Feeding the Monster

by Seth Mnookin

  The Beckett trade appeared to be a fantastic one—young, proven arms are rare commodities in baseball—and the local media reacted accordingly. After calling the trade “one of the most significant deals in recent team history,” the Globe’s Nick Cafardo noted how it was “CEO Larry Lucchino” who had “sealed the deal with the Marlins.” It didn’t take long before details about the trade began to emerge that made it seem less of an obvious steal. An MRI of the oft-injured Beckett’s shoulder—he’d been on the disabled list nine times in the previous four years—raised serious concerns about his rotator cuff. Assistant to the general manager Jed Hoyer, in constant consultation with Epstein, had been wary about making the trade, but Lucchino had been eager to get it done. “It was so clear what was going on,” says someone with an ownership stake in the team. “You had the people who were looking out for the long-term interests of the club advising to hold off, and the people who wanted to get the focus off of the front-office fiasco pushing to make the deal.”

  There were other, more active ways in which some Sox executives felt Lucchino was rushing to turn the page. By mid-November, Lucchino had begun interviewing GM candidates, including former Montreal Expos and Baltimore Orioles executive Jim Beattie and the Washington Nationals’ Jim Bowden. While it was obviously necessary to prepare for a scenario in which Epstein didn’t return, Lucchino repeatedly, and publicly, met with Beattie, creating an awkward situation in which it appeared as if Beattie was being actively rejected by Red Sox ownership despite Lucchino’s recommendation. By late November, Jeremy Kapstein, best known as the man in the blue windbreaker who sat directly behind home plate during Red Sox home games, began loudly promoting himself as a GM candidate. Kapstein, who had been the CEO of the San Diego Padres in 1989 and 1990, was one of several Lucchino cronies to land nebulous positions with the Red Sox.* His official title with the organization was “senior advisor/baseball projects,” but he was almost never involved with baseball-related decisions. To the extent he was thought of at all, it was as the somewhat odd, sour-faced man who squirreled away catered sandwiches and brought bags of raw sweet corn to people’s offices as gifts.

  Despite Lucchino’s recommendations, Henry and Werner did not hire Beattie, and never seriously considered Kapstein. With Henry in constant contact with Epstein, Werner focused on reconciling Epstein and Lucchino. “I spent more time on this than on anything else since I’ve been here,” Werner says. “It was crucial we made this work. These were the best people out there.” By early December, Epstein’s return was all but assured. As he began working behind the scenes with the team’s front office, the Red Sox set out about planning for his return, which would officially occur some time before the season began. In the meantime, the Sox decided to appoint Jed Hoyer and director of player development Ben Cherington the team’s interim general managers; that way the team could have some short-term stability in its front office. Hoyer and Cherington had both worked closely with Epstein, and Hoyer had been in daily contact with the former GM since he’d left on Halloween night.

  Even this seemingly straightforward plan somehow went awry. With Henry out of town and Lucchino helping to coordinate the announcement, the CEO told Hoyer and Cherington that they would simply be named co-general managers. For simplicity’s sake, there wouldn’t be any “interim” title attached. There were those within the Red Sox who viewed this as one more way of placing a hurdle in front of Epstein: Now, when he returned, he would appear to be pushing aside two allies who had loyally worked beneath him for years. At the press conference announcing Hoyer and Cherington’s appointment, Lucchino was forced to answer a barrage of questions about Epstein, who was by this time known to be making calls about possible trades on behalf of the organization. Lucchino acknowledged there was a chance the former GM would return. “I think it’s premature to discuss exactly what role, if any, Theo would have,” he said. “All we’re saying is we’ll keep the light on at the window, the door ajar. If there’s a fit, we’d love to see it happen.” He was more circumspect in private. “All human relationships have to change over time,” he told me in January, speaking of himself and Epstein. “He’s getting older and I’m getting older. There is a dynamic between us that necessarily must change. But I…that’s about all I have to say on that. I don’t feel any…it happens to lots of relationships. You hope that people are flexible enough and sensible enough to adjust to the new dynamic that’s developed.”

  With Beckett on board and Hoyer and Cherington in place, Lucchino and the Red Sox next turned their attention toward re-signing Johnny Damon. Two-thousand five had been, in many ways, a career-defining year for Damon. His cult status in Boston had been solidified, and his relaxed good looks and high comfort level with the media made him one of the most accessible and popular players on the team. He had spent much of the season leading the American League in batting average, and had had several impressive hitting streaks. And notably, during a year in which much of the team seemed fixated on individual statistics, Damon eagerly suited up even when hurt, despite the fact that his injuries likely contributed to poorer numbers, as he slumped from a .340 average on August 9 to .316 by the season’s end. In mid-September, Henry, while watching Damon grimace after taking an awkward swing, remarked, “This is a guy you want on your club. Look at what he’s going through right now. He’s in all this pain, he’s a free agent, his batting average has dropped. He could say he needs to shut it down. But not this guy.”

  Still, despite Damon’s durability and popularity, the Red Sox knew there was a good chance they’d lose him. The team was prepared to offer Damon a contract similar to the four-year, $40 million deal they gave Jason Varitek a year earlier, but Damon’s agent, Scott Boras, said he was looking for a seven-year deal worth around $12 million a year. In preparation for the likely loss of Damon, the team’s baseball operations staff had been quietly exploring deals that would bring a young outfielder to the team. Even if the Red Sox were able to re-sign Damon, they figured, there were enough question marks in the outfield, from Manny Ramirez’s uncertain status to Trot Nixon’s health, to make it prudent to have a surfeit of healthy outfielders when the season began. At one point, the team had negotiated the terms of a trade of pitcher Bronson Arroyo to the Seattle Mariners for the up-and-coming 24-year-old Jeremy Reed. Later, there was a preliminary deal that would send Arroyo and newly acquired reliever Guillermo Mota to the Cleveland Indians for 26-year-old Coco Crisp and pitcher David Riske. Both times, the deals got put on the back burner. Lucchino wanted to stay focused on re-signing Damon.

  In early December, the Red Sox began for the first time to feel optimistic about bringing back their star center fielder. Despite Boras’s claims of multiple teams being interested, there seemed to be very few suitors for Damon, and it was clear that no team was willing to commit seven years to a player who was already showing decreased range. “By then, we began to think that there really isn’t anyone out there,” says Henry. Boston made its offer official—four years at $10 million a year—and told Boras they’d like to have things settled one way or another by Christmas. Boras responded by telling the Red Sox that Damon was already fielding offers of up to $70 million. “You aren’t even in the game,” the agent said.

  Once again, it was Lucchino who favored taking a more aggressive approach. “I certainly saw his value to the club for the next few years,” he says. “Of course, part of my job is to look at the image of the club and the marketing of the club, the star quality of players on the club, and I knew what an asset we had in him in that regard. In fact, we’d helped make [Damon a star].” But the Red Sox didn’t want to raise their offer and start bidding against themselves without any real indication there were other suitors. “We all reached a consensus about how five years was just too much [to offer Damon],” says Lucchino.

  The situation remained stalled through much of December. By December 20, John Henry and Boras were in direct communication. Now Boras said Damon had a six-year deal “on the table,”
but was willing to stay with the Red Sox if they offered him five years because he loved the city and the team so much. Then, later that evening, Boras told both Henry and Jed Hoyer that there was another “hot” deal on the table, this one for $13 million a year for five years, totaling $65 million. The Sox had already agreed among themselves that they’d be willing to go up to at least $11 million a year for four years, but even that figure totaled some $21 million less than what Boras told the team Damon was being offered. We can’t, Henry told Boras, go that high.

  That night, word began to trickle out that Damon was signing with the Yankees. This had been a scenario the Red Sox had been prepared for—back in September, Henry, Epstein, and assistant general manager Josh Byrnes* had discussed how Damon could very well end up in the Bronx because of New York’s desperate need for a reliable center fielder. The Yankees, it seemed, were the mystery team who had offered the five-year, $65 million contract. But when the details of the deal finally emerged, the Red Sox were shocked to learn that Damon had signed only a four-year deal worth $13 million a year, for a total of $52 million.

  Henry, furious, confronted Boras. What of the five- and six-year deals? Henry asked. Why did you tell us not to bother bidding if we weren’t going to go to $65 million? There had been a five-year deal, Boras insisted. But in the end, Boras said, Damon decided he actually wanted to play in New York, and when the Yankees “stepped up to the plate,” Boras accepted their offer without giving the Red Sox a chance to raise their bid.*

  It turns out that Johnny Damon never had a firm six-year offer from any team, as Scott Boras had repeatedly told the Red Sox. A high-ranking official in Major League Baseball’s central office, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that as far as officials who’d been in contact with every team in baseball could tell, Damon had never even received a solid five-year offer. To Boras, any effort to weaken the bonds of loyalty a player felt to his old team would mean the possibility of more lucrative contracts. Players had traditionally been hesitant to cross the Rubicon from Boston to New York; even Damon had said just seven months earlier that there was “no way” he could play for the Yankees even though he knew they were “going to come after [him] hard.” If Boras could orchestrate it so that Johnny Damon, one of the most popular players on one of the most popular Red Sox teams in history, switched sides, what other players might be willing to do so in the future? And how much higher might player salaries go if agents could regularly get the Yankees to bid for Red Sox free agents, and vice versa?

  *The gorilla suit was auctioned off for $11,000 in January 2006. The proceeds went to charity.

  †It was the first time in memory that Steinberg hadn’t parked himself front and center during a major Red Sox announcement.

  ‡This was a smart move on Henry’s part. Before his resignation, Epstein, during a long conversation with me about his future and the future of the team, had said, “Now you’ve gotten me fired up talking about the [2006] season, I’m going to end up taking a horseshit deal to stay here.”

  *McCourt, who’d failed in his bid to buy the Red Sox, looks determined to assemble as much of Boston’s recent teams as possible. In the past two years, the Dodgers signed two Red Sox free agents—Derek Lowe and Bill Mueller—then signed Nomar Garciaparra to play first base. They also hired Grady Little as the team’s new manager, former Red Sox scout and coach Dave Jauss as the team’s bench coach, and former baseball operations executive Bill Lajoie as a senior advisor to the Dodgers general manager.

  *Another was Ken Nigro, a former Padres employee whom Lucchino hired to run the Red Sox cruises and fantasy camps. Nigro and Dan Shaughnessy both worked at Baltimore’s Sun in the early 1980s, and both Nigro and Kapstein have reputations within the Red Sox as sources for Shaughnessy.

  *On October 28, 2005, Byrnes was named the general manager of the Arizona Diamondbacks.

  *In March 2006, Damon said he would have been willing to go back to Boston for $11.5 million a year, just $500,000 more annually than the Red Sox had already agreed to offer him. Of course, he also said he was hurt that the Red Sox didn’t want him back and implied that he felt disrespected by the team’s $40 million offer. “I even bought a home [in Boston] because they’d told me I’d be there a long time,” he said early in the 2006 season.

  Chapter 44

  Reversing the Curse

  BY JANUARY 19, 2006, much of the turmoil and drama that had defined the winter months at Fenway Park had passed. Down in the team’s baseball operations department, Epstein’s office remained unoccupied, the sign advertising $100 cartons of milk still taped to the window. Jed Hoyer and Ben Cherington were ready and waiting for their once and future boss to come back to work. Epstein and Hoyer spoke several times that day, as they prepared for an announcement regarding Epstein’s return that was scheduled to occur within the week. The rest of the department’s staffers joked about how they hoped Epstein was resting up. Once he officially returned to work, they knew he’d be back on the same relentless schedule.

  Three floors up, the team’s public-relations office seemed uncharacteristically calm. During the season, the department would be a frenetic whirlwind of staffers dealing with credential requests, culling clips, and preparing pre- and postgame informational packets. Now, a handful of staffers were flipping through one of the team’s page-a-day calendars and playing a lighthearted game of “name that Red Sox player.” Everyone seemed relaxed.

  Everyone, that is, except for Charles Steinberg. In the wake of Dan Shaughnessy’s October 30 column, there was a vigorous effort within the organization to determine if Steinberg, the most commonly mentioned suspect, had actually been one of the sources for the piece. Steinberg resolutely insisted he’d had nothing to do with it, but he’d still been muzzled, and had remained uncharacteristically quiet for much of the winter.

  About a month earlier, Steinberg had taken his annual trip to Aruba. Every year, he buys the same type of lined notebook, lies down on the beach, and “tries to get in the mind frame of the 10-year-old fan” in order to brainstorm new ways to promote the team. This year, he’d filled page after page with ideas for in-game video shorts to be aired on the stadium’s JumboTron: a day in the life of a ballboy; a day in the life of a clubhouse attendant; a day in the life of a groundskeeper. But on that beach in Aruba, Steinberg had other things on his mind as well, and at one point he wrote down some questions to which he did not have an answer. “Will this be my last year working with the Red Sox? With Larry?”

  Late in the afternoon on January 19, Steinberg paused to reflect about everything that had occurred during the previous months. He tried to deflect attention away from himself, explaining why he’d been less visible than usual by saying, “This has been a difficult time for Larry.” He went on: “I would imagine it’s been a difficult challenge that he is proud to have met. He doesn’t seek any pity.”

  At almost the precise moment that Steinberg was speaking, Dan Shaughnessy was talking to John Henry on his cell phone. Not long after Epstein left the team, Shaughnessy had written a column titled, “Time to kiss and make up: Sox search should look back at Epstein.” Now, Shaughnessy said, he was preparing to write a piece that said Epstein was selfishly holding the club “hostage,” and that Henry should either “fire Lucchino or tell Epstein to get lost.”

  Henry, who was with Tom Werner in Phoenix at the annual baseball owners meeting, explained to Shaughnessy that Epstein was not holding the club hostage. In fact, Henry said, all of the key people in the organization already knew of his impending return. Since the team’s limited partners were meeting that weekend, Henry said, he wanted to wait to make an official announcement until he had had a chance to speak with all of them.

  Tough luck, Shaughnessy replied. His column was running the next day. “He was going to write things that were nasty,” says Tom Werner. “And false.” After all that had transpired in the wake of Shaughnessy’s October 30 column, Henry and Werner did not want to deal with the fallout from another b
roadside. That night, they rushed out a statement: Epstein would be returning to the club, and the details of the arrangement would be announced soon.

  Shaughnessy seemed to take the announcement as a personal affront. In his next day’s column, he wrote, “The white knight is riding back to Fenway on his high horse.” Calling Epstein “at best, immature and at worst, duplicitous,” he said the entire situation was “embarrassing.” Shaughnessy then went on to imagine the scene at the Red Sox offices: “The people in baseball operations were working hard as usual late Thursday night, trying to plug the team’s holes in center field and shortstop, when Epstein called them and told them there was going to be an announcement that he’s coming back next week. No one knew quite what to say to their former boss. There’s been no discussion about who will report to whom. No one knows how this is going to work, and Theo has burned some bridges with his own people.”

  It is true that there were those in the Red Sox baseball operations department who felt frustrated and even a little betrayed by Epstein. His decision to walk out was seen as peevish, his need to see the world in black-and-white unrealistic. There were, after all, plenty of people who worked for difficult bosses, and most of them managed to find a way to deal with the situation. While Epstein had been off chilling with Pearl Jam in Argentina and vacationing in Hawaii, his mostly unheralded former colleagues had to deal with the turmoil that resulted from his absence. But these were the minor gripes of people who felt close and loyal to Epstein. The notion that his return wasn’t anticipated was comical, as was the charge that there were chain of command issues that remained unsettled.