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

Paul were 12, they nervously watched the Red Sox play the Mets in the 1986 World Series. Fenway was just a couple of stops down the Green (C) Line, and the Red Sox were a passion. The twins were home alone on Saturday night, watching the World Series on television, when the Sox were set to finally win a championship. The boys hatched a plan for the magic moment: they wanted to be suspended in midair—not of this world—when the Sox finally clinched it. Every time the Sox got to within one strike of winning, the boys would leap off the couch. It was exhausting and frightening as Calvin Schiraldi, then Bob Stanley, delivered a series of pitches, none of which delivered the long-awaited grail. Over and over, the boys leapt into the air, only to crash to the floor, disrupting the neighbors downstairs and carving more pain into their preteen souls. They saw three consecutive Met singles, a passed ball that was ruled a wild pitch, then a hideous, unspeakable Little League error—the ground ball between Bill Buckner’s wickets. There went Game 6. When the Sox lost Game 7 two days later, the ’86 World Series had christened and damaged a new generation of Sox sufferers. It broke Theo’s 12-year-old heart and made him a card-carrying member of a group that would come to be known as Red Sox Nation.
    Theo’s brother Paul grew up to be a caregiver for troubled youths at Brookline High School. His sister Anya married Oscar-nominated screenwriter Dan Futterman (
Capote
) and went to Hollywood, where she enjoys a career as a film and television producer and writer (
Homicide, In Treatment
). Theo mapped out a career in baseball that may land him a plaque in Cooperstown.
    After graduating from Brookline High, Epstein entered Yale in the fall of 1991, landed a gig with the school’s daily newspaper, and plotted to get himself into a baseball front office. Sitting in his dorm room in New Haven, it was easy to see that the Baltimore Orioles might be a good place to start. In ’91 the Orioles were owned by Yale grad Eli Jacobs, and former Bulldog running back Calvin Hill was working in the Baltimore front office. Hill is famous for multiple reasons. He was Yale’s running back in the infamous 29–29 Harvard-Yale game of 1969, and one of his fraternity brothers was George W. Bush. He played 12 seasons in the National Football League, made four Pro Bowls, and won a Super Bowl with the Dallas Cowboys. He is a featured character in Garry Trudeau’s long-running
Doonesbury
cartoon strip. His wife was Hillary Rodham’s roommate at Wellesley, and his son is NBA legend Grant Hill. That’s a lot of celebrity for one individual, but Red Sox fans should embrace Calvin Hill as the man who got Theo Epstein his first baseball job.
    Knowing his Yale roots might get him noticed, Theo wrote a letter to Hill in 1992, searching for an internship. Hill put the letter in front of Dr. Charles Steinberg, the Orioles’ director of public affairs. Steinberg knew what it was like to get into baseball at a young age: he had grown up in Baltimore and as a 20-year-old was assigned the task of arranging Earl Weaver’s “matchup” index cards—a skill that Theo and other Gammons Youth would turn into hardball science in the 21st century. Steinberg invited freshman Theo for an interview during Yale’s spring break, and thus was born a relationship that had enormous impact on the World Champion Red Sox of the 21st century—before everything soured inside Fenway Park’s ancient walls.
    Epstein spent the summers of 1992 and 1993 in the front office of the Baltimore Orioles, assembling a project to pay tribute to baseball’s Negro Leagues, which had been shamelessly dismissed, even in the years after Jackie Robinson integrated the major leagues by coming aboard with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. Epstein’s Negro League project was a featured attraction when baseball’s All-Star Game came to Camden Yards in the summer of 1993, and Steinberg insists that the