EDITOR’S NOTE: This excerpt from “The Franchise: Boston Red Sox: A Curated History of the Sox” is reprinted with the permission of Triumph Books. For more information and to order a copy, please visit Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org or TriumphBooks.com/FranchiseRedSox.
The Red Sox have a long tradition of employing general managers who were New England natives.
Dick O’Connell, Lou Gorman, Dan Duquette, Ben Cherington, Mike Hazen, and Brian O’Halloran all grew up in New England, every one of them Red Sox fans.
But no one grew up closer to Fenway than Theo Epstein, who, though born in New York, grew up in Brookline, Massachusetts, just several miles from the ballpark.
Epstein came to the job almost accidentally. When the John Henry–Tom Werner–Larry Lucchino ownership group was approved in 2002, spring training was already underway, and time was tight for making hirings.
Still, the new owners wanted a clean sweep from the past and dismissed both manager Joe Kerrigan and GM Dan Duquette. In Duquette’s place, the team installed Mike Port as the interim GM for the year with a goal of undertaking a more thorough search of applicants after the 2002 season.
For a time—indeed, officially for a few fleeting hours—Billy Beane had an agreement with the Red Sox to leave the Oakland A’s and become the Red Sox’s president of baseball operations. At the time, Beane was seen as the leader of a new generation of executives who combined traditional player evaluation methods (scouting, etc.) with more revolutionary ones involving analytics.
Beane had found early success by searching for market inefficiencies and finding skill sets that had beenunderappreciated by other executives. Such an approach appealed to Henry in particular, who had become wildly successful in the field of hedge funds by employing a similarly advanced analytic approach.
But after weeks of back-and-forth negotiations for the Red Sox—first with Oakland ownership, and then Beane himself— Beane determined that he was unwilling to move from the Bay Area to the East Coast, even after the Sox had agreed to let him spend a significant period based in California to ease concerns about his family.
That prompted the Red Sox to start the search all over again. Before long, Epstein, who had spent the 2002 season as Port’s assistant and was well known to Lucchino from their time together with the San Diego Padres, emerged as a candidate, despite his age (28) and relatively thin résumé.
Epstein’s appointment to GM was greeted with mockery in some circles. A cartoon of Michael Jackson hanging Epstein off a balcony—as he had famously done in London with his own toddler—circulated and jokes were made about Epstein not being able to stay up late on school nights.
Epstein absorbed all the barbs about his youth and inexperience with good nature. But he—and the Red Sox— would have the last laugh.
Soon, it was clear how nontraditional Epstein would be.
In a highly unorthodox move, Epstein claimed journeyman outfielder/first baseman Kevin Millar on waivers, blocking the Florida Marlins from selling Millar to a team in Japan. Such actions were unheard of at the time—teams simply didn’t get in the way of a nearly completed transaction. But Epstein wasn’t one to bow to convention.
In Millar, he saw a useful righty bat who could provide the Sox with an important piece. It didn’t matter to him that the Marlins had other plans. This was hardball, and it was Epstein’s charge to assemble the best roster available—the Old Boy Network be damned.
More moves followed, each designed to make the Red Sox better. How much better was almost incidental. Epstein saw the process of roster building as incremental, part of a puzzle. With each move, the pieces fit together a little better.
Circumstances, however, mandated more dramatic action after the 2003 season. The Red Sox lost Game 7 of the ALCS when Pedro Martinez faltered in the late innings and the Sox lacked a surefire closer option out of the bullpen.
For all the advances being made when it came to player evaluation, when the autopsy was performed on the 2003 Sox, even the most casual fan could see that the team had come up empty because of a lack of pitching. There was no need to run programs through “Carmine,” the Red Sox’s computerized software system that was revealed in a lengthy Sports Illustrated feature; no need to consult with sabermetric godfather Bill James, or for any careful study of analytics. Simply put, the Red Sox, as had seemingly been the case for so many years in franchise history, needed arms.
That much was obvious to even the most casual observer.
The 2003 Red Sox certainly didn’t lack for offense, that’s for sure.
Those Sox had scored 961 runs, the second-most in franchise history, with six hitters contributing 20 or more homers and eight supplying 85 or more RBI.
So Epstein set out to address that obvious deficiency. He along with assistant GM Jed Hoyer, spent Thanksgiving with Curt Schilling and his family in Arizona, attempting to persuade Schilling to waive a no-trade clause in his contract with the Arizona Diamondbacks.
With Schilling agreeable to a deal—and extended—the trade was made. It turned out to be a master stroke for Epstein, providing the Sox with another top-of-the-rotation starter.
The other was the signing of free agent Keith Foulke. The Red Sox loved that Foulke was durable beyond belief and capable of pitching more than one inning per outing. They would lean on Foulke heavily in the 2004 postseason—the team played 14 games that month and Foulke appeared in 11 of them, allowing a grand total of one earned run in 14 innings.
It was fitting that he was on the mound when the Sox finished off their sweep of the Cardinals for the first title in 86 years; a year earlier, the Red Sox didn’t have a reliever of his dependability to whom they could turn late in postseason games.
But Epstein’s boldest stroke—not only that season, but for his entire tenure in Boston—came at the trade deadline in the middle of the 2004 season.
The Red Sox were plodding along—in contention but underachieving somewhat in the American League playoff race.
Worse, the Sox weren’t sure what they were going to get from shortstop Nomar Garciaparra.
Battling a variety of injuries, Garciaparra was in and out of the lineup in the first half, playing in just 38 of the first 100 games. He also sent a message to management that he was unsure how much he could be counted on in the second half of the season.
All of that proved too much for Epstein, who went into the trade deadline with a thought that would have been unthinkable only months earlier—to trade off Garciaparra.
Garciaparra had been a dynamic player for the Sox in his first seven seasons, winning two batting titles, scoring 100 or more runs on six occasions, and four times driving in 100 or more runs. In the mythical battle for Best Shortstop in the American League—a contest involving Derek Jeter, Alex Rodriguez, and Miguel Tejada—Garciaparra was the Boston entrant, and a homegrown one at that.
But Garciaparra’s relationship with the team had begun to fray. Ownership had made a contract extension offer in the spring, but while Garciaparra deliberated, the offer was then pulled off the table. That, his uncertain availability, and, by extension, his deteriorating defensive play all conspired to force Epstein’s hand. In a stunning, complicated swap involving three other teams, Epstein dealt off Garciaparra and young outfielder Matt Murton and ended up with shortstop Orlando Cabrera and first baseman Doug Mientkiewicz.
It was audacious on Epstein’s part, a point made patently obvious to him when he left Fenway after news of the deal became public and was met with expletive-filled rants from fans as he walked to nearby Kenmore Square.
That night, for the first time in his life, he took an Ambien to help him sleep.The bold stroke proved to be just what the Red Sox needed—on the field and in the clubhouse. Cabrera brought dependability to the shortstop position, even if he wasn’t nearly the offensive performer that his predecessor was. And, at first, the slick-fielding Mientkiewicz proved to be a huge upgrade.
Epstein had fretted that the team’s shaky infield defense would be, in his words, his club’s “fatal flaw,” but that was now rectified.
At the same time, Garciaparra had become increasingly negative, a brooding presence in the clubhouse, warning teammates that management couldn’t be trusted and railing against media coverage of the team. With Garciaparra gone, the mood lightened, and suddenly the atmosphere surrounding the Sox was instantly improved.
The real payoff came in October, when the team that Epstein had constructed rallied from what looked like certain defeat to the Yankees in the ALCS and then steamrolled the St. Louis Cardinals in four straight to capture their first championship in almost 90 years.
In a jubilant Red Sox clubhouse celebration, Epstein, who had a knack for saying the right thing at the right time, toasted the players and organization and proclaimed, “Now, 1918 is just another year in which the Red Sox won the World Series.”
The room erupted in recognition. For years, the players, staff members and others in the organization had heard the cruel chants of “1918! 1918!” especially in New York. But the sweep of the Cardinals had disarmed that taunt and rendered it meaningless.
At the time, the analytics movement was in its infancy, and it was easy—if more than a little lazy—to suggest that Epstein was simply reacting to computer-generated data. But such a stance revealed ignorance.
It was never Epstein’s intent to reinvent how players were evaluated; rather, he was looking to make the process more efficient and accurate. But while utilizing new data, Epstein never ran from the game’s traditions.
