Book excerpt: Inside the surprising rise and calamitous fall of the 2013-14 Red Sox
Alex Speier’s new book is "Homegrown: How the Red Sox Built a Champion from the Ground Up."
This article is adapted from Alex Speier’s book Homegrown: How the Red Sox Built a Champion from the Ground Up, to be published August 13 by William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Speier is a baseball writer for the Boston Globe.
Coming into the season, the 2013 Red Sox were never a World Series favorite. But the team won 97 games, the AL East, and, eventually, the World Series. Contrast that with the 2014 team, which had high expectations but managed to win just 71 games. In Homegrown, Speier spins the tale of those two seasons.
Page 63: [Red Sox GM Ben] Cherington and the front office treated their internal forecasts with something of a grain of salt, recognizing the possibility of enormous divergence from such assumptions. After all, the actual results in 2011 and 2012 had not been kind to the Red Sox’ internal projections.
“So much can happen during the season in a place like Boston to sort of push you away from the projections in either direction,” said Cherington. “It’s a unique place so if things are going well it might push a group towards achieving at even a higher level than we expected. If things are really not going well, it might be harder for a group to even achieve what could rationally be expected.”
The Red Sox never considered stepping back from their commitment to try to win in 2013, but ambitions were measured.
Wild-card aspirations seemed realistic, with at least a possibility of competing for the top of the American League East at a time when parity ruled the division, but after the humbling experience of 2012, no one was about to declare the Sox the team to beat.
While the front office was cautiously optimistic, the season the Red Sox were about to have was about to shock even the most optimistic of fans.
Pages 83-85: “Our team was supposed to be last place,” [Xander] Bogaerts reflected, still incredulous. “One hundred percent, man, we had not a good team.”
But that team that wasn’t expected to be good was instead great. The things that made that team great were unusual, and hard to replicate. Members of the team understood that there had been a special alchemy involved in the sense of shared purpose in support of both the team and, in the aftermath of the Marathon bombings, the city. There was also, as Lucchino put it, “a lesson” in the shared sense of purpose of the front office and owners—dating to the previous year’s discussion of ‘Lessons Learned’—as well as in the sense of unity in the relationship between Farrell and Cherington, as well as [John]Farrell and the players.
Still, there was an awareness that the underpinnings of the 2013 team’s remarkable success—an almost perfect succession of free-agent signings that yielded phenomenal impact from a typically inefficient market—would be difficult to impossible to replicate. Serendipity factored prominently in the fact that [Shane] Victorino, [Mike] Napoli, and J.D. Drew had all rebounded from career nadirs in 2012 to deliver something close to career-peak performances in 2013. As much as the Red Sox delighted in their charmed championship run, the team also recognized that sustainable long-term success depended on a different model, and on the growing integration of young players who would emerge as the team’s future stars.
For that reason, the team seemed in many ways more optimistic about its prospects moving forward toward 2014 than it had entering the 2013 campaign. Bogaerts had arrived, and other players looked like they weren’t far behind, creating the sense that the team stood at the threshold of a bright future. At a time when the Yankees and Rays farm systems looked comparatively barren, a rival executive surmised that the Red Sox were poised to enjoy preeminence in the American League East for the next half decade. Though more measured in their assessments, the Red Sox acknowledged the glowing horizon.
But privately, while there was reason to feel good about both the state and direction of the organization, Cherington understood that challenges loomed. The reigning champions would have to confront a period of coming transition as they moved from an unexpected championship in Phase One of Cherington’s blueprint to the period of integrating young players in Phase Two.
“I remember thinking, ‘Okay, we’re into this phase now that I thought would be the most challenging of all the phases,’” recalled Cherington. “I don’t remember saying that publicly . . .[but] I remember thinking that. That was something internally we were looking at, thinking, ‘We’re in this period. We’re going to have to continue to hit it well in free agency and trades, extend the right players, and hopefully bring along the young players as fast as we can.’”
As he navigated toward 2014, Cherington recognized the emergent menace on the horizon, but no one anticipated the size of the iceberg that the Red Sox were approaching
The Red Sox shocked everyone in 2013, but the surprises didn’t end there. In 2014 the Red Sox surprised the baseball world a second time, but not in the way the team would have wanted.
Pages 91-94: In 2013, the Red Sox had forged an unanticipated championship path thanks in no small part to a culture of shared on- and off-field purpose that helped to maximize individual performances and exceed collective expectations. A team that prided itself on its baseball acumen reveled in the ability to manufacture wins by amplifying its talent through high-level execution. The dialogue about finding in-game edges was constant in the clubhouse that season.
The culture changed in 2014, for a reason it often does: money. While the Red Sox had reached extensions with two of the team’s identified three long-term pillars—Dustin Pedroia in 2013, David Ortiz in 2014—the effort to extend lefthander Jon Lester, a homegrown player entering his thirteenth season in the Red Sox organization and his ninth in the big leagues, went badly awry.
During the off-season following 2013, Lester discussed repeatedly and openly his desire to stay in Boston, and suggested he’d take a discount to do so. A sense prevailed that Lester could anchor the pitching staff for years to come, much as Pedroia and Ortiz could do so for the position players.
That optimism quickly faded. The Red Sox made an opening offer to the left-hander of four years and $70 million—well below what the market suggested an ace should consider for a long-term deal. It was meant to be an initial salvo, much as had been the case when the Red Sox and Pedroia negotiated back and forth on what ended up being an eight-year, $110 million extension the previous summer.
But it was so far below market standards—in a spring where a less-decorated starter, Homer Bailey, had been given a six-year, $105 million extension from the Reds—that it became a terminus rather than a starting point in negotiations.
“We blew that signing in spring training,” Red Sox principal owner John Henry later lamented.
The consequences extended beyond just Lester. The closeness of the players, which had worked so much toward a common goal of winning in 2013, now seemed to work against it. Resentment, particularly among members of the pitching staff, toward the organization became a common sentiment.
Lester’s stature inside the clubhouse was as enormous as his six-foot-four, 240-pound frame. He commanded immense respect not just for his eight seasons of excellent performances but for his considerable toughness born not just of a baseball upbringing in Boston but also of his status as a cancer survivor.
Disbelief spread that the team would slight a player who was not only an unquestioned front-of-the-rotation presence—a dominant October force who’d played a key role in the 2013 title—but who seemingly represented everything the team would want in a player in the Boston baseball crucible.
“They were a pretty tight group, really tight group. It’s one of the reasons why we won in ’13. I wasn’t privy to those [extension] conversations, but I think it’s fair to say that it brought some dissension amongst the team,” said Dana LeVangie, who in 2014 was in his twenty-fourth season in the Red Sox organization, and his second as bullpen coach. “I thought there was some bitterness throughout [2014] that was disappointing. Those were some of the factors that I felt like they weren’t all in for the team, in it to the end.”
And there were other problems brewing. [Catcher A.J.] Pierzynski, a longtime lightning rod, became a pariah. Many players came to avoid his corner of the clubhouse, retreating from the cutting sarcasm that some found funny while others found brutal. Some in the organization, however, believed that the way that Pierzynski was placed on an island reflected not as badly on him as it did on his teammates, who so clearly had each other’s backs the previous year. The championship environment of 2013 was proving impossible to replicate the following year.
In 2013, young players who’d been called up—particularly Bogaerts and Brandon Workman, a pitcher who became a bullpen mainstay through the October run to a championship arrived to a welcoming atmosphere. Older players greeted younger teammates by trying to guide them on and off the field in a way that would allow them to contribute. In 2014, the winds changed direction.
“In 2013 almost one hundred percent of mental energy was, or closer to one hundred percent, was focused on what do we need to do to win tonight. In 2014, the truth is probably it was less than that,” said Cherington. “Any young player coming into that environment sees that, starts to ask, ‘Why? How do I fit in here? These aren’t the things I was associating with the team last year.’”
