Terry Francona 1990 Upper Deck

Before Terry Francona was the most beloved Red Sox manager of all time (he led them to the 2004 and 2007 World Series Championship, if you forgot and was a whisker from going back to the Fall Classic in 2008), he was a major league baseball player. 

I know it’s difficult to think of Francona as anything but the guy who sat at the end of the dugout in a Red Sox sweatshirt, but he was a well-regarded college player. He won the Golden Spikes in 1980 (which is the college version of MVP), won the MVP of the 1980 College World Series (that his University of Arizona team won) and was a first-round pick of the Montreal Expos. Add in that his father Tito (this is where he got that nickname, if you didn’t know) played in the Major Leagues for 15 years, and it appeared that Francona the younger was poised to be a star. 

Terry rocketed through the Montreal minor leagues and made his debut the year after he was drafted. He played in 34 games and started the season in the minors again, before coming up to stay in the second half of 1982.  

Francona didn’t have much of a position, he played a little outfield but in Montreal, they had two young, Hall of Famers in Andre Dawson and Tim Raines along with a bunch of other guys in rightfield. At first base was Al Oliver and in 1984 Francona got the opportunity to start, but he didn’t do much to establish himself as a star. The following year, he moved around a bit more and after the 1986 season, he was granted his release. 

From there he bounced around like a baseball vagabond: with stops in the North Side of Chicago in 1986, Cincinnati the following year, Cleveland the year after before winding up his career in Suds City in 1989. 

One of the things that people often say about baseball is that it’s a humbling game, and they’re right. If, at the beginning of the 1980s, you were to tell Francona that he’d end up bouncing around the Midwest hoping to latch onto a job; he’d have said you were nuts. He had the pedigree and not only that, but at every level he played at, not only was he successful; but he was among the most successful. 

I’m not sure how rapid failure, or in Francona’s case, rapid mediocrity can screw with your brain, but it must make you crazy. How can you hit like Ted Williams at multiple levels, but be stuck behind Warren fucking Cromartie at the ultimate level? Was Warren Cromartie that much better than you? Did he work harder than you? What was his secret?

I once read an interview with an athlete (I can’t recall who, and honestly it doesn’t matter) where the interviewer talked about how great it must be to a professional athlete. “You play a kid’s game and you get showered with money and praise and adulation! It must be wonderful!” And the athlete said that for stars, that kind of life is wonderful; but the majority of professional athletes aren’t stars. They’re constantly stressed out of their minds that someone is going to take their job or that their manager has a bug up their ass about them or that they’re going to lose their athleticism. Not only that but their General Manager is always looking to replace them with someone younger and cheaper. And the media is highlighting their latest screw up and that asshole in the stands is yelling at them. They live in constant fear and doubt.

It sounds like an incredibly stressful situation and I’m kinda shocked that an athlete hasn’t broken and pulled a “Last Boy Scout” yet. 

For Francona he had to live with this paranoia just like everyone else, but he also had to live with the stain of being a disappointment. That’s a lot of baggage to foist on to one person. And I think that’s why he was such a good manager. He understood what it was like to be a star and he understood what it was like to be a scrub. He got that the fear of losing this professional life, this money, this lottery ticket all of this weighed heavily on 99% of his players. He was able to coax greatness out of them because he understood them in a way that few had. 

Ted Williams was an incredible baseball player, but he was a shitty manager. In the late 60s, he managed the Washington Senators and when they moved west to Dallas, he managed the Texas Rangers for a little bit too. The one thing that Williams could never understand is why his players couldn't hit like him.

Ted Williams was probably the greatest pure hitter that ever lived. And while he studied the hell out of hitting, he had a truly unique innate ability to marry the transfer of his weight and otherworldly hand-eye-coordination to smash a spherical object thrown at great speed with another rounded object, hitting that first object very, very far. It's not easy. Every hit is a complex calculation that your brain conducts where it determines the speed of what's being thrown at you with the ability to guess where this thing is going to be in .004 seconds. Even for major league hitters, hitting isn't easy. Shit, in his greatest season ever, Williams failed 59.4% of the time.

But his inability to understand that his charges are doing their best routinely flummoxed him. 

Not so for Francona. He understood that the game of baseball is hard, that hitting a baseball is even harder still. Not only that, but he was able to express this understanding of the game's frustration. And I think that’s also why he was Michael Jordan’s first manager when MJ rode the busses in the mid 90s and called Birmingham home for a summer. Francona sorta understood what it was like to be a star (maybe not a Michael Jordan star) and he grew up in major league locker rooms, so he also wasn’t star struck either. 

Was Terry Francona perfect? No. Probably not. But for a sport like baseball with its litany of imperfect people, he does just fine.