TORONTO — Those drops of blood on the pitching rubber Monday night? They augur well for the good people of Cleveland. So much so that they might as well plan the parade route.
Because Terry Francona’s teams have always been willing to shed a little blood, you know. Especially when it comes to slaying the ghosts that can bedevil a franchise, or slaking the thirst of a long World Series drought. Okay, it’s a bit of a stretch to put Trevor Bauer’s gushing right pinky finger in the same category as Curt Schilling’s bloody sock. Bauer couldn’t make it out of the first inning of Monday’s Game 3 of the American League Championship Series, when a 10-stitch gash caused by a losing battle with a drone opened up four batters into the game. Cleveland second baseman Jason Kipnis would later say he knew something wasn’t right when there was “kind of a puddle forming below him on the mound. We thought that there’s something going on there. The pants … they started getting little spots…”
In 2004, when Francona was managing the Boston Red Sox to their first World Series win since 1918, Schilling worked eight innings 24 hours after having a quickie nip and tuck done on a torn ankle tendon sheath and helped the Red Sox win Game 6 of their ALCS against the New York Yankees. Down 3-0 in the series at one point, the Red Sox won Game 7 to become the first team to come back from a 3-0 deficit in a best-of-seven series.
(Hands up if you think the Toronto Blue Jays can do that. Thought so.)
Schilling, of course, is having none of the comparisons. Monday’s game wasn’t even over – Francona had about five more relievers to go through, for pete’s sake – when he sent out a tweet: “Please don’t tweet at me about Bauer. He cost himself a start, likely more, AND his teammates, and fans, dicking around with a drone. #stupid”
Schilling was only a slightly less reprehensible human being back when he was doing his stigmata thing at Yankee Stadium than he is now. Back then he was just a bit of a, well, boob – hardly unique among the ranks of baseball players, let alone professional athletes, but, on balance, less dangerous to society than he is now as a poster boy for the Alt-Right.
Wouldn’t you know it, Francona wasn’t having any of it either when asked about a comparison after the game. Or perhaps he simply lost his train of thought. After all, it had been about 45 minutes since his last pitching change.
“No, that was 12 years ago,” he said. “I can barely remember last week. I don’t think of that stuff during the game, believe me. I know that would make for a good story, but that’s not what I was thinking about tonight.”
Spoilsport.
Francona told TBS’s Sam Ryan that he knew he was in difficulty when he got to the mound and there was “blood on the rubber.” He joked that he told Bauer to keep the ball “because it’s got blood on it; it might be worth some money.” Well, why not? Schilling, after all, sold his sock for $92,613 at an auction in 2013. He had pitched Game 1 of the 2004 ALCS with a torn tendon sheath, then went out to the mound in Game 6 at Yankee Stadium after the Red Sox’s team doctor Bill Morgan sutured the loose tendon back into the skin. His former teammate Gabe Kapler told MLB.com’s Ian Brown that “It was a little bit, like, science fiction-y.”
A reddish patch formed on the white sock underneath Schilling’s red stirrups – he wore low-cut cleats instead of high-tops – and television viewers were treated to repeated showings, left to make up their own mind whether the patch was actually growing. It was like watching the Weather Channel during the formation of a hurricane. The blood turned out to be a byproduct of the stitches pressing against Schilling’s sock but Schilling – bless his tiny little heart – did a wonderful job of milking the whole experience enough to add to the legend.
The Red Sox, of course, went on to sweep the St. Louis Cardinals for their first World Series, in the process vanquishing the Curse of the Bambino. Francona’s current club is now just five wins away from ending the franchise’s 67-year World Series drought and how delicious is this:
If the Chicago Cubs win the National League Championship Series, then not only would the two teams with the longest World Series droughts face each other – so, too, would Francona face Cubs president of baseball operations Theo Epstein, who was the GM of that 2004 Red Sox team. The Cubs haven’t won since 1908.
Like Francona, Epstein was eventually run out of town by conniving, back-biting ownership and complicit media allies. And look at him now. Monday’s win was Francona’s 34th in 52 career playoff games, adding to his best-ever winning percentage of any manager with a minimum 50 post-season games. It also moved him into a tie for seventh on the all-time list with Sparky Anderson.
Players win these things, it’s true, but Francona has managed a hell of a series, and I keep thinking back to something John Farrell – the current Red Sox manager, former Red Sox pitching coach and former Blue Jays manager – told me when we were still talking. One of the things he learned from Francona was how to manage a crisis, or what passes for a crisis in the world of professional sports. He has been the man with all the right moves so far, whether it was disarming any sense of controversy around Bauer’s injury (“he wasn’t out in some alley at 3:00 in the morning and got cut on a beer can. It wasn’t like he was water skiing … it wasn’t remotely malicious,” Francona said,) or moving quickly when someone told him there was a photo on social media of him flipping the bird in the direction of the Blue Jays dugout after Blue Jays manager John Gibbons asked home plate umpire Brian Gorman to look at Bauer’s pinkie. “Oh, no,” Francona said. “My goodness, oh, no, my goodness. Gibby was unbelievable about it.
“Gibby actually called me, he said – that’s not really what we wanted to do,” Francona said. “I get it. I mean, shoot, it was only a matter of time until everybody saw it. It was bleeding pretty bad.”
So there you go: blood was shed, Cleveland won and baseball could be moving toward some type of cataclysmic collision of warped history the likes of which we have never seen. Francona’s had first-hand experience at this stuff; but he’s also seen teams blow 3-0 leads, too. Could there be a more appropriate manager for this team at this time? No.