Red Sox Rule (8 page)

Tito waited for his son to slog up the driveway. As soon as the
door opened, Tito picked Terry up—he had meant to drag him—and took him to the kitchen for a real talking-to. Mom and Dad mentioned taking baseball away from him, but Terry got off with the far easier sentence: a month of no social activities.

Besides, the professional scouts and college coaches would have been disappointed if that had been the end of his baseball career. He was going to be drafted, and he was going to be pursued by some of the top college programs in the country. He heard from Florida State, North Carolina, Wichita State, and Arizona. Of all of them, boy, did he ever love North Carolina. On a visit there, he was able to see a basketball game at the famous Carmichael Auditorium. It was beautiful to be sitting near a court, trimmed in baby blue, watching players like Phil Ford and Mike O’Koren carry out Dean Smith’s instructions. The head baseball coach, Mike Roberts, was a young guy and Terry would be one of his first recruits.

That was the plan in his heart, and although clichés celebrate romantic decisions, Terry’s unemotional baseball sensibilities knew what was best. If he wanted to stay on the sure big-league path, it probably made more sense to sign with either the University of Arizona or with the Chicago Cubs, who had taken him in the second round of the 1977 draft. Arizona’s head coach was Jerry Kindall, who had played in Cleveland with Tito. Despite that, Coach Kindall was blunt in a phone conversation with Fazio: “We don’t recruit in Pennsylvania.” What he should have added was that the Wildcats didn’t normally recruit there. They were going beyond making an exception for Terry; he had never seen the school and they had never seen him play. In both cases, with individual and institution, their reputations had preceded them.

As summer got closer to fall, the Cubs were making Terry’s decision even easier. The magic number in his head was $40,000.
If the Cubs weren’t willing to give him that to sign, he would pack up and fly to Tucson. The Cubs offered $18,000 and then upped their offer—$19,000!—before school started.
Oh, well,
he thought.
What a wasted draft pick.
He was going to Arizona.

He was alone when he flew to Tucson as a prized 18-year-old recruit. He had made the decision to attend Arizona and reject the insulting Cubs offer, and those were both grown-up decisions. But he was a kid, in body and in thought. Wait until the people in Arizona saw that they were pinning part of their future on a 6-foot-1, 160-pound package of bones. He wasn’t ready for the college fastball, he wasn’t prepared for the college workload, and he wasn’t prepared to be away from home. Back in New Brighton he had a cute girlfriend, a stable home life, and an entire town that supported him.

What had he done? He spent a lot of time on one of those dormitory pay phones, leaning against the wall and crying to his folks. The other top recruit, a junior college transfer named Brad Mills, was nothing like him. This guy was serious: he was 2 years older, he was stronger, he was organized, and he was already engaged to be married. Mills had looked forward to meeting the Terry Francona that everyone had raved about, and when he finally saw him, frankly, he thought the program was in trouble. In his opinion, those red Chuck Taylors were a pair of red flags.

Neither recruit had any idea how much their baseball lives were going to change under Kindall. He was a stickler for fundamentals, and he’d hold practices for 41/2 hours sometimes. He knew everything there was to know about baseball, and his mission was to make sure his players did, too. If they missed anything, they’d repeat a drill.

Terry got better fast under Kindall, so much so that he was a starter in left field as a freshman. Still, it seemed that everything in college was faster, and that wasn’t always positive. Just as he was
feeling good about his freshman year and his now-close relationship to teammate and roommate Mills, here was Coach Kindall with something else at the end of the year: his young left fielder had been invited to participate in summer baseball in Fairbanks, Alaska. It was a great opportunity.

“Coach, I know it sounds good,” Terry said. “But I haven’t seen my family.”

The coach was direct: “Do you want to be a real player or not?”

He went back to New Brighton for 5 days, said hello to his parents and good-bye to his girlfriend, and went to play in Alaska. From Alaska he went to play with the USA Team in Italy. From Italy he went back to Arizona. Not much changed after his sophomore year, when his featured international baseball trip was Cuba, where he looked into Fidel Castro’s eyes and shook his hand. He was getting his first taste of big-league life: there is no such thing as summer vacation.

While he was in Cuba, one of his friends—they called him the Riddler—was working on his behalf in Tucson. As a freshman, Terry had been in a methods of mathematics class with a couple of attractive girls from Tucson. He once had the nerve to pass them, hand them a note on his way by, and keep walking. They looked at the note, looked at each other, and then cracked up laughing. Of course, the joke started with the shoes and moved up to the hair, which they believed was 2 or 3 years behind the times.

Anyway, that had been 2 years earlier. The Riddler saw one of the girls, Jacque Lang, and told her that one of his friends thought she was great. The problem, the Riddler explained, was that he was too afraid to ask her out. Terry got back to Tucson, heard the story, and called Jacque Lang to apologize for his clumsy friend. And then he asked her out.

She was cute and smart, an Arizona cheerleader with her mind
on medical school. Their first date was at the Lunt Avenue Marble Club, and the date was sponsored by Grandpa Francona. Every time Terry hit a home run, Carmen would send him $10. Sometimes it seemed that Terry would round third and dial home: “Gramps, I hit a home run today…Can you get it here tomorrow?” Ten bucks could get you a whole lot of appetizers, including the fried zucchini and ranch dip that they ate that night.

What a date. They both should have had “Rx” printed on their shirts. Jacque was wearing a cast because she had fallen from a cheerleading pyramid. Terry was going to have his wisdom teeth removed and was given ominous instructions: “Try not to breathe on anybody.” He liked her a lot, and he allowed his thoughts to consider marriage when she wasn’t thinking that way at all. He may have even been thinking of marriage on that first date when, driving in his 1975 Mustang, he was talking to her so much that he rear-ended the car in front of him. At least he made her laugh. No damage, no injuries, and a relationship was born.

Terry was a dominating presence on Coach Kindall’s team by this time. He had played a lot of baseball over the summers, and he had grown into his lanky body. He hadn’t lifted many weights, and he still had packed 25 pounds onto his physique. While his freshman year was marked by a high batting average but little impact on the game, he was a middle-of-the-order contributor as a junior. There were just two issues with the season.

One was that it was the first he played without Mills, who had become an unlikely member of his family. They couldn’t have been more different on the surface. They had been roommates for road games, presumably so Coach Kindall could teach the players to get along with their alter egos. Mills was the neat freak, the one who could take one look at his pens and folders and instantly know if they had been moved 2 inches to the left or right. He had those
supplies because, long before laptops, he was keeping impeccably handwritten files on opponents and their tendencies. He was as precise, organized, and talented as any hitter who had ever come through Tucson. The first few games Terry watched him play, he said to himself, “This is the best hitter I’ve ever seen.”

Mills began his Arizona career by hitting well over .400, but a shoulder injury slowed his production and concerned the scouts. They still liked the ability, and they would have had their evaluation cards revoked if they hadn’t, but the injury added more risk to the already risky world of amateur drafting.

The other “issue” Terry had was taken care of in a 5-minute conversation with Kindall. The coach was worried that his star player might be too infatuated with Jacque, and that the infatuation would take his mind off baseball. Coaches can sense the difference between a fling and a future, and what Terry had for Ms. Lang was no fling.

“It’s still me, Coach,” Terry reminded him. “I can’t believe you’re having this conversation with me: I’m always here two hours early.”

The kid was right. His passion for baseball was overflowing; it was probably a good thing if he used some of that overflow passion to fall in love. It certainly wasn’t affecting his game or the team’s fortunes. They were favorites in the College World Series and Terry was the College Player of the Year. Mills was already in the pros, drafted in the 17th round by the Expos, and Terry was going to be joining him soon.

It seemed too staged that the Expos would draft him, too, but with the 22nd pick of the first round, one spot ahead of a high school prospect named Billy Beane. The draft happened, Arizona won the title, and Coach Kindall pulled him aside.

“I think you know what you have to do now,” the coach said. “It’s probably time for you to move on and take this opportunity.”

Terry Francona was closer to being a big-league ballplayer.

He flew home from Omaha, site of the World Series, with his parents. Jacque still had to finish school at Arizona, but he knew that the start of his pro career was not going to mean an ending for them. It couldn’t; she had no idea how close he was to asking her to marry him. But before that could happen, he had to sign a deal. He was a young man now, a man whose vision was even sharper than that of the 18-year-old kid who had been bold enough to turn down the $19,000 from the Cubs. It was 1980, his draft status had changed, and the price of doing business had gone up. His price: $100,000 on the nose.

The deal was completed over one of Birdie’s turkey dinners, and a few hours later Terry was on his way to Pittsburgh International Airport for a flight to Memphis, where he would begin his Double-A career. Tito gave him the advice of a veteran baseball man: “Son, see the ball and hit the ball.” Birdie gave him tears and a head shake: “You are now a piece of meat.” She was grateful that he had been given his father’s gift, but gifts sometimes have hidden pouches of pain. He was in a fragile place now, and she knew it. It was a place where his first love now doubled as his business, and like love, business is often irrational. She had helped raise an innocent boy with an innocent love for a sport. Now love was going to be on a contract.

There’s something about mothers: part protectors, part prophets. As Terry drove in Ugly Duckling rental cars, stayed in Admiral Benbow Hotels, and stretched out on pool rafts atop the floors of Greyhound buses—he had to get comfortable somehow—he often wondered what he had gotten himself into. How many reminders did he need that this was not the baseball bubble of Coach Kindall’s Arizona?

Maybe it was the time he saw his manager, Larry Bearnarth,
charge from the first seat of the bus toward the last, with designs on fighting a player. (They were separated, so the manager with the degree in English literature didn’t have a fight story for his memoirs.) Maybe it was the time he drove in a run and was told by one of the veterans, “You had better thank him.” Thank him? For what? Aren’t you supposed to come home from second on a single? It could have been the bus rides for trips that would have been flights in college: ten hours from Memphis to Savannah, twelve hours—Lord, have mercy—from Memphis to Orlando.

Honestly, it could have been his game. All anyone told him was to hit .300, and if he did that he’d be fine. He did it, but he didn’t like the way it was done. He was a velvet hammer tapping away in the middle of Graceland. He didn’t want to keep stacking harmless singles after harmless singles.

Things got better in his second season, when he returned to Memphis and then was summoned to Triple-A Denver. He was told to keep his apartment in Memphis because he wouldn’t be in Colorado long. The words were right and wrong: He got four hits in his first Triple-A game, and Alou, his father’s former teammate, wasn’t going to let him go back to Double-A. The manager could see that Little Tito knew what he was doing at the plate; he was so good that Alou let him put on the hit-and-run by himself. He’d tug on his helmet, and that was the sign for the runner. He was so good that he could watch the middle infielders break and hit the ball where they weren’t. If the shortstop slid over to cover, he’d slap the ball past him, too.

Alou was a fun and unusual manager to play for. While some managers needed to have their obvious fingerprints on the game, Alou’s ego didn’t get in the way of what was best for the team. If he trusted the player, he understood that the player could see certain things that the manager couldn’t.

So they all had a blast in the thin air of Denver, with each day bringing a satchel full of hits. When the Expos called for Terry in the summer of ’81, it was the last time he’d see his apartments in Memphis and Denver. Heading toward 1982, his life was all about making things official: He was officially a big-league player and, three months shy of his 23rd birthday, he and Jacque could officially refer to themselves as Mr. and Mrs. Terry Francona.

They were married in Tucson and Grandpa Francona performed the ceremony. The family had seen Carmen do weddings before, and they gently reminded Terry that there had been some flubbed names and comical lapses during big moments. Terry didn’t care. He insisted on having his grandfather bring them together. A mispronounced name or procedure out of order wasn’t going to stop the marriage. The point was having Grandpa there, and as his grandson expected, the ceremony was flawless.

If only events on the field could be described the same way, for Terry and Mills.

For Millsie, the worst parts of his collegiate career trailed him to the big leagues. If it wasn’t a shoulder it was a knee, and if it wasn’t a knee it was a random line drive hitting him in Houston. It was always something masking all that talent, and then, cruelly, it was always something taking away from it. The same player who had been good enough to jump from Double-A to the big leagues and hit .300 had been transformed into a comeback player. He was always coming back from some injury, trying to regain his stroke in the majors until the injuries forced him, permanently, to the minors.