Feeding the Monster

by Seth Mnookin

  But the role of savior in baseball-obsessed Boston was not one to which Garciaparra was well suited. Despite the almost universal acclaim he received, he soon discovered that the constant attention and scrutiny made him uneasy, even upset. Over time, his natural sensitivity morphed into a paranoid thin-skinnedness, a dangerous characteristic for a star in a town where some of the city’s columnists view knocking local sports icons as a kind of civic duty. Within a couple of years of arriving in Boston, even as he was being fulsomely praised as one of the greatest players ever to wear a B on his cap—and even though he seemed to be the only athlete in town immune from criticism—Garciaparra began to keep track of every slight, real or imagined, and would spend hours a day thinking about how he was being, or might be, portrayed by the press.

  “[Playing in Boston is] like playing three games a day,” Garciaparra says. “You play the mental game of preparing for the press before the game, and the questions you have to answer then. There’s the mental anguish of the game itself, and the mental anguish of what you have to talk about at the end of the game.” Whereas some players barely speak with the press and others don’t worry much about what they say, Garciaparra devoted the same obsessiveness to his interactions with the fourth estate as he did to his batting routine. During games, Garciaparra says he’d often think about what he had said in the clubhouse before the game. “How are they going to take it? What’s it going to come out like? You focus on the game but you are thinking about that,” he says. As soon as a game ended, Garciaparra would begin worrying again: “OK, what are they going to ask me [now]? How am I going to answer?”

  Since baseball’s inception, the shortstop has been acknowledged as the most important defensive player on the field. Unlike the other infielders, who are to a greater or lesser extent tied to their bags, the shortstop is free to roam. Since most hitters are right-handed, their natural swing carries the ball toward left field,* meaning the shortstop will see far more balls than any other player in the field. What’s more, for balls hit to the third base side of the shortstop, the player has to run in one direction, field the ball, stop, set himself, and throw all the way across the diamond to first.

  Because they were so important on the field, even elite shortstops tended to be only average offensive players. Take the Brooklyn Dodgers’ Pee Wee Reese, who averaged fewer than 10 home runs a year, or the Yankees’ Phil Rizzuto, who hit only 38 homers in his entire career. Perhaps no one personifies this model better than the St. Louis Cardinals’ Ozzie Smith, nicknamed the Wizard. The 150-pound Smith hit under .260 in nine out of his 19 seasons in the majors and averaged just one-and-a-half home runs a year. He was elected into the Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility.

  The Baltimore Orioles’ Cal Ripken changed the conventional wisdom concerning what a shortstop could do. At 6 feet, 4 inches and well over 200 pounds, he looked more like a prototypical slugging first baseman. In 1982, at age 21, Ripken hit 28 home runs, the first of six straight years in which he hit more than 25 homers. Ripken was just as good with his glove, and over his 19-year career, he won two Gold Glove awards at short. Aspiring ballplayers suddenly realized that playing shortstop didn’t mean neglecting their offensive skills.

  By the late 1990s, the impact of Ripken’s ascendance was clear. Those years were a golden age for shortstops. Garciaparra, Derek Jeter, and Alex Rodriguez were three of the best players in the game, and their friendly rivalry only stirred interest in these hard-hitting field marshals. The game hadn’t seen three similarly dominant and popular players at one position in a half-century, since future Hall of Famers Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, and Duke Snider patrolled center field for the Yankees, the New York Giants, and the Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1950s. From 1998 through 2000, Garciaparra could make a valid claim to being the best of the bunch. While playing defense, he exhibited what seemed to be a philosophical refusal to set his body before he threw, and his acrobatic contortions as he whipped the ball to first base while on a full run became as iconic as his prepitch batter’s box routines. On offense, he was nothing less than a monster. He hit .357 in 1999, and followed that up with a .372 average in 2000.

  At that point, Garciaparra was in the third year of a five-year deal he’d signed in the spring of 1998, when he’d had only one full season under his belt. The contract was worth $23.25 million, for an average of $4.65 million a year, and the Red Sox held options worth around $11 million a year for 2003 and 2004. Neither Jeter nor Rodriguez had signed this kind of lucrative contract early in his career. Instead, after the 2000 season, both players signed gaudy long-term deals.

  By that point, Rodriguez, only 25 and already eligible for free agency, was seen as the person most likely to be considered the next decade’s best all-around player. He had excellent power, intense ambition, good range, and was a threat on the base paths. Garciaparra was good, to be sure, but he wasn’t quite as fast, wasn’t quite as savvy a base runner, hit for a little less power, wasn’t as good a defender, and perhaps most important, was two years older. In December 2000, Texas Rangers owner Tom Hicks offered Rodriguez an incredible $252 million, 10-year deal. It was, many said at the time, a foolish move: Rodriguez’s next-highest suitor offered around $100 million less. But Hicks thought Rodriguez would bring him, and the Rangers, instant credibility. That same winter Jeter, who out of the three marquee shortstops had perhaps the highest baseball IQ but the lowest level of natural ability, was signed to a 10-year deal for $189 million. That was also a hugely inflated price, but it was what Yankees owner George Steinbrenner was willing to pay to ensure that Jeter, who’d joined the team as a full-time starter as a 21-year-old in 1996, spent most of his career in New York. Those deals came to gnaw at Garciaparra. “He felt like he was in the same category as an A-Rod or a Jeter,” says Johnny Damon, “and that he should be paid like that…. At the time when Jeter signed that contract, Nomar was actually considered the better player.”

  As the years went by, Garciaparra, often known simply by the Bostonism “Nomah” or the affectionate diminutive “Nomie,” became more and more beloved throughout New England. By the time he retired, he would, everyone agreed, take his place in a pantheon that included Boston sports heroes like the Bruins’ Bobby Orr, the Celtics’ Larry Bird, and Ted Williams. In the spring of 2001, he was honored with the cover of Sports Illustrated’s baseball preview issue. “A Cut Above,” read the headline. “How Nomar Garciaparra made himself the toughest out in baseball.”* Garciaparra was photographed shirtless, holding a baseball bat parallel to the ground, a Red Sox cap perched on his head. His face, with its high cheekbones and aquiline nose, was immediately recognizable to any baseball fan in the country. But the body bore little resemblance to that of the skinny rookie who had impressed the world four years earlier. His waxed chest was bulging, his latissimus dorsi—the middle back muscles that run from just below the shoulders to the waist—so large they were clearly visible from a straight-on frontal shot.

  Days later, Red Sox officials announced that Garciaparra would be sidelined for a couple of weeks with a split tendon in his right wrist. Garciaparra said he wasn’t sure what, exactly, had caused the injury. He’d first hurt his wrist a year-and-a-half earlier, when, on September 25, 1999, Baltimore’s Al Reyes hit him flush with a pitch, but he had been able to play most of the 2000 season with only minor pain.

  The uncertain cause of Garciaparra’s injury, coupled with his muscle-bound Sports Illustrated cover appearance, put the first chinks in Garciaparra’s armor. The late 1990s featured an unprecedented display of power across baseball, as hitters like Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, and Barry Bonds smashed balls out of ballparks in unprecedented numbers. Before 1997, there had been only six single season performances in the history of the game in which a player had hit more than 55 home runs. From 1997 through 2001, the feat occurred 11 more times. Rumblings about a steroid problem in Major League Baseball were just beginning, and Garciaparra’s injury added him to the list of suspect players: Tendon tears are on
e common side effect of steroid abuse, as bursts of training and sudden muscle growth overload static tendons and ligaments. During his year on the sidelines, Garciaparra, who had always been obsessive about his image and his routines, found the occasional whispered questions increasingly difficult to bear.* He became even more distrustful of the local press and felt boxed in by the constant attention he received.

  Garciaparra made a near-full recovery in 2002, batting .310 with 24 home runs. By the end of the season, he was back among Boston’s beloved. At the same time, he was growing more bitter about what he saw as his below-market contract. Even in his rookie year, Garciaparra thought, he’d hit for a higher average, hit more home runs, had more runs batted in, and had more hits than Jeter and Rodriguez. On the Red Sox, both Manny Ramirez and Pedro Martinez, neither of whom would ever be accused of being team players, were making more. “You look at your teammates, what they are making,” Garciaparra says, speaking in detail for the first time about his contract negotiations with the Red Sox. “Manny’s making 20 [million dollars a year]. Pedro’s making 17 [million]. You see where you fit in, you see what you do. Alex is making 25 [million], Jeter’s making 19 [million]. I mean, where do I fit it in? Let’s figure it all out.”

  As this was occupying the obsessive Garciaparra, Henry, Werner, and Lucchino approached Garciaparra and his agent, Arn Tellem, to begin discussions about a contract extension. Garciaparra had two years left on his deal, but the three partners all agreed they wanted to find a way to keep the shortstop on the team for the long term. “We saw him as a potentially iconic figure for the franchise,” says Lucchino. The three Red Sox executives met with Garciaparra and Tellem on John Henry’s yacht during spring training in 2003.

  That day, the Red Sox proposed a four-year contract extension worth $60 million, which would keep Garciaparra with the Red Sox at least until he was 35. Lucchino says the Red Sox were obviously aware that this was a lower annual salary than Jeter and Rodriguez had gotten a few years before, but they felt it was a fair offer, even a generous one. “We tried to explain that there seemed to be a changing landscape, a changing market,” Lucchino says. Indeed, since Rodriguez, Jeter, and Ramirez had signed their deals before the 2001 season, no one else had gotten a deal worth $20 million a year.

  “I said, ‘Great,’ ” Garciaparra says. “Four years, $15 million, fine: We agree on that. That is great. What I would like, though, I asked for a signing bonus for $8 million.” That would bring the average annual value of his contract to $17 million—“less than everybody [else],” Garciaparra points out, referring to Boston’s two highest paid players, along with Jeter and Rodriguez—but still enough so that he wouldn’t feel resentful. In Garciaparra’s mind, the signing bonus would actually be divided up between the next two years of his previously signed deal, when he was slated to make about $11 million a year. That way, he says, the four-year extension would feel more like a six-year deal at $15 million a year. In either case, Garciaparra says, he thought that they’d agreed on a baseline from which they’d work as they moved forward. “Shoot,” he says, “I’m already accepting the $15 [million].”

  The Red Sox, however, saw things differently. “We just weren’t doing a contract for that kind of money,” says Lucchino of Tellem and Garciaparra’s $68 million counteroffer, “so it was kind of back to the drawing board.” The two sides agreed to keep talking, but when no deal had been reached by the beginning of the season, they decided to revisit the issue at the end of the year. “I thought, great, we’re almost there,” says Garciaparra. “Let’s go into the season and we’ll work out the specifics afterwards.” In Garciaparra’s mind, this would already cost him the $4 million of his requested “signing bonus” that he’d wanted to tack onto his 2003 salary. “My thought throughout the season was, ‘One season’s over, I probably won’t get that $4 million.’…I don’t know if they really grasped it.”

  Certainly nothing happened during the 2003 season to make Garciaparra feel that his value had dropped. That year, he made his fifth All-Star team and, even after a horrendous end-of-season slump—he hit only .170 in September—he ended the year at .301 with 28 home runs and 105 runs batted in. “It was an exciting year,” he says. “Everything was great, and going into the offseason, now it was just a matter of hearing from them.”

  *Since a right-handed batter stands on the left side of the plate, a hit to right field would be to the “opposite” field. The follow through of a batter’s natural swing means the ball will usually go to the same side of the field on which he’s standing; to hit a ball to the opposite field, a hitter needs to punch the ball rather than drive it. Hitters who can consistently hit opposite-field home runs are relatively rare for this reason.

  *Even in 2000, the year he hit .372, Garciaparra was far from the toughest out in baseball: That year, he was eighth in on base percentage, behind, among others, Jason Giambi, Frank Thomas, Gary Sheffield, and Barry Bonds, all of whom hit below .335. As on base percentage became more valued, Garciaparra’s free-swinging ways were increasingly frowned upon.

  *In 2004, when the debate over steroid testing was at its peak, Garciaparra became one of the most outspoken opponents of Major League Baseball–implemented testing. “I don’t trust testing,” he said. “Testing is just not the answer.” In April 2005, Garciaparra crumpled to the ground when running out of the batter’s box; he had torn his groin when muscle ripped away from bone. That injury resulted in printed speculation about possible steroid use. “Look, I’m hardly the first person to raise the question,” Bob Ryan wrote in the Globe. “[H]e did go from, like, standard athlete issue normal to ultra-buffed in one winter, and he has been…systematically breaking down for the past six years.” Garciaparra angrily laughed off the accusations. “If I was taking steroids, can I send them back and get the good ones?” he said that year. “Cause these don’t work…. I just laugh. I mean, come on. It’s ridiculous.” Garciaparra began the 2006 season with a strained rib-cage muscle. That injury occurred during Garciaparra’s first at-bat of the spring’s final exhibition game.

  Chapter 27

  The Epic

  Offseason Begins

  ON SATURDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2003, 23-year-old Josh Beckett pitched a complete game shutout on short rest to lead the Florida Marlins to a World Series victory over the Yankees, four games to two. Two days later, on the morning of Monday, October 27, the Sox told Grady Little he wouldn’t be invited back for the 2004 season. Little’s dismissal surprised no one. The local media predicted the Sox’s search for a new manager would take center stage alongside the questions of whether to pursue pitchers such as Bartolo Colon and Kevin Millwood, and how to fix the bullpen. “Boston’s baseball brain trust is gearing up for one of the hottest offseasons in recent memory,” the Globe wrote on October 29.

  They had no idea. A series of deals made in the Dan Duquette era were all coming due at the same time, and four of the team’s nine regular starting players (Garciaparra, Trot Nixon, Jason Varitek, and the Epstein-signed David Ortiz), as well as two of its five starting pitchers (Pedro Martinez and Derek Lowe), had contracts that expired at the end of the 2004 season. Epstein had never agreed with Duquette’s approach, with its emphasis on a handful of big-name superstars who invariably demanded enormous contracts. He also thought that one of the team’s historic problems was its fixation on immediate gratification. Instead of building a strong farm system that would produce high-quality players whose inexpensive early years would be under the team’s control, the Sox scrambled year after year, trading away their future for the fantasy of succeeding in the present. Ironically, it was Epstein’s very belief in long-term planning that emboldened him to shoot for the moon in 2004. The Red Sox wouldn’t sign all of their impending free agents precisely because it wasn’t worth paying exorbitant sums for stars on the downside of their careers. But there was no reason to waste the team they had. It was time for the Red Sox to go for it, and Epstein, by not gorging on high-priced contracts in his first year as gen
eral manager, had the flexibility to search for high-impact players who could be signed to reasonable deals.

  Already, Boston was deep in talks with the Texas Rangers in an effort to trade for Alex Rodriguez, who, at 28, projected to have plenty more great years ahead of him. Since arriving in Texas, Rodriguez had performed pretty much as advertised. However, the Rangers had still gotten worse every year and finished in last place in the American League West three years running. Owner Tom Hicks decided he wanted to free up payroll, creating what seemed like a perfect opportunity for Boston. “[Hicks] called me and told me he was interested in moving A-Rod, and Boston was one of the places he was willing to go,” says Lucchino. Hicks told Lucchino the Rangers wanted Garciaparra and some of the Red Sox’s young pitchers in return.

  The day after the 2003 World Series ended, Lucchino and Hicks met at the St. Regis Hotel in Manhattan. The market for Rodriguez, small to begin with, was shrinking: The Yankees had already told Hicks they weren’t interested in trading for A-Rod. That day, Lucchino said Boston wasn’t willing to part with Garciaparra, but they would consider a deal in which Texas would take Manny Ramirez. The Sox, according to John Henry, were hoping that should the deal work out, either Garciaparra or Rodriguez would move to second or third base.

  Within days of this discussion, Henry, Werner, and Lucchino had a meeting with Ramirez and his agent, Jeff Moorad, to discuss Ramirez’s latest trade demands. Ramirez, who still had five years and almost $100 million in salary left on his contract, gave a list of teams he’d be willing to play for—both the Mets and the Yankees were acceptable, along with the Seattle Mariners, the Minnesota Twins, and the Toronto Blue Jays. If he weren’t going to New York, Henry says, Ramirez indicated he “wanted to play in a city where he wasn’t such a big deal to people, where there wouldn’t be so much of a spotlight on him.” Since a trade with one of those teams on Ramirez’s list seemed unlikely, the two sides discussed putting Ramirez on irrevocable waivers, which meant that any team in baseball could claim him as long as they were willing to pay his salary. The Red Sox didn’t expect anyone to claim Ramirez, but they hoped the process would prove to him that he had to be more realistic about his options.