It has been a week now since Terry "Tito" Francona has gotten any real sleep. This past month he has endured more stress than most of us will encounter in a lifetime. He got into Baltimore Monday night around 3 AM, and after that night's excruciating loss to the Orioles it was reported that he never returned to the hotel, wandering the streets of Edgar Allen Poe in the humid gloam.
On Wednesday afternoon, prior to the Red Sox last act on the field in their historic collapse of 2011, he made his obligatory appearance on WEEI sports radio in Boston. Although typically polite, there were two remarkable moments of live radio. 1) He was asked twice about returning to Boston--did he hope that Theo and company would pick up his option? This was his chance to say all the right things about the organization and that of course he hoped to have his job back. Uncomfortable silence, and then he said he couldn't answer, that this wasn't the time and place, and that all his energy was needed to help the Sox on the field. Hosts Michael Holley and Mikey Adams made the question simpler and more direct, and again the pause, this time longer. He ducked the chance to declare his desire to remain a member of Red Sox Nation.
2) Mohegan Sun has a sponsored segment within the sponsored segment. They encourage fans to submit a question for the manager, the best questions make air, and the individual who submits the best of the best gets to spend an evening at the Casino with Tito, including a glamorous dinner with the skip. Wednesday's entry went like this: "Based on the fact that the Sox did so poorly at the start of the year AND the finish, should you have been tougher on the players." Francona dismissed the question, saying it's the worst he had heard. Holley countered, "Actually, it's at the top of our list right now." Francona stepped out of his polite veneer. "You tell him if he wins, that I'm not coming." He repeated his vow to make sure everyone realized he wasn't kidding, and got off the line and returned to his game prep in Baltimore, a game that could very well be his last in a Boston uniform.
After decades of being the underfunded underdog to Stenibrenner's machine, the Red Sox, the "Old Towne Team," are now the spending fools of major league baseball. During this past weekend's drubbing in the Bronx, Yank's GM Brian Cashman essentially made fun of the Red Sox pursuit of the grossly underachieving Carl Crawford this past off-season, saying that he made a bid on last year's prize free agent just to drive up the price , and that his left fielder Brett Gardner performs the same role at a savings of $10 million per. The Crawford debacle is not even the Sox greatest headache. The team is stuck with petulant John Lackey for 3 more years, grossly overpaid, underachieving and downright rude every time he coughs up the ball to Francona after each brutal performance. You can't blame Francona for not wanting to return to a clubhouse with Lackey in it, the number one scapegoat of this infamous season.
Sox Geo Theo Epstein and the Red Sox acts of horrible overspending, simply because they could, makes them the team other franchises snicker at when they fail, sort of the anti-Money Ball team. This is ironic because they were the club that hired Bill James and were the original subscribers to S.A.B.R.E.-metrics, finding undervalued ballplayers based on computer stats. Now they are the poster-children for overpaid underperformers. Hopefully that will not tarnish the reputations of Jacoby Elsbury, Dustin Pedroia and Alfredo Aceves, who were downright heroic in defeat, battling beyond fatigue as the ship sank from beneath their feet.
There will be scapegoats, and it would be surprising if Francona survives a collapse that will go down in history, in a city that prides itself for its history. And although 2011 will forever be compared to the 1978 Sox club that squandered a 13 game lead in July to the charging Yanks, the 78 club went down fighting, winning their final 10 in a row to force a playoff, culminating in a single game of epic proportions. 2011 was the equivalent of a medieval patient being bled to death. The Red Sox did not win two games in a row since an August 27 double header against Oakland. Over 5 weeks of baseball without consecutive wins. A team that had the local Bean-eaters bragging that it was the best of all time.
Their horrendous start and finish is evidence a slick GM could use against a manager whose contract is up. Someone to be offered in sacrifice for a freaked out Red Sox nation that consists of 5 and 1/2 New England states. There is a bright side for Francona, however, he'll probably get to duck his obligatory meal with a Sox sycophant up at Mohegan Sun. There is no supporting evidence that the initials of the fan who submitted the question to WEEI's Big Show were "T.E."
