about newly embossed sweatshirts that were already on sale in the team souvenir store. The ’04 Sox were a wacky rainbow of diverse personalities. But they were a team. They had their differences, but they also had each other’s backs. Francona knew he could count on guys like Kevin Millar, Gabe Kapler, Ellis Burks, Jason Varitek, and David Ortiz to keep things in line. The ragtag bunch cared about one another. It was the mark of every good team. Baseball is the most selfish of our team sports. It’s a sequence of one-on-one battles. You don’t need teammates to pass you the ball or protect you in the pocket. If you try to help yourself, you’re usually helping the team. But there’s a lot of human interaction and tolerance in a big league clubhouse, and the winners generally handle matters better than the losers. The special ball clubs are the ones that are able to get past the small stuff and push each other to succeed. The ’04 Red Sox were one of those teams. Francona’s managing style tapped into the genius of the Idiots.

He was the proverbial players’ manager. He didn’t bark orders, didn’t have a lot of rules, and never ever buried his players in public. He took all the bullets. He swallowed hard when he saw things that violated his sense of baseball etiquette or decorum. He always looked at the big picture. If mercurial Manny stopped running out his ground balls or took himself out of the lineup with mysterious hamstring injuries, Francona would leave it up to Manny’s teammates to decide the best course of action.

I always had my fingers crossed with Manny, said the manager. Sometimes, when it really got bad, I’d meet with Damon and ’Tek and David or Doug Mirabelli. All the veterans. I’d say, ‘I see what you guys are seeing. What do you want me to do? I can bench him or suspend him, and Theo will back me up. I want to know what you guys think is the best thing for us.’ And every time they’d come to the same conclusion. I think it was hardest for ’Tek, because he was so respectful of the game. But he did it. They’d always wind up telling me, ‘No, we’ll be a team. We’ll take his numbers.’ So that’s what we wound up doing.

And Manny wound up being Most Valuable Player of the 2004 World Series. Of course.

Francona was never a World Series MVP or American League Manager of the Year. In the autumn of 2004, he went mano a mano with Mike Scioscia, Joe Torre, then Tony La Russa, and he came out on top in each series, but he stayed in the background. There wasn’t a lot of credit for the manager of the Red Sox, nor was there much space for him on the victory platform. There were no Gatorade showers or magazine covers. The best he could do was an endorsement for Metamucil—which made him the ultimate regular guy. He was just the man who put his players in position to succeed and let their skills take over. He was the master of preparation and people management. When others told him that he probably would have made a good corporation manager, he’d deflect the praise and refer to himself as a dumb-ass.

But deep down, he knew he could handle all of it. He knew that he was always prepared. Nobody could take away the baseball lessons he’d learned in five decades around big league clubhouses. It was his style to present himself as less than brilliant, but that was part of the ruse. Everybody who was paying attention could see that other managers never got the better of him. The Red Sox had the right guy in the dugout.

Francona managed the Sox for seven more seasons after 2004, never changing his style. He’d get to the ballpark absurdly early, pore over voluminous reports from Epstein’s baseball operations department, work out in the clubhouse Swim-Ex, talk strategy with his coaches, and have all of his work done by the time the ballplayers started showing up for duty. If the owners wanted to show the clubhouse off to their friends, he’d grudgingly submit to the meet-and-greet. He’d be grateful if the suits didn’t bring anyone into his office when he was half-naked. He’d patiently submit to questions from the Boston media three hours before every game, and again after every game. A lot of time was spent diffusing combustible situations. Everything the Sox did mattered. Nothing was too trivial to draw the scrutiny of talk shows and newspapers.

I got to where I hated the traffic lights when I was driving to the ballpark, said the Sox manager. The guy in the car next to me always had something to say and didn’t feel like he had to hold back. When we weren’t going good, those red lights seemed to last forever.

It isn’t like this anywhere else—not even in Philadelphia, where Francona managed for four sub-.500 seasons. Boston is a smaller town, and the Red Sox are a religious experience for local fans. Columnist Mike Barnicle summed it up when he wrote, Baseball is not life or death, but the Red Sox are. This is why years spent managing the Red Sox are like dog years. They age you disproportionately. Those before-and-after photos of US presidents looking young and vigorous on Inauguration Day, then tired and gray four years later? It was the same with the men who worked in the small corner office of the Red Sox clubhouse.

During his eight seasons in Boston, Francona occasionally allowed himself to wonder what it would be like elsewhere. He’d eavesdrop on one of Joe Maddon’s sessions with the South Florida media and gasp at the easy tone of the questions. He’d see Toronto Blue Jays players almost come to blows on the mound in midgame and be amazed when the incident was buried in the local papers. He knew it would have been front-page stuff in Boston.

But those moments of longing for hardball tranquillity always passed. Managing in Boston was better, even if it was an ass ache much of the time.

What he loved most was the baseball. The games. During those three-plus hours when the team was on the field and he was in the dugout, Francona could escape the madness and immerse himself in the game he loved.

His favorite time of every day was the half-hour he’d spend in the dugout before the first pitch at Fenway. That was when the media was gone and all the preparation was over. It was just the manager, his coaches, and the band of hungry players who’d come out early to banter in the quiet time before the television camera’s red light went on and quick decisions had to be made. It was a time when a manager could talk to players apart from the heat of the moment. It was a time to set up shop and get ready for the game. Francona would align three water bottles under the upper dugout bench perch—a spot where he could best watch and manage the game. He’d tape his matchup sheet to the pegboard on the dugout wall and hide his stash of Lancaster chew behind wads of bubblegum that had been unwrapped by clubhouse worker Steve Murphy. He’d sign a few autographs for folks in the rows directly behind the Sox dugout. That always ended the same way. Frenetic fans tossed baseballs toward him, and sooner or later someone would hit him in the chest while he was signing a ball. That would be the end of the signing session. The offending fan—the one who ruined it for everyone—invariably was an adult.

None of his players or coaches was required to be in the dugout in the golden half-hour before the first pitch, but Francona always knew he had a good team when there were a lot of ballplayers hanging around in those quiet minutes of pregame.

I loved that time, he said. That’s when they haven’t made an out, they haven’t made an error yet. You can get a guy in the dugout 20 minutes before the game starts, and they are pretty loose. Once the game starts, you can’t have that conversation anymore. It’s a great time to talk to people, and I loved it.

The white noise of Boston only got louder in the years after the championships of ’04 and ’07, and ultimately the players stopped taking care of each other and abused their freedom. The 2011 season unfolded like many of the earlier Francona years as the Sox played 39 games over .500 for four months and came into September with the best record in baseball. But it was not like the other years. Veteran players David Ortiz, Tim Wakefield, and Jonathan Papelbon—warriors of championships past—worried about their next contract and got caught up in ancillary issues. An injured Kevin Youkilis had trouble dealing with his inability to contribute. Carl Crawford, an underachiever all year after signing a whopping, seven-year, $142 million contract, never performed like the player who tortured Boston when he played for Tampa Bay. Worst of all, pitchers Josh Beckett, John Lackey, and Jon Lester seemed to lose their focus, sometimes drinking beer and eating chicken in the clubhouse instead of staying in the dugout to encourage teammates. Players who at one time were mature enough to police themselves suddenly were in need of a managerial taskmaster. Francona opted not to change the style that had produced an average of 93 wins per season in his eight years in the Boston dugout.

I think the chicken-and-beer stuff turned out to be more of a metaphor for our team, said Francona. I can guarantee that these guys drank less beer than a lot of other teams. I was most disturbed by the idea that stuff wasn’t staying in the clubhouse. They weren’t protecting each other. If somebody was drinking, they weren’t drinking a lot. I’m not saying it’s right, but I was more disturbed by our lack of unity. That group, they had gained my trust. Well, they probably took advantage of it in the end. They needed a new voice.

While the Sox were unraveling like a ball of yarn bouncing down stairs, Francona was dealing with difficult personal issues. He was living in a hotel, separated from his wife of almost 30 years. His body was ravaged by more than 30 surgeries from his playing days, and he relied on pain medication to keep himself game-ready. He was worried about his son, Nick, who was commanding a sniper platoon in Afghanistan, and his son-in-law, who was dismantling homemade bombs in Afghanistan. He kept his cell phone handy in the dugout, in case there was news from Nick or one of his daughters.

But he was the same manager he’d been the whole time in Boston. He knew it would be phony to suddenly change his ways. He knew that it would send a message of panic if he started playing drill sergeant. After seven years and five months of steady success, he wasn’t going to change his style. But he knew he no longer had the backing of ownership. The vaunted trio of John Henry, Tom Werner, and Larry Lucchino hadn’t triggered his contract option and seemed more concerned about selling the Red Sox brand and making money than about winning championships.

Nothing could stop the September slide of 2011. The Sox, plagued by horrendous starting pitching, lost 20 of their final 27 games, blowing the biggest September lead in major league history. When they were eliminated by a wacky series of events in the midnight hour of the final night of the regular season, Francona knew it was time to go. He had little choice in the matter. Ownership was going in a new direction. It was all coming apart. Brilliant GM Theo Epstein was seduced by the Chicago Cubs, and some of Francona’s trusted ballplayers didn’t seem to have their heads in the right place anymore.

There’s one thing I’m going to be proud of after I’m gone, Francona said in the days after it ended. I think they’re going to find there’s more shit that goes on than they realize.

A lot went on in eight years at Fenway. The sellouts, pink hats, parades, and renditions of Sweet Caroline were fun. Putting out fires and dealing with a complex and needy cast of characters was a daily challenge. But none of it could take anything away from what happened on the field. The baseball was always the best part.

CHAPTER 2

I’m Mr. Francona’s son and he wanted me to come over and say hello

A BASEBALL LIFE is a life of interminable bus trips, tobacco spit, sunflower seeds, rain delays, day-night doubleheaders, and storytelling. There’s a lot of standing in the outfield, shagging fly balls, and swapping lies. No life in sports has more downtime, more loitering, more waiting. The old salts tell the hungry young bucks not to get too high or too low. And always stay within yourself . . . whatever that means. The season is simply too long for daily reaction and analysis. It’s not like football, a violent, self-important game that demands that you hit yourself over the head with a mallet for six days if you should happen to lose on any given Sunday. Baseball doesn’t attach too much importance to any single game. If you lose today, you go back out there and get ’em tomorrow. There’s always a chance for instant redemption. Hall of Fame skipper Earl Weaver knew what he was talking about when he said that the best part about baseball was that we do this every day.

When you grow up the son of a major league ballplayer and dedicate your life to playing, then coaching and managing baseball teams, you appreciate the slow, steady pace of the game. You also create a worldwide network of teammates, coaches, and associates who keep finding you, sometimes years after you think you’re done with them. This is how it’s always been for Terry Francona.

When he was eight years old, Francona met Joe Torre, who was then a star catcher with the Atlanta Braves and a teammate of outfielder Tito Francona. Thirty-seven years after their initial meeting, Torre would come back into Francona’s life as a worthy adversary in the Red Sox–Yankee rivalry of the 21st century.

When he was 11 years old, Francona met Ted Williams, the best player in the history of the Boston Red Sox, perhaps the greatest hitter who ever lived. Decades later, Francona would drive past a statue of Williams on his way to work every day at Fenway Park.

When he fulfilled a lifelong dream and played in the big leagues, Terry Francona’s first manager was Dick Williams—the man who skippered the most important Red Sox team of the 20th century, the 1967 Cardiac Kids. In the 21st century, Francona would become the greatest Red Sox manager since Dick Williams.

When his playing days were over and he became a coach and manager, Francona roomed and carpooled with a minor league lifer and cotton farmer named Grady Little. Eleven years after they were roommates, Little made a decision that altered the lives of millions of Red Sox fans and paved Francona’s path to Boston.

Even some of the ballparks represented a thread. Terry Francona was a seven-year-old kid in the stands when the St. Louis Cardinals dedicated their spectacular new stadium in 1966. Sixteen years later, Francona’s promising big league career was derailed when he tore up his knee chasing a fly ball on Busch Stadium’s warning track. In 2004 Francona stood on the same field as manager of the World Champion Boston Red Sox. Now the place is gone, torn down to make room for a better model.

That’s the baseball life. You get hired or fired by guys who played with, or against, your dad. Your college teammate, Brad Mills, is back at your side in the dugouts in St. Louis and Colorado when you win World Series for the Red Sox. Buddy Bell, your roommate with the Reds, brings you back into baseball as a coach when your playing days are over. Ken Macha, a fellow western Pennsylvanian who befriends you when you are about to be released by the Montreal Expos in 1986, rescues you from the depths of depression when blood clots almost take your life in 2002. John Farrell, another big league teammate, comes back into your life as your pitching coach and eventually succeeds you as manager of the Red Sox. Billy Beane, the man drafted one spot behind you in 1980, becomes famous as the Moneyball GM, then serves as your boss when you coach under Macha. When Beane turns down an offer from the Red Sox in 2002, the Sox turn to 28-year-old Theo Epstein, who hires you as the 44th manager of the Boston Red Sox. Ellis Burks, the center fielder who caught the ball you hit in your final big league at-bat, becomes one of your trusted clubhouse guys when you win the first World Series with the Red Sox in 2004.

They are baseball brothers, and they weave in and out of your life—on the diamond, in the dugout, and in the back rows of buses and airplanes.

Terry Jon Francona was born on April 22, 1959, in Aberdeen, South Dakota, where his dad, Tito, had met Roberta Jackson when he was a young outfielder in the Baltimore Orioles farm system in 1953. Roberta (always known as Birdie) wasn’t allowed to date ballplayers, but her brother-in-law, outfielder Zeke Strange, was Francona’s minor league manager, and that connection allowed an exception to the rule. Tito and Birdie married in 1956 after Tito’s rookie year with the Orioles. By the time their first child was born, Tito was emerging as a star outfielder with the Cleveland Indians. He hit .363 with 20 homers and 79 RBI for the Tribe in 1959. An armchair psychologist would submit that the birth of his only son moved Tito to have his best year in the bigs. In 14 other major league seasons, he never hit anything close to .363.

He used to kill a sinker, said Tim McCarver, Tito Francona’s teammate with the Cardinals in 1965 and ’66. He was a great low-ball hitter. Tito could hit anything down.

We can’t go any further in this baseball story without some explanation of the name Tito. Christened John Patsy Francona, Tito the elder got his lifelong nickname from his dad, Carmen Francona, a steelworker, piano tuner, and minister who raised his family in New Brighton, Pennsylvania, a borough of around 6,000 citizens, many of whom made their livings at local steel, lumber, and paper mills near the Ohio River. Tito is a popular nickname for small boys in Italian households. It comes from the ancient Roman name Titus. Carmen dubbed John Tito when the boy was four years old, and it is the name John Patsy Francona has answered to for his entire life.

Running around big league clubhouses when he was a small boy, Terry Francona came to be known as Little Tito. As a grown man, a father of four, and a two-time World Champion, Terry Francona is honored to answer to the name that his dad got from his grandfather. Strangers and professional acquaintances call him Terry. His friends, ballplayers, coaches, and clubhouse confidants go with Tito.

Terry grew up in New Brighton and has fond, funny memories of his dad’s parents. Carmen was 100 percent Italian, known all over New Brighton, the steelworker/preacher who could fix your piano even though he could never read a note of music. Josephine Skubis, Terry’s Polish grandmother, grew up in an orphanage, met Carmen when she was only 14, and was tough enough to drive a crane during the Great Depression.

They were the embodiment of all the Italian-Polish jokes, said Terry Francona. My granddad ran the family. He was the patriarch. Everybody in the county knew him. When I was in college at Arizona, checking out at a Kmart, somebody heard my name and said, ‘Yeah, your grandpa tuned my piano.’ He was a minister for the religious services in a part of town called Hunky Alley. My mom was from South Dakota and had never seen anything like it. The family folklore is that when she came to meet my grandmother, my grandmother offered her chicken soup and set down a bowl of broth in front of her that had a whole chicken sitting in it.

Three and a half years after Terry was born, Tito and Roberta had a daughter, Amy, and the children were raised in a brick ranch in New Brighton while Tito was finishing his 15-year career in the majors. New Brighton is Steeler and Pirates country. It’s near the Ohio border, close to Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, where Joe Willie Namath was raised. At church services in the late 1960s, retired outfielder Tito Francona would nudge his son and say, There’s Joe Namath’s brother. The Franconas weren’t rich, but had everything they needed, including a vast basement that Terry converted into a baseball training multiplex. Big league ballplayers didn’t have the cachet or the cash back then that they have in the 21st century. Tito Francona’s big league salary topped out at $30,500. His big endorsement deal was $600 from Rawlings—the company gave him three cents for every G-250 Tito Francona mitt sold. When he was done playing major league baseball, Tito took a job with the local park department, but everybody in New Brighton knew him as a former big leaguer. Among the mementos in the Francona family den were a couple of framed photographs of Tito with Ted Williams.

Another reminder that the Francona household was home to a big league ballplayer: there was a spittoon in every room. Tito Francona was not one of those ballplayers who left his chewing tobacco in the dugout.

The inside of the driver’s side door in our car was always brown, said Terry.

Early in every major league season, before school let out, young Terry went long stretches without seeing his dad. He didn’t have a baseball practice partner, so Birdie assembled a contraption that would allow her son to practice throwing and catching by himself. Working out daily in his basement, Terry made himself the best nine-year-old ballplayer in New Brighton, and when Phillips 66 sponsored a regional pitching, batting, and throwing competition in nearby Beaver, Birdie drove her son to the competition.

The other kids had their dads there coaching them and playing catch, remembered Terry Francona. I hadn’t seen my dad in three months, but my mom sat next to me on the bench and bullshitted with me the whole time.

He won the competition easily, but he never got his trophy. Event organizers disqualified Terry Francona because his dad was a big leaguer. Birdie was livid. She gathered up her son, put him in the car, and promised to drive him for a consolation ice cream. But she couldn’t see the road through her tears and anger. She just kept driving and talking about the injustice of it all until her son noticed a sign that read: WELCOME TO OHIO.

A ballplayer never forgets support like that.

In the latter years of Tito’s big league career, Birdie would wait until school got out in mid-June, pack up the family, and relocate to an apartment near her husband’s workplace. The summer of 1965 was spent in St. Louis.

My first baseball memory is living in apartments in St. Louis, said Francona. I was six or seven years old and we lived in these apartments called ‘The Executive.’ It’s not like a place where players would live today. They were horrendous. A lot of the other ballplayers’ families were there—Ray Washburn, Ray Sadecki, Bob Skinner. I used to play baseball with their kids every day. It was like a thousand degrees every day. I didn’t get to the park that often, I was too young. But I was there the night they opened Busch.

I remember Terry floating around those apartments, said McCarver. A lot of guys used that place because it was across from the airports. Let me tell you, there was nothing ‘executive’ about it. I stayed there four or five years, including 1967, when Roger Maris lived there, and we used to drive to the ballpark together. I remember little Terry very well.

Little Tito got into some trouble one night when he was carpooling to the park with some of the other ballplayers’ families. Birdie Francona was at the wheel, and everyone heard the bulletin over the radio that Cardinal first baseman Orlando Cepeda had been hit in the face during batting practice and would not be in the lineup. Young Terry whooped it up in the backseat because he knew that meant his dad would be starting at first base. Birdie was mortified.

Then there was the night he showed up in the clubhouse with a fistful of dollars. Curt Simmons’s sons had convinced Little Tito that it was okay to sell players’ game bats to fans. Business was booming until Tito asked his son to explain where all the money was coming from. Fortunately, manager Red Schoendienst and Cardinal ballplayers never knew about the enterprise.

Terry started going to the park almost every day in the summer of 1967 when his dad was playing with the Atlanta Braves. He’d hitch a ride to the park with Rita Raymond, wife of pitcher Claude Raymond, then find his dad in the clubhouse and get a dollar to spend on concession food. One dollar. Every night. It was good for a 75-cent chicken sandwich, but there was nothing he could buy with the 25 cents of change. After watching the game with Rita Raymond and the rest of the wives, he’d ride home in the backseat, listening to Tito and Claude analyze what just happened.

I heard everything they said, he remembered. I was the only eight-year-old who knew that you pitch guys high and tight, and low and away. I saw Bert Blyleven pitch when I was 11, and when I told my dad, ‘That guy has the greatest breaking ball I’ve ever seen,’ that’s when my dad figured out that I was really paying attention.

In Atlanta he introduced himself to Joe Torre, the hot-hitting catcher who always had a five-o’clock shadow by lunchtime. Years later, when Francona and Torre were the two managers in the greatest rivalry in the sport, Torre would break the ice at the beginning of every series by greeting Francona with a handshake and the question, How’s your dad?

The final year of Tito Francona’s career was one of the best years of Terry’s life. Tito went to spring training in Mesa with the Oakland A’s, and Birdie came out with the kids for a three-week vacation. Terry was ten. It was hardball heaven in the Arizona desert. He got to be batboy every day, hanging around with Sal Bando and pitcher Al Downing. He played catch with a sculpted young outfielder named Reggie Jackson, who’d been a star at Arizona State. He took a road trip with the team on a day when his dad stayed back in Mesa. Tito had to have his knee drained and was scheduled to play in a B game. At the road game with the big leaguers, Little Tito spilled a bunch of pine tar in the middle of the game and was too embarrassed to tell anybody. He rode back home to Mesa with super-sticky fingers.

Most of the time he was comfortable around the big league ballplayers, comfortable enough to gawk at Rick Monday’s attractive young wife and tell the outfielder, You’re my idol.

To this day, when Monday sees Terry Francona, he laughs and says, You’re my idol!

Rick says he doesn’t even remember me doing that, but I told him, ‘That’s my story and I’m sticking to it,’ said Francona.

Little Tito got an authentic green satin Oakland A’s jacket for Christmas in 1969. He wore it to school every day.

It was the best present I ever got, said Terry Francona.

When Tito was traded to the Milwaukee Brewers early in the 1970 season, it worked out well for his only son. Milwaukee wasn’t as hot and humid as St. Louis and Atlanta, and the Brewers in those days played in the American League, which opened up a new world of teams for Terry. Plus, he was finally old enough to go to the ballpark with his dad every day. Brewers manager Dave Bristol didn’t like kids hanging around the clubhouse, but this was Tito’s last gasp in the bigs, so nobody complained about the 11-year-old boy. Downing helped Terry hide from Bristol. The kid shagged fly balls with the big leaguers while the Brewers were taking batting practice. When the visitors took their turn in the cage, Little Tito went up into the stands to snag foul balls with the fans. After batting practice, Little Tito would make one more visit to the clubhouse to line his pockets with candy bars—like a rube traveler stuffing his luggage with the contents of a big-city hotel minibar. Major league clubhouses are well stocked with all forms of sweets, snacks, and beverages. Ballplayers support this bounty in the form of tips to the clubhouse workers, but it looks like free stuff to an 11-year-old, and Tito Francona never said a word about Little Tito raiding the candy rack. He took care of the clubbies when his boy wasn’t around. Years later, Terry Francona’s generosity toward the clubbies would become well known inside big league clubhouses.

In late July 1970, the Washington Senators, managed by Ted Williams, came to County Stadium. Two months away from retirement, Tito Francona made sure his only son didn’t miss an opportunity to meet baseball’s last .400 hitter. Teddy Ballgame had taken time to meet with rookie Tito Francona when Terry’s dad made his big league debut in the spring of 1956. A mutual friend asked Williams to visit with the young Orioles outfielder, and when the kid from western Pennsylvania walked into the visitors’ dugout at Fenway before his first big league game, the Splendid Splinter was waiting for him. If you wanted to talk hitting, Ted was your friend. The pitchers were the enemies, even the ones on Ted’s own team. Like most ballplayers of his era, Francona believed that Williams was the greatest hitter who ever lived, an opinion shared by the louder-than-life Boston batting champ. In the den of his New Brighton home, Tito Francona keeps a photo of his debut day meeting with Ted Williams.

When the Senators were taking batting practice at County Stadium in 1970, Tito Francona took his son aside and pointed across the diamond toward the big man in the visitors’ dugout.

That’s Ted Williams. Go introduce yourself.

Young Terry didn’t need his dad taking him by the hand. Father knew best. It would make a better impression if the kid walked over there by himself.

Wearing his ball cap and carrying his glove, 11-year-old Terry Francona walked across the field, behind the batting cage, and down the steps of the visitors’ dugout, where Williams was sitting.

Mr. Williams, I’m Mr. Francona’s son and he wanted me to come over and say hello.

Williams loved to make parents look good in front of their own kids and was impressed by the manners of Little Tito.

Well, you are a great-looking kid! bellowed Williams. And your dad is one helluva ballplayer. I just want to know one thing, young man. Can you hit?

He was great to me, Terry Francona remembered. He took a minute and said hello and shook my hand. It meant a lot to my dad.

It was bucket list time in Tito Francona’s career. He knew these were his final days in the bigs, so—pushing his luck a little—he went to Bristol and asked if he could take his son on a ten-game road trip through Minnesota, Chicago, and Kansas City in early August. Bristol said okay.

That was it. Birdie took Terry to buy a sport coat, combed the kid’s hair, and sent him on his way. Her 11-year-old son was going to live the big league life for a week and a half.

I had a ball, Terry Francona said more than 40 years later. I’d be in the hotel room with my dad and get up early and go down to that lobby while my dad slept. All the players and coaches were coming and going. If somebody needed a newspaper or a cup of coffee, I’d get it. To this day I love hotel lobbies. I love watching the people. I think it always reminds me of those first days on the road with my dad.

At the ballpark on the road, players would dress him in the smallest Brewer uniform they could find, then roll tape around him to tighten and tuck the billowing parts. Tito’s son was polite, respectful, and appreciative. He made it a point to talk to everyone, a quality that stayed with him throughout his baseball life. Be nice to all the workers. Try to remember their names. For an 11-year-old, he knew a remarkable number of people in ballparks across America.

Tito wanted to shield his young son from some things about the baseball life. Late one night, long after a game in Kansas City, father and son were sitting in the middle of the dark Brewer bus when both became aware of some X-rated talk coming from the back of the Greyhound. The Brewers had won their game, and no doubt a few postgame beers