Free Francona: The Red Sox Years by Terry Francona, Dan Shaughnessy

right now?”
    It got away quickly after that. Hideki Matsui hit a ground-rule double to right, and Jorge Posada tied the game with a bloop double to center on Pedro’s 123rd pitch. Little finally came out to get Martinez.
    The Red Sox lost in the bottom of the 11th when Aaron Boone launched a Tim Wakefield knuckleball over the wall in left.
    Two nights later, with the 2003 WORLD SERIES logo still embedded in the grass behind home plate at Fenway, David Wells threw the first pitch for the first game of the 99th World Series, played between the Florida Marlins and the New York Yankees at Yankee Stadium.
    While the Marlins and Yankees played in the Bronx, Terry Francona was at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, on a recruiting visit with his son, Nick, a star left-handed pitcher at Lawrenceville Prep. Georgetown coach Pete Wilk annually invited four or five top recruits and their parents to the Hoyas’ fall-ball fund-raiser dinner. Boston multimedia personality Mike Barnicle was at the event with his three sons, including Nick Barnicle, a catcher on the Georgetown varsity. In between speeches, Barnicle approached Francona and suggested that Oakland’s bench coach should give the Red Sox a call.
    “It’s a good fit,” Barnicle told Francona. “You’ve managed in the big leagues, you coached with the A’s, and you know the Red Sox. Your name ends in a vowel—Larry Lucchino will like that. You should give them a call.”
    “The Red Sox already have a manager,” Francona told Barnicle. “They’re not going to fire a guy over one mistake.”

CHAPTER 4

“He kind of blew us away. . . . Is the guy too nice?”
    B ASEBALL COMMISSIONER BUD SELIG has an unofficial rule prohibiting teams from making major announcements during the World Series. Selig doesn’t like teams making moves that detract attention from the Fall Classic.
    On Monday, October 27, the first business day after the conclusion of the 2003 World Series, the Red Sox fired Grady Little, who had won 188 games in two seasons.
    “I didn’t realize what was coming,” Francona said. “I actually thought Grady handled it pretty well that night. When he left Pedro in the game and they lost, I thought,
Okay, that’ll go away.
Now that I’ve been through it, I know.”
    Theo Epstein was the man in charge of replacing Grady Little. In the autumn of 2003, Epstein was already a rising front-office star who breathed youth and charisma into the stodgy offices on Yawkey Way. He was part of a new generation of baseball executives grounded in knowledge and data rather than experience on the playing field. Many of them were educated at elite universities and grew up reading about baseball, worshiping at the altar of Peter Gammons, the Hall of Fame
Boston Globe
scribe who invented the Sunday notes columns that became a staple of newspapers across the country in the 1970s.
    Theo and his twin brother, Paul, were born on December 29, 1973, children of brilliant, liberal parents who taught their sons to think independently and never root for the New York Yankees. The Epsteins are a family of letters and service. Theo’s grandfather, Oscar-winner Philip Epstein, wrote
Casablanca
with his twin brother Julius. Theo’s dad, Leslie, is a novelist who for many years served as director of the creative writing program at Boston University. Along with their older sister, Anya, the Epstein twins grew up in a roomy apartment building on Parkman Street in Brookline, Massachusetts. With no lawn of their own to mow, the boys played baseball and soccer at the nearby Amory Street playground and made a makeshift Fenway out of the concrete floor and walls of the parking lot behind the Holiday Inn along the Beacon Street trolley line. The Epstein twins were city Pony League champs as members of the Brookline Yankees, but were more accomplished as soccer players at Brookline High School, where the Warriors would make it to the state tournament in Theo’s senior season.
    When Theo and