Feeding the Monster Read online

  Also by Seth Mnookin

  Hard News: The Scandals at The New York Times

  and Their Meaning for the American Media

  SIMON & SCHUSTER

  Rockefeller Center

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Copyright © 2006 by Seth Mnookin

  All rights reserved,

  including the right of reproduction

  in whole or in part in any form.

  SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Designed by Paul Dippolito

  The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-9322-8

  ISBN-10: 0-7432-9322-3

  A portion of Chapter 34, “Can You Believe It?” appeared in a different form in Vanity Fair magazine.

  Visit us on the World Wide Web:

  http://www.SimonSays.com

  To my sister and brother, Abigail and Jacob;

  and my grandparents, Marjorie, Seymour,

  Marion, I.J., and Richard.

  Contents

  Introduction

  Part I: A Century of Boston Baseball

  1 From the Beaneaters to the Babe

  2 Tom Yawkey’s Team, Ted Williams’s Town

  3 The Impossible Dream and the Sixth Game

  4 The Gerbil, the Spaceman, the Rocket, and the Curse

  5 The Yawkey Trust

  Part II: For Sale

  6 Selling Boston’s Salvation

  7 The Producer

  8 The Baseball Visionary

  9 From Soybeans to Stadiums

  10 Putting Together the Team

  11 A Surreal Process

  12 December 20, 2001

  13 Boston’s Second Favorite Sport: Revenge

  Part III: A Fresh Start: 2002

  14 “Sweep Out the Duke”

  15 “Getting Ready to Have a Good Ride”

  16 The Love Affair Begins

  17 Enter Bill James

  18 Red Sox General Manager Billy Beane

  19 Introducing the Boy Wonder

  Part IV: The Best Hitting Team

  Ever Assembled: 2003

  20 Shopping at Wal-Mart for David Ortiz

  21 Kim and the Committee

  22 “You Want Me to Hit Like a Little Bitch?”

  23 The Manny Sagas, Part 1

  24 Gumped: A Cautionary Tale

  25 Not Again

  26 Nomar Wants to Know Where He Fits in

  27 The Epic Offseason Begins

  28 “This Is About Winning the World Series”

  29 The A-Rod Chronicles

  Part V: The World Champion

  Boston Red Sox: 2004

  30 Welcome to the Jungle

  31 Treading Water

  32 Trading an Icon

  33 “We’re Gonna Kick Fucking Ass Starting Today”

  34 “Can You Believe It?”

  Part VI: Feeding the Monster: 2005

  35 The Morning After

  36 Goodbye to No. 45

  37 Theo Epstein Looks to the Future

  38 The Defending Champs

  39 The Manny Sagas, Part 2

  40 The Rift Widens

  41 The End of an Era

  42 Apocalypse Now, Redux

  43 Putting It All Back Together Again

  44 Reversing the Curse

  Epilogue

  A Note on Sources and Methodology

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  Introduction

  IT WAS JUST AFTER SEVEN THIRTY on the evening of October 7, 2005, when Boston shortstop Edgar Renteria grounded out to second base to end the game, and although telephone operators at Fenway Park would continue to greet callers to the “home of the World Champion Boston Red Sox” for another couple of weeks, the Red Sox’s magical run—the one that began in February 2002, when John Henry, Tom Werner, and Larry Lucchino took control of one of the most iconic sports teams in America—was over. The Red Sox, after winning the 2004 World Series to cap what will go down as the most famous postseason run in history, had been swept in the first round of the playoffs by the Chicago White Sox.

  The immediate postmortems would center on that bases-loaded, no-outs jam the White Sox had wriggled out of in the sixth inning, but the air had been let out of the Red Sox’s game, and their season, an inning earlier. In the bottom of the fifth, designated hitter David Ortiz came up with two men on and two men out. As he lumbered toward the plate at Fenway, Ortiz was busy mulling over his previous at-bat, when he had finally put the Red Sox on the board with a towering home run to straightaway center field. Now, with the score tied 2–2, the Fenway crowd began to scream in unison as Ortiz made his deliberate, heaving journey to the batter’s box: “M-V-P! M-V-P!” It was as if the crowd felt it could will the country’s sportswriters into granting Ortiz the award if its cheers were loud enough.

  Ortiz, who bears a passing resemblance to the cartoon movie monster Shrek, contorts his face into a menacing snarl when he’s hitting; it makes him look as if he’s preparing to eat the opposing pitcher for dinner. With Johnny Damon, the team’s matinee idol of a center fielder, dancing off second base, his wild mane of hair flapping below his batting helmet, and Renteria edging off first, Ortiz uncoiled his mammoth arms and chased after Chicago starter Freddy Garcia’s first offering. The bat hit the ball sharply—thwack!—and, at first, it seemed to mirror perfectly the trajectory of Ortiz’s fourth inning shot. The crowd leapt to its feet with a roar. But as strong and powerful as Ortiz is, not even he can push a ball out of the deepest part of the park when he doesn’t connect dead on, and his bat had gotten just under this ball. As he dashed for first, and Damon rounded third, the ball arced through the crisp Boston air and fell, finally, into Aaron Rowand’s glove in center field. Inning over.

  Ortiz stopped about 20 feet from first base and froze, staring blankly at the spot where his blast had died. He stayed there as the White Sox jogged off the field. He stayed there as his teammates began taking their defensive positions around him. It was as if he couldn’t believe that this time, in this at-bat, he hadn’t been able to come through. The Red Sox had to win this game…didn’t they? They had all the trappings of a championship team, including a $127 million payroll, the second highest in baseball. (The Yankees, the perennial bullies down the block, led the field at $208 million.) They had a roster full of All-Stars: Manny Ramirez, the slugging left fielder who was often described as the best right-handed hitter in the American League; Jason Varitek, the unassuming catcher who was known as one of the premier pitch-callers in baseball; and, of course, Damon and Ortiz. They had what was commonly described as the smartest front office in the business and an ownership group that seemed as devoted to fielding a winning team and giving back to the community as it was to making money. It was a recipe that was supposed to all but ensure success.

  Indeed, since Henry, Werner, and Lucchino had taken over, being a Boston Red Sox fan, once a pastime best suited to masochists and depressives, had become fun, exciting, even trendy. Henry, the shy commodities trader, brought the same faith in statistical analysis to his baseball team that he did to his work in the markets. Werner, the television executive responsible for hits like The Cosby Show and Roseanne, helped ensure that the Red Sox’s regional sports network, the New England Sports Network (NESN), raked in revenue. And Lucchino, the hard-charging former litigator, was an uncommonly creative chief executive known for never resting on his laurels and having a keen eye for emerging front-office talent. He delighted in fostering and developing smart, young leaders, most notably Theo Epstein, the 31-year-old Bostonian who became a folk hero when he was named the team’s general manager before the 2003 se
ason.

  Together, Henry, Werner, and Lucchino had taken an organization known primarily for its heartbreaking losses and perennial runner-up status and transformed it into a world champion. Gone were the days when the team failed to sign Jackie Robinson or Willie Mays because its owner and its general manager were racists. Gone were the days when Carlton Fisk, a New England native and one of the best catchers ever to play the game, was lost to free agency because the Red Sox front office neglected to mail him his contract on time. Gone were the days of owners not speaking to management, of management not speaking to the coaching staff, of the coaching staff not speaking to the players. Gone was the Curse of the Bambino, the specter of Bucky F-ing Dent and Billy Buckner. Even the notoriously combative Boston media seemed to have been pacified by the team’s press-friendly policies and winning ways. The Red Sox of old might have fielded a team of whining, overpaid misfits who got swept in the first round, and in the old days, that sort of failure would be followed by a course of inevitable finger-pointing and recriminations, whether deserved or not. But that wouldn’t happen now. These days, things were different.

  Weren’t they?

  It had been just five years earlier, on October 6, 2000, that John Harrington, then chief executive officer of the Red Sox, announced that, for the first time in a generation, the team was up for sale. Harrington was the last direct link to Tom Yawkey, the millionaire playboy who bought the Red Sox in 1933, and whose name now graced Yawkey Way, the street on which the entrance to Fenway Park’s offices were located. Yawkey died in 1976; his wife, Jean, helped run the team until her death in 1992, at which point Harrington, one of Jean Yawkey’s closest confidants, took control of the Jean R. Yawkey Trust, which by 1994 owned a majority stake in the team.

  At first, the timing of Harrington’s announcement seemed odd. The Red Sox had just emerged victorious from a grueling legislative battle that all but guaranteed the construction of a new, modern ballpark to replace Fenway, the oldest, smallest, and least comfortable place to watch a ball game in the whole country. But Jean Yawkey’s will had compelled the trust to put the team up for sale eventually (the profits would be used to endow the charitable Yawkey Foundations), and the Red Sox’s value was at an all-time high. Attendance was up, baseball had recovered from the labor dispute that had led to the strike that canceled the 1994 World Series, and the Red Sox were stocked with exciting, top-tier talent, including pitching great Pedro Martinez and homegrown superstar shortstop Nomar Garciaparra. In the press conference announcing the sale, Harrington said that, above all else, he hoped the team would go to a local bidder. “God willing,” Harrington said, “my last act will be to turn this incredible team over to a die-hard Red Sox fan from New England who knows how important the team is to this town and the fabric of this community.” In an article the next day, The Boston Globe noted that Harrington would, of course, be willing to listen to bids from outsiders.

  The journey that began that day would continue for another 14 months. The sale of Major League Baseball teams is a notoriously Byzantine and time-consuming process; after the seller finds a buyer and the two agree on a price, the new owner still must be approved by three-fourths of MLB’s 30 owners. Baseball commissioner Allan H. “Bud” Selig is perpetually rumored to fix this or that deal to help his cronies or allies end up with the winning bid. In Boston’s case, the sale was even weirder than usual: The intense emotional hold the Red Sox have over the New England populace meant the entire region, from sportswriters to politicians, was strongly predisposed to a local group buying the team, whether or not it was willing to put up the money to do so. For much of 2001, the Boston Herald (and to a lesser extent, the Globe), unabashedly promoted the bid of Joe O’Donnell and Steve Karp, a pair of local businessmen who seemed to be friends or business associates with virtually every power broker in the city. Tom Werner, who had teamed up with Les Otten, a controversial New England ski entrepreneur, was seen as a long shot. And John Henry, who spent much of 2001 trying to get a new stadium built for the Florida Marlins, the Miami-based team he had bought in 1998, didn’t even enter the fray until November, just weeks before final bids for the Red Sox were due.

  Yet, on December 20, 2001, Henry, Werner, and Lucchino were awarded the team. Within days, word had it that the sale had been a fix, a bag job, orchestrated by Selig and perpetrated by Harrington and Red Sox lawyers. Advanced by Massachusetts attorney general Tom Reilly and rabidly propagated by the Herald (as well as Globe sports columnists Dan Shaughnessy and Will McDonough), the notion spread. For years, any discussion of the Henry ownership group would include some sort of caveat about the rigged sale of the team. Over time, this notion began to calcify—the transformation of myth into accepted reality is an essential motif in the Red Sox’s history*—and eventually the new owners more or less stopped trying to correct the record.

  The unconcealed bitterness and acrimony that greeted Henry and Werner when they arrived in Boston was only part of the problem the new owners faced. In the years leading up to the sale, the internal workings of the Red Sox organization had almost totally broken down. General manager Dan Duquette’s pathological distrust of the media had fostered a paranoid culture in which team employees had to request explicit permission before answering the most basic of questions. (At one point, a team spokesman refused to give ESPN’s Rob Neyer a list of people who had sung the national anthem at Fenway during the 2000 season, despite the fact that the information was broadcast on the park’s JumboTron before every game.) Duquette’s open feuding with his managers and the infighting among the players had only heightened the natural claustrophobia of Fenway Park, which had a tiny clubhouse to begin with.

  Still, after the sale of the team became official, Henry and his partners were ecstatic. The Red Sox, they believed, were not only one of baseball’s marquee franchises, they were also one of its most neglected. Fan outreach was nonexistent, creative revenue enhancement unheard of, marketing diffident to the point of being almost immaterial. With Boston’s fan base, and the Red Sox’s rich history, the new owners felt they were in a position not only to field consistently winning teams but also to explore previously untapped ways to bring in more money to what was already, in spite of everything, one of baseball’s more successful organizations.

  Upon taking over the team, Henry was, at first, greeted enthusiastically by many of its stars. He was known for being close to some of his former Marlins players, and word of his collegial, even paternal, relationship with players traveled quickly through Major League Baseball, with its close and chatty fraternity of multimillionaire athletes. Even Garciaparra, who had recently spoken out about how frustrating it was to play in Boston, told Henry he was excited about the future. But for all the hope and optimism he generated, Henry soon discovered just how odd a team he’d bought. On the first day of spring training in 2002, Manny Ramirez, who’d signed an eight-year, $160 million contract with the Sox before the 2001 season, approached the new owner. “Look, man, you gotta get me out of here,” Ramirez told Henry. “I hate the pressure, I hate the manager. Please. I’ve heard you’re a good guy. Please—you need to trade me.” Henry was stunned. Just weeks earlier, he was giggling in amazement over the fact that he now owned a team that could afford stars like Ramirez, who hit the first pitch he saw at Fenway as a member of the Red Sox into the netting above the Green Monster, the park’s fabled left field wall, and finished his first year with the team with 41 home runs. We can, Henry told Ramirez, do something about the manager—the Red Sox were already planning on firing Joe Kerrigan, who had taken over after Dan Duquette had axed Jimy Williams the previous August. And, per his request, the Red Sox did briefly explore trading Ramirez, but ultimately, Henry decided there was no way the team was going to part with one of the most potent offensive forces in all of baseball.

  Over the next four seasons, these dramas cropped up again and again. Ramirez’s annual trade demands would have been farcical if they weren’t so distracting. (Despite his professed unhap
piness, Ramirez averaged 40 home runs and 122 runs batted in from 2001 through 2005.) Before the 2004 season, Garciaparra was felled by a mysterious Achilles injury, and that July, the most popular Red Sox player since Carl Yastrzemski was traded to the Chicago Cubs. Pedro Martinez, even when he was earning $17.5 million a year, was obsessed with the perceived amount of respect he received from team executives. After becoming a free agent before the 2005 season, he signed a four-year deal with the New York Mets.

  If the never-ending clubhouse turmoil—and the ensuing, usually overwrought coverage by the Boston media—seemed reminiscent of the Red Sox of old, the on-field results and front-office approach were starkly different. In 2003, Epstein’s first year as general manager, the Red Sox led all of baseball in virtually every offensive category. After trailing the Oakland Athletics two games to none in their first round, best-of-five playoff series, they came back in thrilling fashion to advance to the American League Championship Series against the Yankees. That seven-game set featured on-field fights, off-field sniping, and a heartbreaking, extra-innings loss in the deciding Game 7. The next year, the Sox kept most of their offense intact while adding perennial All-Star starter Curt Schilling and bulldog closer Keith Foulke. After playing .500 ball for much of the year, the team ripped off a dominating stretch of victories late in the season and then clawed back from a three-game deficit to embarrass the Yankees in the 2004 ALCS, becoming the first team in baseball history to fall behind 3-0 and go on to win a seven-game series.* The World Series sweep of the St. Louis Cardinals, which secured Boston’s first championship since 1918, almost seemed anticlimactic in comparison, like the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team’s gold-medal–winning victory over Finland after it had upset the Soviet Union in the semifinals. Lucchino, meanwhile, helped craft an aggressively creative business approach that led to everything from the formation of a group that outsourced the team’s marketing expertise to a string of consecutive sellouts that threatens to break baseball’s all-time record.