Feeding the Monster

by Seth Mnookin

  This book grew out of that assignment, and is the product of a unique arrangement I had with the Red Sox. In the months following the Red Sox’s World Series victory, the team’s executives and management were deluged with book proposals. By that time, I had gotten to know John Henry, who was familiar with Hard News, my book on The New York Times. (The Times Company is the largest minority partner in the Sox.) While the book proposals poured in, John and I had a general conversation about the publishing industry, and at the end of that conversation, I told him I’d love the chance to write about the team. I also told him that the book I was interested in writing was a very different one from those that had been suggested to him—projects in which he’d share royalties with the author or dictate what material the book included. The book I wanted to write was not an official or sanctioned history of the team, and I wasn’t willing to grant John (or the team) any editorial control over the final product. There was a sprawling story to be covered, from the sale of the team in 2001 to the aftermath of the World Series victory, and in order to do it justice I wanted to treat the Red Sox as I’d treat any other journalistic subject, with the freedom to ask about anything and write about everything.

  John almost immediately agreed. I was surprised, although I’ve since learned this level of openness and transparency is totally consistent with how he does business. I was granted access to all levels of the organization, from John and his partner, Tom Werner, to top management, baseball operations, and the team’s coaching staff and players. Larry Lucchino set me up with a desk at Fenway and an electronic passkey that opened almost every door in the park. I sat in on meetings and traveled with the team, and no subject was off limits. (There was only one caveat to my arrangement: as a result of having access to Fenway’s offices and free run of the organization, I had to clear any proprietary financial documents I came across. Everything else was fair game.) While there have been behind-the-scenes books about major league sports teams and tell-alls written by current and former players, Feeding the Monster is, to the best of my knowledge, the first book in which a writer was given unfettered access to every level of a club.

  The openness with which John greeted me with was replicated by almost everyone within the Red Sox. As a result, this book is informed by more than 100 hours of exclusive interviews with past and present employees of the team. In addition to those one-on-one meetings, I attended more than half of the Red Sox’s 162 games during the 2005 season. My routine on game-day usually went something like this: After spending the morning in the Sox offices, I’d retreat to the team’s clubhouse at three thirty and spend the next several hours masquerading as a beat reporter. At six, I’d either head up to the press box or over to the partners’ or the principal owner’s suite. I also interviewed dozens of people not directly associated with the Red Sox, from Boston businessmen to people involved in the sale of the team, as well as journalists, baseball officials, agents, and players from other teams. In general, any quotes that result from an exclusive interview are designated by a present-tense verb: says, asks, etc.

  For recent history, I relied heavily on coverage in The Boston Globe, the Boston Herald, The Providence Journal, and the Hartford Courant. When quoting from a particularly impressive scoop, I tried to give that reporter credit. When re-creating box scores or computing pitching or batting statistics, I strove to use as many independent sources as possible. Still, there’s always the possibility the data I relied on may be off. ESPN.com’s website contains detailed game logs; however, these are occasionally faulty, especially when it comes to pitching lines. In a sport with so many numbers floating around, other vagaries abound. As I discovered, sometimes reputable sources will have different numbers for a particular pitcher’s splits as the result of a switch-hitting batter choosing to hit the “wrong” way: batting lefty against a left-handed pitcher, for instance, when a scorer assumes he’ll bat righty. Even figures from Major League Baseball and Stats, Inc., sometimes differ because of mistakes such as this.

  I consulted a handful of the many books written about the Red Sox, including Baseball Prospectus’s Mind Game, Howard Bryant’s Shut Out, Johnny Damon’s Idiot, Peter Gammons’s Beyond the Sixth Game, Peter Golenbock’s Red Sox Nation, David Halberstam’s The Teammates, Richard A. Johnson and Glenn Stout’s Red Sox Century, Tony Massarotti and John Harper’s A Tale of Two Cities, Leigh Montville’s Ted Williams, and Dan Shaughnessy’s The Curse of the Bambino and Reversing the Curse. Robert K. Adair’s The Physics of Baseball, Michael Lewis’s Moneyball, Daniel Okrent’s 9 Innings, Okrent and Harris Lewine’s The Ultimate Baseball Book, Alan Schwarz’s The Numbers Game, and Andrew Zimbalist’s In the Best Interests of Baseball? were also much-used references. Bill James’s and Roger Angell’s articles and books, the annual Baseball Prospectus guides, Ben McGrath’s New Yorker articles on Bill James and the knuckleball, and the websites Baseball Prospectus, Baseball Reference, ESPN.com, Retrosheet, and Sons of Sam Horn were valuable resources as well.

  Acknowledgments

  For the past 20 years, my mother has been teaching me how to write. As I’ve moved from high-school essays to a college thesis to newspaper and magazine stories to books, the biggest change in our working relationship has been the demands I’ve made on her time. In the month before this manuscript was due, she was available around the clock. I could send her 10,000 words two hours after asking her to read through the first half of the book for the 10th time and her only question would be, “How soon do you need it back?” (Since my mother deserves credit for any of the felicitous writing contained herein, those who enjoyed this book should check out—and buy—her poetry, which you can find at www.wendymnookin.com.) During those same frantic final weeks, my father would call in comments from airports around the country, and on more than one occasion he asked for entire chapters to be sent to him via BlackBerry. In my periods of greatest exhaustion, he helped boost my flagging spirits as only a father can.

  Hanya Yanagihara, Karen Olsson, and Jonathan Mahler gave me invaluable insight and feedback. Hanya, in the middle of editing features and redesigning portions of Condé Nast Traveller, listened to my complaints, tightened my prose, and indulged me during several semi-coherent fits. Karen, fresh off of the publication of her amazing novel, Waterloo, responded to my panic by suggesting a cross-country exchange. Her daily queries and encouragements both sharpened the book and helped me to keep on keeping on. Jon, whose Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bronx Is Burning is the model for literary nonfiction that combines social history with baseball, helped sort out what seemed to be intractable structural problems.

  I met Tim Mennell when he was hired to do a blind read of Hard News. A year and a half later, I was still in awe of how spot-on his comments, suggestions, and fixes were. Despite being asked to help on this book at the last moment, Tim—the self-appointed “vice president of the Upper Midwest branch of the Denny Doyle Appreciation Society”—signed on. He caught clumsy errors, stupid errors, and completely understandable errors. He offered elegant fixes for thorny problems and humorous solutions for daily dilemmas.

  I first encountered John Tomase during the Red Sox’s 2005 home opener, the beginning of my season with the team. John, then the Sox reporter for the North Andover Eagle-Tribune, was warm and welcoming from the start. More important, he was exceedingly funny and one of the smartest writers working the beat. (One of the perpetual frustrations of 2005 was slogging through the Trib’s user-repellent website in order to read John’s articles.) At the end of the 2005 baseball season, when the Boston Herald hired John to cover the Patriots, it was bad news for fans of great baseball writing and reporting. It was a boon for me in that it freed up John to read and make suggestions on my manuscript without being tempted to poach my best material. He offered insightful suggestions and helped with some particularly troublesome sections. And he kept me laughing, even after I’d spent the previous 18 hours staring at a computer screen.

  This project grew out of a story I wrote for Vanity Fair,
where I’ve been lucky enough to have Anne Fulenwider as an editor and Graydon Carter as an editor in chief. Not many editors of a glossy magazine known for combining high society and celebrity coverage with hard-hitting political and investigative stories would set a writer loose on a baseball team, but Anne and Graydon did just that. At Vanity Fair, I was paired with Sarah Czeladnicki and John Huba, a photo editor and photographer who are both rabid Yankees fans. (I believe Huba’s first words to me were, “I can’t fucking believe this is the assignment I got.”) It’s a testament to the incredible talents of both that they produced a spread that contained some of the best sports photojournalism I’ve ever seen. I was so taken with Huba’s photographs (and Sarah’s photo editing) I asked them both to help out on this project. Despite the fact that it meant they’d once again have to pore over images of David Ortiz and Curt Schilling, they readily agreed. (Even Yankees fans, it seems, can be generous.) Many of the other photographs contained in this book come from the pages of The Boston Globe. Kathleen Cable, from the Globe’s photo research department, helped me select those pictures. When she sent me the initial packet of shots she’d put together without the benefit of having read any of the book, they so perfectly illustrated my text that I was convinced she’d found some way to tap into my hard drive.

  Rebecca Seesel and David Fellows transcribed so many hours of interviews I’m sure the sound of my voice makes them cringe. They both did an admirable job, often turning around tapes in record time.

  At Simon & Schuster, Bob Bender (another Yankees fan—they apparently breed like mice) constantly amazed me with his encyclopedic knowledge of baseball and his willingness to edit as many thousands of words as I could spit out. He’s one of the deftest and gentlest editors I’ve encountered. Thank God for that: When Bob suggested we trim my section on the history of the Red Sox by half—half!—it was his mellifluous tones that made me realize he was right. David Rosenthal has been in and out of my life for the better part of a decade, and I’m lucky to finally get the chance to work with him. He’s an almost perfect publisher: smart, funny, savvy, and aggressive with a huge set of balls. My agent, David McCormick, immediately saw the incredible opportunity this book afforded me and was a forceful and convincing advocate from the day I told him I wanted to spend the next year of my life following the Red Sox.

  I spent much of the spring and summer in Boston where Judith and Sean Palfrey, the housemasters of Harvard’s Adams House, gave me refuge. More than a decade after she thought she’d gotten rid of me, Victoria Macy helped deal with all my little problems, from figuring out how to gain access to the gym to securing a working air conditioner.

  I could not have completed this book without a place to actually write. For three straight months, I essentially moved into Paragraph, a workspace for writers in downtown Manhattan. It saved me. Anyone looking for a quiet place to work should visit www.paragraphy.com. (Just don’t steal the perch.)

  Finally, the men and women who work for the Boston Red Sox were remarkably warm, accommodating, and gracious. Naming everyone who was helpful would require listing almost every last person on the team’s payroll, from the clubhouse attendants to the PR interns to John Henry, Tom Werner, and Larry Lucchino. I thank them all.

  Index

  Aaron, Hank

  Alderson, Sandy

  Alfond, Harold

  Alfond, Theodore and William

  Alomar, Roberto

  Alou, Felipe

  Alou, Moises

  American League, birth of

  American League Championship Series (ALCS)

  (1999)

  (2003)

  (2004)

  American Skiing Company

  Anaheim Angels

  [2004] playoffs

  up for sale

  Anderson, Brady

  Anderson, Larry

  Anderson, Marlon

  Angell, Roger

  Angelos, Peter

  APBA

  Aramark Corporation

  Arizona Diamondbacks

  Armas, Tony Jr.

  Arnold, Roseanne

  Arroyo, Bronson

  2004 playoffs

  2004 season

  Atlanta Braves

  Bagwell, Jeff

  Bailey, Steve

  Baltimore Orioles

  bankruptcy sale of

  history of

  Lucchino as CEO of

  payroll of

  2005 season

  Williams as owner of

  Bard, Josh

  Barnicle, Mike

  Barrett, Marty

  baseball:

  all about repetition

  “backdoor” strike

  changeup pitches

  fastballs

  goof pitches

  hitting to opposite field

  inefficient markets of

  knuckleballs

  mechanics of pitching in

  player tribalism in

  popularity of

  “scaffolding” for players in

  shortstops in

  see also Major League Baseball; specific teams

  Baseball Writers Association of America (BBWAA)

  Beane, Billy

  Beattie, Jim

  Beck, Rod

  Beckett, Josh

  Beeston, Paul

  Belichick, Bill

  Bellhorn, Mark

  Beltre, Adrian

  Bench, Johnny

  Bichette, Dante

  Bigbie, Larry

  Bill James Baseball Abstract

  Bingham, Dana & Gould

  Bird, Larry

  Birmingham, Thomas

  Birmingham Barons

  Boddicker, Mike

  Boggs, Wade

  Bonds, Barry

  Bonds, Bobby

  Bonilla, Bobby

  Boone, Aaron

  Boras, Scott

  Boston:

  July Fourth celebrations in

  national identity of

  rivalry of New York and

  segregation in

  Boston Americans

  Boston Beaneaters

  Boston Bruins

  Boston Celtics

  Boston Concessions Group

  Boston Foundation, The

  Boston Globe, The

  Gammons’s columns for

  management criticized by

  on Red Sox sale

  Shaughnessy’s columns for see Shaughnessy, Dan

  Boston Herald

  on GM position

  management criticized by

  on player infighting

  on Red Sox sale

  on superstars

  Boston media:

  access to clubhouse

  BBWAA members

  competition in

  and Duquette

  and Epstein

  expectations of

  extensive coverage by

  Henry’s dealings with

  on “Impossible Dream” season

  management criticized by

  and national audience

  notorious combativeness of

  on player acquisitions

  on player infighting

  players criticized by

  on Red Sox sale

  relentless negativism in

  rumors spread by

  sales of

  Spanish-speaking reporters absent from

  on superstars

  on 2004 season

  on 2005 season

  Boston Pilgrims

  Boston Red Sox:

  attendance figures of

  baseball operations office of

  charitable operations of

  corporate sponsors of

  effects of success on

  fans of, see Boston Red Sox fans

  financial picture of

  limited partners in

  management strategy session

  as Mecca

  minor league system of

  name of

  1967 “Impossible Dream” season

&nbs
p; 1975 World Series

  1978 season

  1986 World Series

  1995 season

  1999 playoffs

  ownership group

  payroll of

  racial segregation in

  and revenue sharing

  rich history of

  and Ruth, see Ruth, Babe

  sale of

  as Sportsmen of the Year

  statistical analysis used by

  statistics of

  team building in

  transition period of

  2001 season

  2002 season

  2003 playoffs

  2003 season

  2004 playoffs

  2004 season

  2004 spring training

  2004 World Series

  2005 season

  2006 season

  as World Champions

  as world-class team

  Yankees rivalry with

  Boston Red Sox fans

  broken hearts of

  expectations of

  intensity of

  Internet sites of

  national audience of

  regionwide, see New England

  Royal Rooters

  team outreach to

  and 2002 season

  and 2004 playoffs

  and 2004 World Series

  Boston Red Stockings

  Boston Somersets

  Boswell, Thomas

  Bowden, Jim

  Boyd, Oil Can

  Bradford, Chad

  Bradley, Bill

  Brenly, Bob

  Brock, Lou

  Brooklyn Dodgers

  Brosius, Scott

  Brown, Kevin

  Browne, Ian

  Bruschi, Tedy

  Bryant, Howard

  Buck, Joe

  Buckley, Steve

  Buckner, Bill

  Buffett, Warren

  Burkett, John

  Burks, Ellis

  Bush, George W.

  Bush, Jeb

  Butterfield, Fox

  Byrnes, Eric

  Byrnes, Josh

  Cabrera, Daniel

  Cabrera, Orlando

  Cafardo, Nick

  Cairo, Miguel

  California Angels

  Callahan, Gerry

  Camden Yards, Baltimore

  Cameron, Mike

  Caminiti, Ken

  Cammarata, Ben

  Carbo, Bernie

  Carsey-Werner Productions