Feeding the Monster

by Seth Mnookin

  *Kevin Millar, apparently, was not impressed. Once, he walked over to a naked Ramirez, pointed at his groin and exclaimed, “Forty home runs and 140 RBIs, and with this penis!”

  *Out of everyone in the Red Sox front office, James was perhaps the wariest of ascribing too much weight to the effects of baseball’s testing program. “The new steroid policy is more of a media focus than a looming factor in analyzing what has happened or is likely to happen,” he says. Teams need to worry about the possibility that players are taking steroids, but “you have to worry about 500 other things, too,” James says. “Stan Musial had an off season in ’59 and attributed it later, in a biography, to the fact that [the Musials] had a newborn baby who wasn’t a good sleeper and was keeping him awake nights…. It’s not that steroids aren’t a legitimate factor, it’s just that there are a very wide range of legitimate factors, so adding one more doesn’t change anything very much.”

  *By the second half of the season, the consensus among a Major League Baseball official and executives on several teams I spoke with was that players quickly figured out ways around the testing program. Human growth hormone, or HGH, was assumed to be the new drug of choice among many players since it is undetectable by urine tests, which is currently all that is allowed by baseball’s collective bargaining agreement. Some players—like the slugger who went from fewer than 10 first-half home runs to more than 25 in the season’s second half—were so widely assumed to be using that this is discussed openly around the game.

  Chapter 40

  The Rift Widens

  AS CONSUMING as the Ramirez trade-deadline saga was, the Red Sox seemed unaffected on the field. From July 26 through July 31, the team won all five of its games. The Sox would eventually win eight straight and 14 out of 16, sweeping series with the Kansas City Royals, the Texas Rangers, and the Chicago White Sox, and Ramirez would hit home runs in the first two games after the trade deadline.

  Even if things seemed to work out for the team, the saga still ended up having an adverse effect on the organization. The relationship between Larry Lucchino and Theo Epstein, already tense, deteriorated even further. Epstein and his colleagues felt that Lucchino’s acknowledgment of Ramirez’s trade request on WEEI had made it harder for the organization to stay focused on its goals. “Larry’s radio appearances often have a bit of, ‘Let’s get the fire extinguishers ready,’ ” says one team employee. “[In any given year], there’s the strong, strong likelihood these guys will not be traded. Given that, why not work at trying to repair the relationship in advance instead of fanning the flames? What’s the point? The extra publicity?”* Another staffer wondered, “Why is it the only guy in the front office who can’t keep things in-house is our CEO?” Already, Epstein had spent 2005 increasingly isolated from the rest of the organization. Now his coworkers were also growing resentful of the man with whom Epstein had had an unspoken battle for much of the season.

  The days immediately following the trade deadline only inflamed the situation. On Tuesday, August 2, the Globe’s Chris Snow reported that “Sox ownership” blocked an agreed-upon trade with the Colorado Rockies in which the Red Sox would give up Adam Stern and a minor league prospect and get outfielder Larry Bigbie and a prospect in return. In order to complete the trade, the Rockies had to first trade for Bigbie, who was a member of the Baltimore Orioles. They completed that trade, only to have the Red Sox back out of their deal at the last minute.

  In Snow’s story, Lucchino laid blame for this mishap at the feet of assistant general manager Josh Byrnes, Epstein’s right-hand man. “Byrnes, according to Sox CEO Larry Lucchino, did most of the work on the Bigbie deal because GM Theo Epstein’s attention was focused on Ramirez,” Snow wrote. And after all the time spent soothing Ramirez’s jangled nerves, Lucchino also said the team had been discussing deals for the left fielder until 4:00 P.M. on Sunday. (Epstein, in his press conference after the deadline, took pains not to discuss who on the team, if anyone, had been available as a trading chip.) Finally, he implied that Epstein had been so distracted by the Ramirez negotiations that it hindered the team’s ability to make other moves.

  Lucchino, for his part, thought that some of the previous week’s drama could have been avoided if only Epstein had taken his suggestions. “I independently talked to Theo on [the] Wednesday [before the trade deadline] and stressed to him that we needed a direct conversation, a direct request from Francona to Manny to play if we were going to consider…some kind of disciplinary action if he refused to play in the future,” Lucchino says. “Theo discouraged that idea. He thought it might make too much of an issue right before the game, and that it would be disruptive.”

  Even more damagingly, Lucchino felt that once again Epstein might have contributed to criticism Lucchino had received in the press after the trade deadline. On August 3, Peter Gammons laced into Lucchino in Gammons’s first ESPN.com column since his election several days earlier to the writers wing of the Baseball Hall of Fame. Gammons derisively referred to Lucchino as ownership’s “assistant.” Red Sox management had, Gammons wrote, “agreed to keep quiet” about Ramirez’s trade request, but on Thursday, “Lucchino did just the opposite, and Ramirez felt that he’d been lied to.” It was Epstein, Gammons said, who “fortunately…had repaired much of the damage.” Finally, Gammons wrote that Lucchino had been the one to nix the Bigbie deal, which “rightly” incensed the Rockies. Instead of “accept[ing] responsibility,” Gammons wrote, Lucchino “threw Byrnes under the bus.”

  Lucchino was already convinced that Epstein and Gammons’s close relationship meant the general manager was feeding the reporter stories. “By this time,” John Henry told me in January 2006, “every time the needles came out, from [Lucchino’s] standpoint, it came from Theo.”

  Not until the end of 2005 would Henry learn of the deep antipathy between Epstein and Lucchino. In early August, virtually everyone in Red Sox Nation, from John Henry to the media to the fans, was in the dark about the situation. Accordingly, there was almost no concern about the fact that it was Lucchino who was responsible for negotiating Theo Epstein’s contract, which would expire in just three months.* Sure, there were those journalists who’d noticed that Epstein seemed oddly truculent—one reporter said watching Epstein in 2005 reminded him of watching Nomar Garciaparra in 2004. And several of Epstein’s colleagues in the baseball operations department were worried that the stress and isolation of his job were becoming overwhelming. But there were enough day-to-day things to focus on without digging into a subject everyone assumed wouldn’t be an issue. In July, when Henry was asked by the Globe about Epstein’s contract situation, he said, “It just is not an issue with Theo, Tito, Larry, or myself.” Henry wasn’t spinning; he really thought that was the case. When Charles Steinberg was asked the same question, he replied by saying it would actually be rude for Epstein to ask about his contract during the season. “One can see why two collaborative colleagues, albeit in a vertical relationship, shouldn’t take time in the delicious, speedy, luge of a season to square off,” Steinberg told me at the time. “It would seem disrespectful…to go in to Larry and say, ‘By the way, let’s talk about how much I’m going to get next year.’ ” Warming up to the role-playing, Steinberg continued. “ ‘Now? Why now?’ ‘The media’s asking, Larry.’ ”

  But for Epstein, his contract was becoming more of an issue with each day. After his spring training email to Lucchino, Epstein says he didn’t hear back from the Red Sox CEO for months. By the time he did, his frustration had grown. When Lucchino made an opening offer of around $750,000 a year—considerably less than Epstein felt he was worth—it was Epstein who said the two men should wait until the season was over to work things out. The offer was so low, Epstein said, “there was sort of no way to counter it, especially while we were still playing.” What should have been a relatively simple process now looked like it would be a drawn-out negotiation. “I didn’t want to focus on it and be pissed off,” Epstein says. His bitterness over his contract, comb
ined with his frustration over the aggressive PR approach of the team and the suffocating nature of life in Boston, made him increasingly disenchanted. “For me personally, if this organizational approach keeps up, I think I have one or two more years here and that’s it,” Epstein said in August. “I don’t care for it and it makes it impossible for me to have a life that’s tolerable, by my standards.”

  Epstein, to be sure, wasn’t the only person who felt suffocated by the effects of the Red Sox’s ubiquity in 2005. Lack of privacy was the main reason Manny Ramirez gave for his most recent trade request. David Wells, the burly, hard-living, spotlight-loving lefty, complained that the overbearing Boston fans made playing for the Red Sox actually unpleasant. “In New York, you can hide, you can go anywhere you want,” Wells says. “In Boston, you can’t go anywhere. We’re all hermits because of the fact that if we try to go out, we just get bombarded with fans…. When the game’s over, you’ve got to let us breathe. I mean, look at Manny.” Boston, Wells says, is far worse than any of the other cities he’s played in, including New York, Baltimore, Detroit, and Chicago. “It’s a no-brainer. It’s hard for an athlete in this town because you don’t have a life…. I feel bad for my kids, because they like to get out there. They love Boston. They say, ‘Dad, this is a cool city,’ but I can’t take them out. We’ve watched a lot of movies [at home] this year.”

  Wells is renowned throughout baseball for saying practically anything that pops into his head, but his frustration was far from unique. A year after riding his bike to home games at the Chicago Cubs’ Wrigley Field, Matt Clement practically had to wear a disguise to drive to Fenway without his car being mobbed at stoplights. Even the usually diplomatic Terry Francona acknowledges that playing in a city where the fans and the media are so intense can be exhausting. “I’ll give you a good example,” he says. “We were in Toronto, and their catcher said something about their closer, just hammered him. And it got about a four-inch article in the paper. If that had happened in Boston? It would’ve been World War III.”

  *Ironically, much of the press corps was also questioning Lucchino’s judgment and wondering why Lucchino had confirmed Ramirez’s trade request. Charles Steinberg made the situation worse when he tried to argue to a couple of reporters that Lucchino might not have actually been talking about a current trade demand. “I don’t know still when the most recent time was that he asked to be traded,” Steinberg said in early August in an effort to defend Lucchino against criticism that his comments had made the situation harder to deal with. “What Larry says is, ‘My goodness, he has asked to be traded since a week before we took over as owners, it’s been an annual occurrence.’ He says, ‘So the short answer is yes.’ ” Reporters have a finely honed sense of outrage, and when they feel they’re being lied to, they’re likely to decide the source is incapable of being honest with them in the future. This was an obvious falsehood.

  *Because of the team’s policy of not allowing front-office personnel to use agents, Epstein and Lucchino would have to negotiate Epstein’s deal without the benefit of intermediaries, putting the two already frustrated executives into an adversarial position in which Epstein was forced to justify his worth and Lucchino had to argue against his value.

  Chapter 41

  The End of an Era

  ON AUGUST 15, 2004, the Red Sox were 64-52, 10.5 games behind the Yankees in the American League East and tied with the Texas Rangers for the wild-card lead. It was at precisely that point that the team went on its season-defining run, winning 20 of its next 22 contests and closing the gap with the Yankees to just two games.

  A year later, the team’s record was 68-48, a full four games better, and Boston had a three-and-a-half game lead over New York in the American League East. The Sox had opened the month by winning nine of their first 12 games. Perhaps this year, instead of closing the gap with the Yankees, the Red Sox could build on their lead. Certainly there was reason to be optimistic. Curt Schilling was getting ready to return to the team’s starting rotation, Jonathan Papelbon had shown promise in his start against the Twins, and Trot Nixon was about to return after a stint on the disabled list due to his strained oblique.

  But, unlike the year before, when the Red Sox were a hugely talented and healthy team that struggled for much of the season to get into a groove, the 2005 club seemed, if anything, to be overachieving. The team’s bullpen had been, as assistant general manager Josh Byrnes put it, “atrocious.” There was the total collapse of Keith Foulke, the disintegration of formerly reliable set-up man Alan Embree, and the physical breakdown of Matt Mantei.* Only the Red Sox’s offense—which often made the league’s other elite relievers look as bad as its own—had kept Boston in contention. The Orioles’ B. J. Ryan, who finished the year with a 2.43 earned run average, was 0-2 with a 5.87 ERA against the Sox. The Angels’ Scott Shields, who posted a 2.75 ERA on the season, was 0-3 with a 10.80 mark versus Boston. Even the great Mariano Rivera, who successfully converted 91 percent of his saves overall in 2005, blew two out of eight, or 25 percent, of his save opportunities when facing Boston.

  If the Red Sox were going to put some distance between themselves and the Yankees during the season’s final seven weeks, they would need to work hard. On the 15th, the Sox began a 10-game road trip, during which they’d travel to Detroit, Anaheim, and Kansas City. From August 23 through September 21, Boston would play a remarkable 30 games in 30 days, the longest stretch of consecutive games in all of baseball.†

  The Red Sox went 3-4 on the first two legs of their road trip. The last-place Royals, with one of the worst offenses in the league, seemed like the perfect antidote for the team’s mini-slump. Far from being a normal late-August visit to an American League cellar dweller, this would be one of the most anticipated series of the summer, because it would feature the return of Curt Schilling to the team’s starting rotation.

  Since returning to the team as a closer in mid-July, Schilling had alternated periods of effectiveness with seeming incompetence. In his 21 relief appearances, from July 14* through August 21, he went 4-3 with 9 saves and a 5.17 ERA. He still did not, as the Red Sox would readily admit, have his usual great stuff, and his move back to the starting rotation was more a reflection of the general disarray of the team’s pitching than it was a testament to the faith the Sox had in him. A year earlier, when Schilling and the Red Sox had agreed to suture his ankle tendon out of place so that he’d be able to pitch in the playoffs, they did so knowing they were taking a huge risk. Since the procedure had never been done before, there was no guarantee he’d ever fully recover. His track record thus far in 2005 didn’t inspire confidence. “It would be harder to move him out of the bullpen if his time there had been really successful,” a member of the team’s baseball operations staff told me in late August. “And it would be harder to put him in the rotation if the rotation was doing well.”

  Schilling’s return was scheduled for August 25, the final game of the road trip. It had already been a tense couple of days. After winning the first game of the Royals series two nights earlier, the Sox had lost the next game by a score of 4–3, and once again, Manny Ramirez’s half-hearted effort had potentially been the difference in the game. In the fifth inning, with Boston leading 3–1, Ramirez came to the plate with the bases loaded and one out. He hit a ball to short, and began one of his customary jogs down the first base line. David Ortiz, who’d walked ahead of Ramirez, barreled into second base in an effort to break up a double play, but Ramirez was still out at first.* (Ortiz ended up injuring his hand on the play.)

  By this point in the year, Terry Francona was physically and mentally exhausted. The 2005 season, which he’d been so optimistic about in spring training, had become torturous. He had been hospitalized before the third game of the season with tightness in his chest, which was eventually diagnosed as a viral infection. His balky knees—he’d already had 18 knee operations—were bothering him, and when the season ended, he planned on having his right knee replaced. If the day-to-day
requirements of leading the Red Sox weren’t difficult enough, the selfish demands of his veteran team made coming to the park sometimes seem like a chore. “I felt myself getting a little edgy at times and losing my patience,” Francona admitted after the season ended. Even his daily sessions with the Sox beat reporters were growing tense and occasionally combative.

  On August 25, in just such a session, the Hartford Courant’s Dave Heuschkel pushed Francona close to the edge. Heuschkel can be acerbic at times, and he prides himself on asking questions other reporters avoid. “Old school!” he’s been known to shout, in reference to his reporting style. “I’m old school, baby!”

  “Did you happen to see that ball Manny hit last night with the bases loaded in the fifth?” Heuschkel asked.

  Francona, already tired of coddling Ramirez, was in no mood. “No, I wasn’t watching,” he shot back.

  “Did you see him jog?” Heuschkel asked.

  “I don’t think he jogged,” Francona said. “I don’t think that is correct.”

  “It wasn’t hit that hard though,” Heuschkel countered.

  “Well, if you’re going to make a statement, make it right,” Fran cona replied. Now Francona’s back was up, but Heuschkel wasn’t about to give in: “He jogged. I saw it.”