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

to get the Sox job.
    On November 24, the day Selig gave Schilling a 72-hour window in which he could waive his no-trade clause and come to terms with the Red Sox, Schilling responded to a media question about the possibility of coming to Boston by saying, “Terry is a huge part of this. Terry is the number-one attraction there for me. If he’s not the manager there, my interest in going to Boston would diminish drastically. I love playing for him, I enjoyed playing for him. I knew where I stood with him when I walked through the door. He didn’t get dealt a full deck when he was in Philadelphia. He’s up there with the people I played for in terms of the respect factor. That will play a big part in my decision.”
    Aware of how his remarks would be interpreted, Schilling said, “People are going to put a real bad spin on this. I only made myself available [for a trade to Boston] when I understood Terry was the number-one candidate there after a lot of interviews. It would be disrespectful to insinuate otherwise that I’m the reason he was going to get the job.”
    The next day Epstein and Hoyer flew to Arizona to court Schilling. Lucchino also made an appearance, arriving from San Diego the day before Thanksgiving. Schilling and his wife were impressed with the Sox presentation and invited Epstein and Hoyer to Thanksgiving at their home in Paradise Valley. (Lucchino went back to his family in California.) The day after Thanksgiving, the day of the commissioner’s deadline, Schilling agreed to a three-year, $37.5 million deal with the Red Sox and announced to the world, “I guess I hate the Yankees now.”
    “I think Schill was trying to help,” Francona said later. “But then it came out that the reason I got my job was because of Schill. I don’t think that’s true. I was pretty deep into the process. They weren’t interviewing any more people. But I really didn’t care what people thought.”
    “Schill couldn’t have been stronger with his praise for Tito,” said Epstein. “With Schill’s personality, I think he thought,
Hey, they want me so bad they’ll hire this manager just to get me,
but the reality is that it was done.”
    Early in the next week, as November turned to December, Francona got the call he’d been hoping for.
    “I was at my daughter’s volleyball practice, in a car, freezing my ass off,” he remembered. “Theo had told me Larry was going to call and for me to act all surprised. So Larry called and said, ‘We’d like you to be the manager.’ I said, ‘Great,’ and he said, ‘We’ll pay you just over a million for two years.’ I asked if he was serious about the money, and he said, ‘Yes, take it or leave it, because if you don’t want it, we’ll get somebody else.’ I said I’d have to think about it.”
    The hard-line contract offer was typical of Lucchino, ever-mindful of demonstrating that he was the boss. Epstein understood this, but Francona was just beginning to learn. Francona called Epstein to complain about the proposed salary. By major league standards, it was terrible. Epstein said he understood and bumped Francona to three years for a total of $1.55 million.
    This is how things would work for the next eight years. Francona would register his complaints to ownership through Epstein. Theo would be the man in the middle, right up until the day Francona was fired.
    On Thursday, December 4, six days after the Schilling announcement, Francona was introduced to the Boston media as the new manager of the Red Sox. The first question he was asked was about Manny Ramirez not running out ground balls.
    He handled the queries with ease, even when WBZ’s ubiquitous Jonny Miller asked if every Sox manager was just a man waiting to be fired.
    “Think about it for a second,” Francona said. “I’ve been released from six teams. I’ve been fired as a manager. I’ve got no hair. I’ve got a nose that’s three times too big for my face, and I grew up in a major league