Feeding the Monster

by Seth Mnookin

  Both Henry and Lucchino were already convinced Theo Epstein would one day run the Red Sox, but Henry in particular wasn’t sure the timing was right. It was hard enough for GMs who had never played professional baseball to gain the respect of star players. Epstein hadn’t even played college ball. What’s more, he was younger than many of the players on the Red Sox payroll. Instead of getting a chance to learn on the job in a less frenzied city, he’d be working in perhaps the most demanding, all-consuming sports media market in the country. “I thought he was a magical person,” says Henry. “And I told him, ‘You’re going to have a long career as the general manager of the Boston Red Sox one day.’ But I was worried. You know, 28-year olds are generally not immature, but this is a serious responsibility. It would completely take over his life.” Henry thought that, in a perfect world, Epstein would wait several more years before running the team’s baseball operations. By that time, the ownership could establish itself, Epstein’s age wouldn’t be as much of a factor, and perhaps the Red Sox would have won a World Series.

  Epstein, for his part, was also concerned—not about his ability to do the work, because he was always happiest when he was most busy—but about how the job would affect his ability to live a sane and normal life away from baseball. “Being an assistant GM is just one part of your life,” Epstein says. “It’s great to hear from old friends and hang out with them. I could walk out of the park after the game, and even if the team lost, you can separate the two. I could hang out at bars and no one recognized me. My identity was intact and there was no bullshit. It was one of the better aspects of being unknown.” If he was named general manager, he knew all that would change. Besides, Epstein says, he never particularly aspired to land the job. “I always wanted to have an active role [in the team],” he says. “I wanted to have influence, to be in the inner circle where I was in a position where I could help impact what was happening on the field, because that’s why I’m in the game. I’m competitive. I wanted to help us win. As long as I had those two things, I didn’t really care necessarily what my title was. When I came to the Red Sox, I never thought I would be the GM.”

  With Beane and Ricciardi out of the running, however, Henry, Werner, and Lucchino had no other obvious candidates in mind. They all agreed that it made no sense to search for a placeholder, a seasoned GM who would man the ship while Epstein was groomed for the job. They knew the kind of organization they wanted to put together and didn’t see much point in waiting around a couple of years to do it. With Lucchino assuring Henry and Werner that Epstein had a maturity and perspective beyond his years, the three men decided to offer the young Boston native the job. And so on Sunday, November 24, Larry Lucchino summoned Epstein to Fenway and told him he’d been chosen to lead the team. He was offered a three-year contract that would pay, in total, about a million dollars plus bonuses, or about $2.2 million less per year than what the Sox had offered Billy Beane.

  It didn’t take long for Epstein to become aware of how his life would be forever altered in ways both large and small. “I knew things would change immediately,” says Epstein. “But I didn’t know how much.” The next morning, as Epstein left his Brookline apartment to make his way to the Fenway Park press conference that would announce his promotion, there was a trio of TV reporters camped outside his front door. The reporters followed Epstein to work. “It was a good symbol for the lack of privacy and amount of attention I was going to get all the time whether I wanted it or not,” he says.

  The Sox tried to frame Epstein’s new posting as another part of the ongoing transition to the “new” Red Sox, another sign that the years of mismanagement and poor communication were things of the past. After announcing Epstein’s promotion at a press conference, Lucchino said, “What this means is, I hope, evident to all of you: This is no longer your father’s Oldsmobile. The Red Sox are determined to do new and innovative things, work with new approaches and new people, and push the envelope for baseball.” Epstein, for his part, charmed the local reporters by demonstrating the extent of his familiarity with Red Sox history, at one point answering a question about Grady Little’s job status by saying that Little was “the manager of this nine,” an allusion to one of former Sox manager Joe Morgan’s famous colloquialisms. Epstein also displayed a sense of humor many of the reporters hadn’t seen before. When asked to respond to the skepticism his appointment had provoked, he quickly quipped, “Do people think I’m too old for the job?” On this day it seemed as if Epstein could do little wrong. Even the notoriously contrarian Dan Shaughnessy lauded the move.

  Yet there were those who questioned why the Red Sox had not been able to hire any of their top choices. “Think long and hard about the supposed search the Red Sox conducted for the better part of the last two months and ask yourself this: If this is such a desirable place to work, then why couldn’t the Sox convince a more experienced man to take the job?” asked the Herald’s Tony Massarotti. The entire search process, Massarotti wrote, “either speaks poorly of the current Sox administration or suggests that this is an extremely difficult place to succeed as a major league executive. Or both.” Hiring Epstein, Massarotti said, showed definitively that the Red Sox were an institution that “Larry Lucchino…clearly knows so extraordinarily little about.”

  Massarotti’s column was only the beginning of the broadsides Lucchino would receive. For the second time in less than a month, he found he was being called on to answer questions about whether his hands-on approach was scaring off some front-office talent. “In no other industry do they call it meddling when a CEO tries to stay active and involved in all facets of his company,” Lucchino told the Herald’s Gerry Callahan. “I do think there’s a role for the CEO of this ball club to be involved in baseball matters. That’s not meddling. That’s due diligence.” Epstein, Callahan noted, “understands and accepts [that] more readily than any of the other 973 GM candidates would have. He has lived and learned under Lucchino for the better part of a decade and has been molded and shaped the way the CEO wants him.”

  It’s true that in 2002, Epstein and Lucchino had a genuinely comfortable relationship. “I worked very closely with Larry [in San Diego],” Epstein says. “He was a sort of hands-on manager of all the departments. He supervised all the departments beneath him, including baseball operations. He didn’t micromanage—he didn’t execute trades or stuff like that—but he always wanted to know just what was going on. When we were there, I don’t think he overruled anything.” Epstein says he likely owes his career in Boston to Lucchino. “He was the one who wanted to hire me,” Epstein says. “Had he not joined the Red Sox, I’m not sure I would have had the opportunity.”

  The day after the press conference announcing Epstein’s promotion, Lucchino and Epstein began remaking the Red Sox baseball operations outfit, bringing in some old hands to complement the young general manager. Bill Lajoie was one of the first new hires to come on board. Lajoie, with his almost half-century’s worth of experience in professional baseball, had helped construct an impressive number of successful teams, including the Cincinnati Reds of the mid-1970s, the Detroit Tigers of the mid-1980s, and the Atlanta Braves of the 1990s. He had served as GM of the Tigers for seven years. At the Red Sox, he’d be a special assistant in charge of scouting, a kind of yin to Bill James’s yang. Soon after Lajoie came to Boston, Epstein hired Colorado Rockies assistant GM Josh Byrnes as his right-hand man. The 32-year-old Byrnes, who cut his teeth in the front office of the hard-hitting Cleveland Indians of the late 1990s, knew all about the pressures of being labeled a boy wonder: When he was named the Indians scouting director at age 27, he was one of the youngest people in the history of the game to occupy that position. Epstein promoted 28-year-old Ben Cherington to director of player development, and 29-year-old Jed Hoyer, who not long before had been working in the Wesleyan College admissions office, was named baseball operations assistant. The Red Sox, led by Epstein, would head into the 2002 season with one of the youngest baseball operations offic
es in major league history, and the only one in which the ages of many of its employees mirrored the ages of the team’s players.

  It didn’t take long for Epstein and his crew to start putting their mark on the Red Sox roster. Even though Dan Duquette had been fired before the season started, the 2002 Red Sox had been very much the product of his era—outside of a midyear acquisition of outfielder Cliff Floyd, the Sox didn’t make many changes to the team during Mike Port’s one year as the general manager. The ’02 team closely resembled many other teams Duquette had assembled in his years in Boston, with a potent core surrounded by role players who were significantly below average. While Derek Lowe and Pedro Martinez blazed through the league, starters John Burkett and Frank Castillo had earned run averages higher than the league’s average. Nomar Garciaparra, Manny Ramirez, Shea Hillenbrand, Jason Varitek, and Trot Nixon had all put up impressive offensive numbers, but first baseman Tony Clark and second basemen Rey Sanchez and Jose Offerman, who accumulated 869 at-bats among them, had a combined on base percentage of .302. (The league average was .331.) The team’s bench players were atrocious. As one member of the Red Sox front office says, “The core of that team was plenty good enough to be a playoff team. But basically players 15 through 25 on the roster sucked.”

  Epstein thought he could successfully remake the offense relatively cheaply by finding players who were likely to take advantage of Fenway Park’s peculiar dimensions or had a particular skill set that was important but unappreciated. Back in 2002, the primary importance of on base percentage was not the accepted gospel it is today. “There were at the time still a lot of undervalued players available,” Epstein says. “We already had Manny, who you can build a lineup around. We had Varitek, a catcher who’s an equally [skilled] offensive [and defensive] player. We had a leadoff hitter [Johnny Damon] in center field. So with those elements up the middle, we thought we could add some value for not too much money.” On December 12, Epstein picked up Cincinnati Reds second baseman Todd Walker in exchange for a pair of minor league players. Three days later, he traded pitcher Josh Hancock to the Phillies for Jeremy Giambi, the brother of former American League MVP Jason.

  Walker, a subpar defensive second baseman, was due $3.5 million in 2003, and his numbers, at first, didn’t look particularly impressive: He’d hit .299 in 2002 with only 11 home runs and 64 runs batted in. But Walker had demonstrated he could get on base at a decent clip, with a .353 on base percentage, almost exactly identical to what Nomar Garciaparra had put up the year before. He was also $4 million cheaper than the Sanchez/Offerman combination that had fared so poorly.

  Similarly, to judge by batting average alone, Jeremy Giambi didn’t appear to be the kind of offensive force that could anchor first base: He’d hit only .259 in 2002. But he did display a decent amount of power, with 20 home runs. Like his brother Jason, Jeremy Giambi had one of the best eyes in the game, and his .414 on base percentage would have been good for a top-10 finish in 2002 had he spent the year in one league. (He was traded in May 2002 from the American League’s Oakland A’s to the National League’s Philadelphia Phillies.) Since he cost just $2 million, the Red Sox would still be able to look for a platoonmate to split time with Giambi, all for less than the $7.3 million the team had paid to Brian Daubach and Tony Clark the season before.

  A new peak in the age-old Red Sox–Yankees rivalry would soon eclipse coverage of these acquisitions. Just before Christmas, the Cuban defector Jose Contreras, a highly regarded pitcher who had never played in the United States, signed a four-year, $32 million deal with the Yankees. Epstein and the Red Sox had also pursued Contreras, and when a reporter from The New York Times called Larry Lucchino to get his reaction, Lucchino initially offered up a terse “no comment.” Then he changed his mind. “No, I’ll make a comment,” he said. “The Evil Empire extends its tentacles even into Latin America.” Although Lucchino later tried to dismiss the quip as a light-hearted joke, it incensed George Steinbrenner, who’d disliked Lucchino for more than a decade.

  “That’s BS,” Steinbrenner said in response in an interview with New York’s Daily News. “That’s how a sick person thinks. I’ve learned this about Lucchino: He’s baseball’s foremost chameleon of all time. He changes colors depending on where he’s standing. He’s been at Baltimore and he deserted them there, and then went out to San Diego and look at what trouble they’re in out there. When he was in San Diego, he was a big man for the small markets. Now he’s in Boston and he’s for the big markets. He’s not the kind of guy you want to have in your foxhole. He’s running the team behind John Henry’s back. I warned John it would happen, told him, ‘Just be careful.’ He talks out of both sides of his mouth. He has trouble talking out of the front of it.” Steinbrenner’s comments were, of course, unfair: Lucchino hadn’t deserted Baltimore, but left after an ownership change, and he had increased both the revenues and the on-field performance of the Padres. It didn’t matter. Instead of letting the matter drop, Lucchino returned fire. “Is that the best he could do?” Lucchino asked the next day. “I don’t think he even gets the reference.” The media certainly did. The Red Sox–Yankees rivalry was already the most hyped tug-of-war in sports, and Lucchino and Steinbrenner’s sniping only upped the ante. From that day forward, television promotions for Red Sox–Yankees matches were inevitably set to the anthemic music from Star Wars.

  Part IV

  The Best Hitting

  Team Ever

  Assembled: 2003

  Chapter 20

  Shopping at Wal-Mart

  for David Ortiz

  WITH LUCCHINO AND STEINBRENNER busy sparring in public, Epstein opened 2003 by making another key acquisition: third baseman Bill Mueller, whom Epstein signed to a two-year deal with a team option for a third year. Mueller, Epstein thought, was another player who showed good patience at the plate and who was projected to do well at Fenway. “We thought Bill Mueller was a better player than Shea Hillenbrand,” Epstein says. “And we thought if we could sign Mueller, we could trade Hillenbrand for pitching help and that Hillenbrand”—coming off an All-Star season—“would be more attractive as a trade chip than he would be to us.” It was the type of levelheaded, coolly rational move that helped build winning ball clubs. Instead of becoming enamored of a player who, for whatever reason, was considered to be more valuable than he actually was, Epstein wanted to use Hillenbrand’s inflated reputation as a way to get more value in return.

  Then the Sox turned their attention toward finding more offensive power to complement Jeremy Giambi at first base and in the designated hitter spot. One of the team’s top choices was Kevin Millar, a scrappy player who’d gone undrafted out of both high school and college and had to fight his way to a major league contract with the Florida Marlins. Millar was not a particularly gifted ballplayer or athlete, but he had better pitch recognition than almost any hitter in the majors. (Unfortunately, he also had an inordinate amount of trouble handling any pitch that wasn’t a fastball.) In 2001—John Henry’s last year with the Marlins—and 2002, Millar had blossomed, hitting over .300 both years and smacking a combined 36 home runs.

  The problem was that the Marlins had already agreed to sell Millar for $1.2 million to Japan’s Chunichi Dragons, with whom Millar had agreed to a two-year, $6.2 million deal. In order to complete the transaction, the Marlins first had to place Millar on waivers. Baseball tradition stated that another team would not claim a player a ball club had agreed to sell overseas.

  The Red Sox, showing they had little patience for the gentlemen’s agreements that had governed baseball for decades, claimed Millar, setting off an almost month-long saga that made news on both sides of the Pacific Ocean, with the will-he-or-won’t-he’s and back-and-forths surrounding the 31-year-old taking up plenty of ink as the month progressed. The Sox, meanwhile, kept hunting for bargains. At the beginning of the offseason, the team had compiled a list of about 15 first basemen and designated hitters who might be available for a discount. They’d gotten Jeremy Giam
bi and still hoped to get Millar. As a backup, they had pursued options like free agents Brad Fullmer, Greg Colbrunn, and Travis Lee. Another name on the list belonged to a burly 27-year-old Dominican left-handed hitter: David Ortiz. The Minnesota Twins had released Ortiz in December—Gold Glove winner Doug Mientkiewicz seemed to have a stranglehold on the first base job in Minnesota—and Ortiz’s poor defensive skills and injury-riddled history made many teams wary.

  Within the Red Sox, Ortiz intrigued virtually everyone involved in the discussions. One of the scouts loved his swing—it was, he said, a thing of beauty. After looking over his hit location charts, Epstein’s crew thought he was likely the type of player who would be able to take advantage of the left field wall in Fenway. Bill James liked the fact that, while he only hit .234 in 2001, his secondary average was almost .400.* (“That’s my kind of player,” James says.) Dave Jauss, a scout who was down in the Dominican Republic for the winter, reported that in the winter-ball leagues on the island, Ortiz was a superstar, as big as Manny Ramirez or the Montreal Expos’ Vladimir Guerrero. Finally, Epstein was consciously trying to find players who could help make the Red Sox clubhouse a more positive place to be, and Ortiz, like Millar, had a reputation for being both outgoing and upbeat, which Epstein felt was crucial at that moment in the team’s history. “We wanted to get guys who had a certain makeup,” Epstein says. “We wanted guys who were supportive of the other 24 guys in the clubhouse, who care more about team winning and losing than they do about their own stats.” Epstein thought that Ortiz, like Millar, had the kind of loose personality that could help the team get through the season in a city like Boston.

  That’s not to say the Red Sox didn’t have reservations. Most pressing were their concerns about Ortiz’s age—foreign-born players are known to claim to be younger than they really are so it will seem as if their peak years are still ahead of them, and Ortiz had given his age as 17 when he broke into professional baseball in the States a decade earlier. Instead of simply throwing up his hands, Epstein asked James to see if he could find a way to determine anything further about Ortiz’s likely age. “I did a study of his career progression up to that point, identifying historical players who had very similar career paths up to that point in time, and concluded that, on average, they were exactly the age that David claimed to be,” says James. “That was a fun little study. I had never done anything like that before.” With that settled, Epstein made his move, acquiring the player that would change both Epstein’s and the Red Sox’s futures. On January 22, 2003, the Red Sox signed David Ortiz to a one-year, $1.25 million deal.