Terry Francona didn’t talk about OPS numbers on Friday after he was fired in Boston. He didn’t talk about Pythagorean winning percentages or range factors or runs created or win shares. He didn’t talk about Bill James or Billy Beane or sabermetrics, the cult that now runs baseball. Francona essentially spoke of how the men on the field playing the game for the Red Sox this past September weren’t enough of a team when their season exploded all over the American League East.  Read more after the jump.
This is what Francona, the son of an old player named Tito Francona, said:
“I wanted desperately for our guys to care about each other on the field. I wasn’t seeing that as much as I wanted to. When things go bad, your true colors show and I was bothered by what was showing. It’s my responsibility.”
Oh, there were bad numbers in Boston all right, and not just the 7-20 record that ended Boston’s season, one of the most stunning reversals of fortune in the history of baseball in Boston or anywhere else. The starting pitchers seemed to give up five or six runs every day, Jonathan Papelbon came up a few fastballs short of a play-in game just after midnight on Wednesday night, Daniel Bard  coughed up two huge eighth innings both against the Blue Jays at the worst possible time.
And in the end there was nobody to hit behind Adrian Gonzalez. You want a number on him? Three. That’s how many times Buck Showalter intentionally walked him in the last game of the season because all the Red Sox had hitting behind Gonzalez was a kid named Ryan Lavarnway. I said this the other day, about what happened on the field, and say it here again:
It wasn’t just one thing with the Red Sox, it was everything.
