“What if?”
That was the massive question that surely formed simultaneously in the minds of all Red Sox players, personnel and fans when the Tampa Bay Rays’ Dan Johnson used the club’s last strike to hit a solo home run and tie the ballgame against the Yankees in the bottom of the ninth. When Evan Longoria hit his own homer in the 12th, securing the Rays’ playoff berth and Sox gargantuan collapse, the question surely turned to “What now?”
The Red Sox had gone 7-20 in September. They had blown a 9-game lead in the Wild Card. They had spent $1 million a game in payroll obligations to many players who had not even approached their potential. And now, in what is widely considered to be the greatest sports city in which to be a winner and the absolute worst in which to be a loser, the questions keep piling up.
The largest such question concerns manager Terry Francona. “Tito” Francona joined the team for the start of the 2004 season. Tito helped bring a World Series championship back to Boston, after an 86-year drought. He helped break the “Curse of the Bambino”. He added another ring with the club in 2007. Boston embraced him as one of, if not the, greatest managers in the history of the franchise, and Tito certainly seemed to share the embrace. Yet as he sat at Thursday’s press conference alongside general manager Theo Epstein, Francona looked like a man without a country.
The normally upbeat and humbly charismatic Francona used words like “frustrated” and “worried”. When asked about his future with the club, Francona again was missing his trademark optimism: “It’s a fair question” was the response when asked if he wanted to be back with the Sox in 2012.
Francona and Red Sox management are expected to meet early Friday morning to discuss the manager’s future with the club. Many possibilities and speculations linger, such as the Red Sox not picking up Francona’s option for 2012-2013, leaving the manager to pursue other options. Should Tito walk, the predominant speculation is that his new club of choice will be the currently manager-less Chicago Cubs.
But nothing will be decided until Francona, Epstein and other members of the front office have their sit down and decide what’s best for the club and for the individual.
And so we wait.
** A rather late update**
Unless you live under a rock or, you know, have a day job, you should already know that the New York Daily News reported at 9 o'clock this morning that Terry Francona has been fired. Yes, fired. No lack of picking up the option, folks, John Henry officially gave Tito the sack.
Apparently, this decision had already been made before the Francona & Epstein press conference of yesterday afternoon, in which Tito, the epitome of a "player's manager" came as close as any of us have ever seen to calling out and/or putting blame on his players. This fact (that the inevitable firing was already known to Francona at the time of the press conference) explains the famously upbeat and unfazed manager's demeanor during the aforementioned press conference, in which Francona's facial expression left me wondering whether his dog had just died or, even worse, if the Sox front office had taken his two World Series rings and replaced them with Ring Pops.
