Let’s see if I have this right. The Boston Red Sox fire Terry Francona, who managed them to two World Series championships, including the franchise’s first in 86 years. They hire Bobby Valentine, who manages them to a last-place finish in their worst season in nearly half a century.
The Red Sox then hire John Farrell to replace Valentine, and despite a gloomy forecast he manages them into the American League East lead or a tie for the lead for the first 38 days of the season and in second or tied for second for another 14 days, a total of 52 days of the first 55 days of the season.
Meanwhile, after a one-year hiatus from managing, Francona goes to Cleveland, where he manages the Indians into the A.L. Central lead with one of their best starts in recent years (24-17 then, 27-21 before Sunday).
The Red Sox fired Francona despite those World Series championships and eight winning records in his eight seasons. The team didn’t make the playoffs in Francona’s final two seasons, and he was accused of losing control of the team at the end of his tenure. You might remember the fried chicken and beer in the clubhouse during games.
Indians official, however, had no problem making Francona manager of the team his father Tito played for from 1959 through 1964.
“The only concern we had,” Mark Shapiro, the club president, said, “was this what he really wanted? Could he handle the market after where he had been?”
Usually, that question is asked about a manager or a player going from a small market to a large market, but Francona was going from the frenzied city of Boston and its often unruly fans to the smaller and more reserved city of Cleveland.
“He said, ‘For a lot of reasons this is the place I want to be,’” Shapiro related by telephone Friday. “‘This is where I want to be. I want the challenges of the young players.’”
Not to speculate too much, but perhaps Francona had had enough of some of the veteran players he experienced in Boston. Younger players will generally be more respectable of managers than veterans will be, especially when the manager is easy going and not a strict disciplinarian.
Shapiro and general manager Chris Antonetti got to know Francona when he worked with them as a special assistant in 2001 after the Philadelphia Phillies ended his four-year managerial tenure with them.
“When he got fired in Philadelphia, I called him and offered him a special assistant job,” Shapiro said. “He worked here for a year.”
The lure of the uniform, however, was too strong for Francona to stay in the front office. He served as a bench coach for the next two years, one year in Texas, one in Oakland, and then the Red Sox hired him to manage them.
The Indians would be delighted to have Francona duplicate his Boston experience, starting with what they would like to be their first winning season since 2007.
“You could expect him to be a laid-back guy, but he’s extremely competitive,” Shapiro said. “He wants to win every game. He’s humble, very respectful of the game, respects how hard the game is to play. He’s humble, self-deprecating.”
The manager is not the only new body in an Indians’ uniform. Half of the infield, two-thirds of the outfield and some members of the relief corps are also new.
“We’ve been far more productive this year than last year,” Shapiro said. “Our lineup one through nine, top to bottom, is stronger. By any standard our lineup is a good lineup. Every guy has contributed.”
Entering the weekend, the Indians were second in the league in total bases, had the second highest slugging percentage and were tied with the second most home runs. They had the third highest on-base percentage and the fourth highest batting average and were tied with the third most runs scored.
Last season they were 13th in runs and slugging percentage, 12th in home runs, ninth in batting average, tied for eighth in total bases and sixth in on-base percentage.
Winning only 68 games, one of their five lowest totals of wins in four decades, the Indians drew their second lowest attendance – 1,603,596 – since 1992.
In an attempt to improve the team and lure fans back to the park, they created half of a new infield, signing third baseman Mark Reynolds and first baseman Nick Swisher, and brought in two new outfielders, signing Michael Bourn and trading for Drew Stubbs.
The new players have helped improve the team but not increase the attendance. Their average attendance this year, the league’s lowest, 16,166, computes to 1,309,446 for the season.
Reynolds leads the team with 12 homers and 40 runs batted in, and his 50 strikeouts don’t lead the league. Bourn is hitting .314 despite missing 20 games with a five-stitch lacerated finger, a memento of a foolish head-first slide into first base trying to beat out a grounder.
Swisher, with time off recently for a paternity leave, is hitting .273 with a .487 slugging percentage. Stubbs has contributed the least of the new Indians with a .245 batting average and a .298 on-base percentage.
On the pitching side of the Indians’ success this season, the two strengths let Francona down on his return to Fenway Park this weekend. Justin Masterson, who has two 1-0 complete games among his seven wins, was battered for five runs in six innings Friday night in an 8-1 loss, and the usually reliable bullpen twice squandered leads in Saturday’s 7-4 loss.
Bryan Shaw, who had a 1.54 earned run average in 18 relief appearances, gave up a tying run in the sixth inning. The Indians regained the lead, 4-3, in the seventh, and Joe Smith, with a 1.13 e.r.a. in 17 games, preserved it in the bottom of the seventh.
But in the bottom of the eighth, the Red Sox rocked Vinnie Pestano, who had a 2.45 e.r.a. in 11 games, for four runs and further spoiled Francona’s anxious homecoming.
Francona acknowledged to reporters that he had some discomfort before Thursday’s series opener and told how general manager Antonetti alleviated it.
“He grabbed me before I went out,” Francona said. “I think he knew I was kind of pacing a little bit. He actually kind of grabbed me and said, ‘Hey, enjoy the moment. Take a minute and enjoy it.’ And I started to kind of give him a look, and he said, ‘No, seriously. Take a minute to enjoy it.’
“The fact of where I’m at with the Indians allowed me to probably enjoy it more. It kind of showed me that you can have something good and enjoy the past. It’s not a knock on the past. Some of it was wonderful – a lot of it was. I kind of found a pretty nice play for the future.”
The immediate future is what Francona and the Indians have to face. In each of the past two years, they began the season as they have this one but were unable to maintain their pace.
Last season the Indians had the same 27-21 record after 48 games but staggered to a 41-73 record the rest of the way. The previous season they had a 30-18 record after the first 48, then compiled a 50-64 record for the rest of the schedule.
Shapiro is confident the Indians can avoid those types of turnarounds. “We have a much stronger foundation,” the president said. “The lineup is stronger and the bullpen is strong. If our rotation holds up, we have a chance to contend all season long.”
The biggest challenge, Shapiro added, is “the best team in baseball is in our division. They don’t have a good record now, but we expect them to be one of the best teams.”
Shapiro, of course, was talking about the Detroit Tigers. At the time he was speaking, the Indians were in first place, half a game ahead of the Tigers. Eight hours later the Indians were in second place, half a game behind the Tigers.
PIRATES PLAYING WITH THEIR FANS AGAIN
The higher they rise the harder they fall.
That’s one possible way of looking at the position in which the Pittsburgh Pirates are perched. But another way is the higher they rise the less likely they will be to fall – under .500, that is.
The Pirates awoke Sunday with a 30-19 record, a season-high 11 games over .500. After 49 games last season, they had a 24-25 record. Yet they built their record to 63-47 on Aug. 8, and with 52 games left in their season, Clint Hurdle’s team seemed certain to be able to win the 19 games they needed to put an end to their ugly, demoralizing losing streak that had reached a Major League Baseball record of 19 years.
They would not make it to an even two decades, right? Wrong. The Pirates won only 16 more games and lost 36 for a season-finishing 79-83 record and extending their losing streak to two decades. Young baseball fans in Pittsburgh were growing up, some emerging from their teen-age years without experiencing a winning Pirates’ season.
As if they and all Pirates’ fans, old and older, hadn’t seen enough disaster, here was another one, Elias Sports Bureau researched baseball history and found that no team had ever played at least 110 games with a record 16 games over .500 and finished the season under .500.
The Pirates, as of Sunday morning, were only five games from matching last season’s high mark, but of course they had many more games remaining on the schedule than they had last year when they were 16 over.
Those extra games could work for or against the Pirates or not matter at all. The Pirates need to win 51 or 52 of the remaining 113 games to avoid another losing season or attain a winning season.
Neal Huntington, the Pirates’ general manager, did not return calls made over two days to his various telephones to discuss the Pirates’ play. Maybe he anticipated the reason for the calls and simply wanted to avoid talking about a tired subject.
But if he is tired talking about it, think of how the fans feel watching their heroes fail year after year. With the hope they raised before the collapse last season, the Pirates hit the 2 million mark in attendance for the first time in a dozen years.
This season, though, the fans apparently are resisting letting the Pirates fool them. The attendance is second lowest only to the Miami Marlins fan count and figures to 1,673,055 for the season.
On the other hand, if the Pirates maintain their over .500 status, they may be able to fool the fans again.
ESPN MAKES MONEY AND MISTAKES
The ESPN sports elephant doesn’t have to accept criticism, constructive or otherwise, from anyone, certainly not from a guy writing a baseball column on an unassuming Web site. But you’d like to think ESPN editors and executives are professional enough to want to be accurate.
Last week I wrote about how both ESPN.com and MLB.com had incorrectly characterized Reid Ryan’s position with the Houston Astros. They named him president of business operations, but those major Internet baseball sites left off the “business operations” and declared him to be the team’s president.
As the week went on, ESPN.com continued to shorten Ryan’s title and enhance his status.
Promoting a podcast, the site said, “Buster Olney talks to Reid Ryan about his first moves in running the Astros.”
Olney, in fact, asked Ryan how he sees his role in baseball operations, and Ryan replied, “That’s not my gig.”
His gig is business operations. He is president of business operations, not of the Astros.
I called ESPN’s attention to its error, and this was the reply I received:
“He is running the franchise, as most team presidents do. The GM runs baseball operations. The usage is accurate, as was Reid’s answer.”
I then asked Gene Dias, the Astros’ senior spokesman, about the matter, and he reiterated Ryan’s position and responsibilities, saying he was in charge of business operations and reported to the principal owner, Jim Crane, just as general manager Jeff Luhnow reports to Crane.
That should be clear enough, but I would not be surprised if ESPN still gets it wrong. One reason I suspect that is a promotional line ESPN.com ran for another Olney podcast:
“Buster Olney talks about the line in the sand that Don Mattingly has drawn with Tim Kurkjian.”
I didn’t get to listen to that podcast, but I wish I had because I wanted to learn why the Los Angeles Dodgers’ manager had drawn a line in the sand with an ESPN reporter.