Francona: The Red Sox Years Read Online Free

Terry.
    Early in every major league season, before school let out, young Terry went long stretches without seeing his dad. He didn’t have a baseball practice partner, so Birdie assembled a contraption that would allow her son to practice throwing and catching by himself. Working out daily in his basement, Terry made himself the best nine-year-old ballplayer in New Brighton, and when Phillips 66 sponsored a regional pitching, batting, and throwing competition in nearby Beaver, Birdie drove her son to the competition.
    “The other kids had their dads there coaching them and playing catch,” remembered Terry Francona. “I hadn’t seen my dad in three months, but my mom sat next to me on the bench and bullshitted with me the whole time.”
    He won the competition easily, but he never got his trophy. Event organizers disqualified Terry Francona because his dad was a big leaguer. Birdie was livid. She gathered up her son, put him in the car, and promised to drive him for a consolation ice cream. But she couldn’t see the road through her tears and anger. She just kept driving and talking about the injustice of it all until her son noticed a sign that read: WELCOME TO OHIO .
    A ballplayer never forgets support like that.
    In the latter years of Tito’s big league career, Birdie would wait until school got out in mid-June, pack up the family, and relocate to an apartment near her husband’s workplace. The summer of 1965 was spent in St. Louis.
    “My first baseball memory is living in apartments in St. Louis,” said Francona. “I was six or seven years old and we lived in these apartments called ‘The Executive.’ It’s not like a place where players would live today. They were horrendous. A lot of the other ballplayers’ families were there—Ray Washburn, Ray Sadecki, Bob Skinner. I used to play baseball with their kids every day. It was like a thousand degrees every day. I didn’t get to the park that often, I was too young. But I was there the night they opened Busch.”
    “I remember Terry floating around those apartments,” said McCarver. “A lot of guys used that place because it was across from the airports. Let me tell you, there was nothing ‘executive’ about it. I stayed there four or five years, including 1967, when Roger Maris lived there, and we used to drive to the ballpark together. I remember little Terry very well.”
    Little Tito got into some trouble one night when he was carpooling to the park with some of the other ballplayers’ families. Birdie Francona was at the wheel, and everyone heard the bulletin over the radio that Cardinal first baseman Orlando Cepeda had been hit in the face during batting practice and would not be in the lineup. Young Terry whooped it up in the backseat because he knew that meant his dad would be starting at first base. Birdie was mortified.
    Then there was the night he showed up in the clubhouse with a fistful of dollars. Curt Simmons’s sons had convinced Little Tito that it was okay to sell players’ game bats to fans. Business was booming until Tito asked his son to explain where all the money was coming from. Fortunately, manager Red Schoendienst and Cardinal ballplayers never knew about the enterprise.
    Terry started going to the park almost every day in the summer of 1967 when his dad was playing with the Atlanta Braves. He’d hitch a ride to the park with Rita Raymond, wife of pitcher Claude Raymond, then find his dad in the clubhouse and get a dollar to spend on concession food. One dollar. Every night. It was good for a 75-cent chicken sandwich, but there was nothing he could buy with the 25 cents of change. After watching the game with Rita Raymond and the rest of the wives, he’d ride home in the backseat, listening to Tito and Claude analyze what just happened.
    “I heard everything they said,” he remembered. “I was the only eight-year-old who knew that you pitch guys high and tight, and low and away. I saw Bert Blyleven pitch when I was 11,