In the wake of the Red Sox' historic collapse it was clear that there would be major repercussions. This morning Fox Sports is reporting that Tito Francona will be the first (but not likely last) victim of that backlash. It's unfortunate, but I think this had to happen.
Reflecting on the last month of the season for the Sox, I've come to the stark realization that this collapse wasn't just historic by sheer numbers of games lost and size of the lead given up... it's much much worse because of the payroll and talent level of this team. This isn't the '78 Sox who squandered a lead... this is a team built to win the World Series now, with no expense spared. A team with an enormous payroll and all-stars up and down the lineup. But this was also a team that lacked depth, cohesiveness, and fortitude. Other than a couple of gritty scrappers like Pedroia and Youkilis, this is a team that seems almost aloof in its approach. It lacked that fire of intensity and sense of urgency. This is a team that looked and played scared down the stretch. And while ultimately the fault lies with the players who did not perform, you can not minimize the impact of the leadership and management on a team of superstars. Those people need to be held accountable.
Let me start by stating that in my opinion, Terry Francona is a very good manager. He was the perfect manager to handle the gritty "dirt-dog" teams of the early and mid 2000s... he was well liked and well respected by players... he had a great sense of how to handle the brutal Boston media, and how to shelter his more quirky players from the harsh spotlight. He was always calm, cool and collected. He was a likable guy by any account. But, he was not always the most effective game-manager... especially when it came to making the hard choices with veterans. Tito has always had a habit of playing favorties with some of his veterans... of staying too loyal and giving too much rope. He played too much with his lineups... he overused effective relievers. His game management skills have often come into question.
These issues were more glaring, in my view, this year more than any other. From the get-go this team had talent, but also had some holes. a 2-9 start left the team pressing from the start of the season. The rocky start affected some players' confidence... and for some, like Carl Crawford, the handling of those early struggles caused irreparable harm. I think the handling of Crawford is one of the big reasons that Tito is not going to be managing this team any longer. It was clear early on that Francona lost faith in Crawford, and began juggling him all over the lineup. Crawford is a marquee player... and like any marquee player he has an ego. To his credit, Crawford has never let that ego out into the focused beam of the public microscope. But deep down, it has to hurt your confidence when a player who has been one of the best in the game, and the premier player on his team, suddenly finds himself badly struggling and being shuttled between 7th and 9th in the lineup. This should never have happened, and Francona needs to take the blame for that. Crawford is a top-of-the order player. He has been his whole career. You can't take a guy like that, still in his prime, after having so much success and do what the Sox did to him. I said this in a previous article, but the Sox should have slapped Crawford into the number 2 or 3 slot and left him there, struggles or not. This isn't the friggin Royals or A's lineup. This lineup had more than enough talent and depth to have been able to make up for his struggles while he worked his way out of them. Dropping him like they did, and then moving him up and down so capriciously based on one or two performances in either direction would wear on anyone, let alone a star player who's never had to deal with a lack of confidence in his entire career.
This is one of Francona's biggest weaknesses: managing the lineup. The Sox used more lineup combinations than any contending team in baseball and more than any team I can remember over the last 10 years. Baseball players more than any other professional athletes are creatures of habit. When you play every day over the course of 162 games, having a routine you can count on day in and day out offers a real mental stress release. Players want to know their roles... they want to understand their routines and know what to expect every day. With the Sox, players were left guessing day to day about the lineup. Other teams don't do this. The Yankees have employed essentially the same lineup day in and day out for years. And as a result, despite injuries and age, they remain a consistent hitting team not prone to prolonged offensive slumps. Players are given a chance to work their way out of slumps while having a modicum of confidence in their role and their spot in the lineup.
Hitters also alter their approach depending on their spot in the lineup. It's the nature of baseball... top of the order guys tend to take their approach to hit for average and high OBP. Middle of the order guys tend to try to hit for power, drive the ball and get runs in. Bottom of the order guys feel their role is just to contribute any way they can. When you begin moving guys around the lineup you may cause them to change their approach, which is never good for a regular player in the middle of the season. I've always wished Francona would settle on a lineup and go with it. The lineup this year should have looked like this:
Ellsbury (L)
Pedroia (R)
Crawford (L)
Youkilis (R)
Gonzalez (L)
Ortiz (L)
Scutaro (R)
Drew/Reddick (L)
Saltalamacchia / Varitek (sw)
You put this lineup out there every day. You stick with it, and you only change it in one or two spots if needed, and make those changes long-term. There's no reason this couldn't be done. Players will go through slumps. It's hard enough to work out of a hitting slump without having your confidence shellacked by being dropped down to the bottom of the order.
Handling the lineup is one thing, but another job of the Manager is handling the clubhouse... and by all accounts this Sox clubhouse had become fractured and somewhat dysfunctional. This is of course the risk you take when you endeavor to employ a roster of highly paid (overpaid?) athletes. I think there are some bad attitudes and pervasive negativity from certain elements of the pitching staff (ahem, John Lackey I'm lookin' at you). From the outside this team was becoming unlikable to both fans and media alike. Far, far gone are the wild and hairy days of Damon, Millar, Pedro and Manny. Terry Francona was the perfect manager for that bunch. Loyal, approachable and reasonable, he was the steady hand at the helm of a party boat. The captain that everyone loved and respected. This team is not that group. Not close to it. And Francona doesn't seem as well equipped to handle it. Now, say what you want about the players needing to be accountable for this behavior, but the reality is that with the contracts and expectations of this team, its makeup is going to remain largely intact, with perhaps the exception of the pitching staff. So if the current manager is not the right person to effectively handle the clubhouse... how can you justify not moving on?
Additionally, I think Tito's handling of the bullpen this year, and the pitching staff in general, was sub-par. This is partially his fault and partially the fault of Theo Epstein (but we'll get to him in m moment). Tito falls in love with certain relievers, and has a tendency to stick with them, overuse them, and not realize when it might be good to give them a 4 or 5 day break. He did this with Daniel Bard, who was dominant for the first 3/4 of the season, but was so overused he couldn't have gotten me out by the end of September. I won't be the least bit surprised to hear about his needing some sort of off-season procedure or therapy on that over-used right arm. By the end, Francona was too hesitant to use fresher arms like Albers or Atchison in pressure situations, and made some odd matchup choices (often throwing Bard out against fastball hitters when a pitcher with softer stuff with movement would have been the better choice, in my opinion). Alfredo Aceves was an absolute steal, and a gem in the bullpen. But he's got starter stuff and has been a starter, and frankly should have been made a starter permanently when it was clear the Sox had lost Bucholz effectively for the season. Instead Tito kept throwing Wakefield and Lackey out there, start after start, spotting teams 5 and 6 runs right off the top. His loyalty to Wake was admirable, but disastrous considering the stakes for this team. It was clear by about mid-June that Wakefield simply didn't have it this year, and might not ever be viable as a starter again. It seems that Terry Francona was the only person not to notice this. Aceves should have been inserted as a starter back then. But then again, depth in the starting rotation was a problem almost from the beginning for this team, which is really the fault of the GM, speaking of which...
If the Red Sox are going to throw Terry Francona under the bus for the total failure of this team, the guy under one of the other wheels should be Theo Epstein. For whatever reason, Theo has been the target of perpetually miserable Sox fans for years. They point to his shaky deals, like JD Drew and Julio Lugo and Edgar Renterria... but somehow conveniently forget about Curt Schilling and Kevin Millar and Bill Mueller and the countless other key cogs and savvy moves he made to assemble two championship teams. I've defended him every step of the way, and I still think he's a clever, savvy and worthy GM. However, at some point he needs to step up and take responsibility for this team's collapse... and more than anything else for the pitching staff he's assembled, and the lack of pitching depth in the minors. The biggest failure to me was an evaluation he made at the beginning of this year. Coming in to the season the Sox were looking at a pitching staff of Lester, Beckett, Lackey, Bucholz and Matsuzaka, with Wakefield as a possible long reliever / spot starter. At first glance most pundits saw this as a pretty formidable staff. Lester was an ace in waiting, Beckett was a proven vet who seemed to be over his injury problems, Lackey actually had a better year, statistically, then most realize, Bucholz had one of the league's lowest ERA's and was a revelation, and Matsuzaka, while maddeningly inconsistent, was still capable of dominating at times and looked pretty good as a no. 5 starter. However a deeper look should have revealed concerns right away. Matsuzaka hadn't been a consistent, viable starter in over two years. Lackey looked to be out of sorts in Fenway, a place where he had little success in his career prior, and just never seemed comfortable on the mound with the Sox. Beckett had not been healthy and had not pitched well in a couple of years, and Bucholz had but one year of success. I saw potential problems with this staff from the beginning. I felt the Sox should have, and could have made a run at Cliff Lee. They did not and instead went after Carl Crawford for about the same money. This was a calculated move on Theo's part, but not well thought out in my opinion. Crawford was a top-of-the-order bat... the Sox already had 2 of those guys. He was an outfielder, and the Sox did need an outfielder, but I think there would have been some decent options there outside of Crawford. And lastly, outfield is a position that can be filled by depth in the minors or with a fair number of players available via trade or free-agency. Quality starting pitching, however, especially in this past pre-season, was woefully thin. It was Lee, and then a huge dropoff. Theo didn't ask the question "what if this rotation falls apart... what if Beckett is injured again, or Bucholz can't duplicate his season, or Lackey continues to struggle, or I'm forced to accept that Dice-K just sucks... what do I do then?" He didn't ask that question. I know this because if he did, and spent any time thinking about it, Cliff Lee would have been a member of the Red Sox. Because behind that starting rotation the Sox had next to nothing. In the minors they had Felix Dubront, a talented lefty with control problems who might never be major-league ready; Kyle Weiland, a possible up and comer still a few years away, and not much else. The minor league system has maybe one or two potential highly regarded pitching prospects. Theo should have seen that pitching depth was going to bite him at some point.
Compounding the problem was Theo's handling of the trade deadline. One of the things I will never understand is this: At the trade deadline the Sox had a possible deal for Rich Harden. They backed out after reviewing his medical issues. The scuttlebut was that they then went out and traded for their next option in Eric Bedard (also with medical questions... actually recovering from an injury and still weeks away from being a viable contributor at the time). My question is this: Given the state of the Sox starting pitching at the time, with two starters out for the season and two more who were absolutely atrocious, why was this an either / or scenario? Why not get both Bedard and roll the dice with Harden? That way you have two potential options, even if one winds up injured. Given the needs, the Sox should have been looking for two pitchers anyhow. Are you telling me they didn't have the pieces to make both those trades happen? Hogwash, of course they did. And they should have. Another miscalculation by Theo.
So all tolled, I think both Francona and Theo share a large part of the blame for the Sox' performance by the end of the season... but I think the Sox' future is still in good hands with Theo (who I believe will learn from this mistake and really go all-in for pitching depth in this upcoming off-season). And while Terry Francona has been the best manager the Sox could have had over the last decade, and his contributions to managing a challenging clubhouse full of diverse personalities should never be underestimated nor forgotten, I think this team needs a new voice... a new presence and direction.
It sucks that you have to go out this way, Tito... you deserve better. Much better. But someone has to take the fall... and I think it's probably for the best for everyone that you're moving on.
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