NICK FRANCONA
In the 1956 American League Rookie-of-the-Year voting John Patsy Francona tied for second with Rocky Colavito behind near-unanimous choice Chicago White Sox SS Luis Aparicio. In his first season with the Cleveland Indians (1959) Francona batted .363 and finished fifth in the balloting for American League MVP. He led the AL in doubles the next year and in 1961 was voted an AL All-Star after hitting .301 while collecting 178 hits including 124 singles, the most in the league.
In a fifteen-year career (1956–1970) wearing no fewer than 9 different big league uniforms the peripatetic and original “Tito” batted .272 on the strength of 1395 Hits; 125 HRs; and 656 RBI. He was traded twice in deals involving the legendary Larry Doby and was named one of the Top 100 Greatest Indians in 2001. A left-handed-hitting OF/1B, the quintessential journeyman was by all accounts a wonderful teammate and an even better human being.
Terrence Jon Francona, born in the first year of his father’s 6-year run with the Tribe has remarked on more than one occasion that he had the best mom and dad in the world.
“Little Tito” unsurprisingly was scripted to be (and still is) a soup to nuts baseball lifer, hanging around big league clubhouses with his father from the time he was a tot. Thanks to his dad and surely encouraged by his mom, he grew up with baseball, hitting plastic balls through the windows of the family’s fifth-floor apartment on Euclid Avenue and sending Tito scampering down the street to retrieve them.
Genes don’t lie and young Francona inherited a wealth of athletic ability which was channeled toward baseball. In the 1978 Amateur World Series he hit .350 .366/.550 as a DH-LF for Team USA helping them to a Silver Medal. He tied Jae-bak Kim, Mitsugu Kobayashi and Graham Ward for 5th. in the Series in hits (15) and tied Jerry Desimone for the most triples (2).
He was an All-Star outfielder with a Bronze-Medal winning Team USA in the 1979 Intercontinental Cup. And he led the 1979 Pan American Games with 13 hits and 3 triples although the US failed to medal.
Playing three years of college baseball at the University of Arizona yielded numerous achievements and accolades such as the prestigious 1980 Golden Spikes Award (Best Amateur Baseball Player in the United States); the 1980 College World Series Championship; and the CWS Most Outstanding Player Award. In 2011 Francona was inducted into the College Baseball Hall of Fame.
His ten-year major league playing career was less stellar though at times notable. Like his dad he was a lefty through and through and played the outfield and first base. He too became accustomed to packing a suitcase playing for five teams in those ten years.
Selected in the first round of the 1980 amateur draft by the Montreal Expos with the 22nd. overall pick, Francona made his major league debut on August 19, 1981 one week after the end of the player’s strike. He distinguished himself by going 4-for-12 in that season’s NLDS East Division match-up against the Phillies, a series the Expos won 3–2.
He developed a reputation as a contact hitter who walked and struck out rarely with little power as his sixteen career HRs and .652 OPS would attest. In 707 games he batted .274 (two points higher than his father, who by Terry’s own admission was a far superior player) with 474 hits and 143 RBI to go with those 16 dingers.
Perhaps as a testament to the character and personalities of both his parents, it was — and is — as the consummate player’s manager that Terry Francona’s star has shone most brightly.
Learning on the job in Philadelphia as a 38-year-old first-time skipper may have been at times painful (285–363 over four seasons — 1997 through 2000 — punctuated by plenty of booing and occasional tire-slashing) but learn he did. Though visible to few, the seeds of managerial greatness were being sown and one of those who recognized it and then reaped the bounty was Red Sox GM Theo Epstein.
After yet another heartbreaking Red Sox loss to the Yankees this time in the 2003 ALCS, Francona was handed the baton, became the maestro extraordinaire with a rank-and-file mentality and the rest as they say was history. World Series titles in 2004 lifting an 86-year ‘curse’ and 2007 (both sweeps) and 744 career victories as the Sox manager — second only to Joe Cronin, but #1 in regular season winning percentage (.574) — along with a .622 postseason success rate (28–17) etched him indelibly in Red Sox lore.
As all good things must come to an end, it was on to Cleveland fittingly where he piloted the club to a 92–70 record in his first season (2013), a 24-game improvement over the previous year. On November 12, 2013 he was named American League Manager of the Year, his first such honor.
Fast forward to 2016 when his Indians were the AL champs and played the Chicago Cubs in the World Series, a baseball match made in heaven: The Cubs had not tasted the fruits of victory since 1908 (108 years) and Cleveland since 1948 (68 years). In a thrilling Series which the Indians led 3–1, it was the Cubs who prevailed in seven games winning the clincher 8–7 in ten innings.
The sting of suffering his first WS losses since storming out of the gate at 9–0 was perhaps soothed a bit when Francona applied the salve of his second AL Manager of the Year award presented to him on November 15, 2016. He continues at the helm of the Wahoos and was in fact given a two-year contract extension through the 2022 season on April 3rd.
Which brings us to Nicholas Francona. Nick Francona is Terry’s only son, one of his four kids. He is an Ivy League-educated (UPenn) US Marine who commanded a scout-sniper platoon in Afghanistan and has the love of baseball coursing through his veins. Unlike his father and grandfather Nick never made it to the show but he has worked administratively for three major league clubs.
It appears that this career path will wind no further.
Not quite a year ago Nick claimed he was fired as the New York Mets assistant director of player development after openly criticizing MLB for failing to adequately document that proceeds from military-themed jersey sales were in fact going to veterans charities. Thirty-four-year-old Nick told The New York Post that the Mets acted in a “cowardly” fashion when caving to the league and serving him up as the sacrifice in retaliation for his public denouncements.
Sidebar:
[Prior to this Nick was terminated by the Los Angeles Dodgers after a clash with Gabe Kapler, then the organization’s director of player development. Young Francona alleged that Kapler discriminated against him after he sought help from an organization that treats veterans for “invisible wounds of war.”
There was also a dispute between the two regarding three instances of sexual assault alleged to have taken place during Spring Training 2015-’16 involving minor league players at the team’s hotel in Glendale, AZ. a few miles from the Dodgers’ complex.
Francona, Kapler’s assistant and in whom he had confided, ended up the whistleblower and Kapler the iconoclastic mediator acceding to the wishes of the Dodgers’ player development hierarchy, i.e. a determination to keep matters such as these in-house. The club informed MLB about none of these incidents.
The Dodgers denied all of the sordid allegations, MLB investigated and it was decided that action against Kapler and the organization was unwarranted. Francona was scapegoated, trying to do what he thought was right].
Francona maintains that he repeatedly asked MLB for evidence showing that the proper percentage of proceeds from Memorial Day apparel sales were directed toward charities linked to military families as promised. When he was stonewalled each time he began to tweet about the issue. The Mets who conceded that they had no beef with Francona’s work performance fired him and it became clear that his position on the military apparel proceeds was the motivating factor. Francona produced an email exchange between then-GM Sandy Alderson — a former Marine who served in Vietnam — and Nick in which the GM warned him that he was starting to “undermine” the club’s military and veterans agenda.
“I felt like [the Mets’] actions in this were a little cowardly,” he said. “When it came time to do the right thing they crumbled under pressure and chose convenience and I think the pressure from the Commissioner’s Office and other teams, expediency was the preferred course for them. I don’t think that is a surprise to anyone. That is kind of how they operate.”
Naturally the Commissioner’s Office in an email to the Post categorically denied Francona’s allegation, replying that there was “absolutely no truth” to it. And the Mets decided to can him.
Which “disappointed” him rather than make him “angry.”
Francona characterized the organization as dysfunctional. “There was something liberating about the fact,” he commented, “that you know there are some limitations when you come to the Mets so this isn’t an ideal organization and a highly functioning place. But do the best you can with that in mind. This is like a fun challenge to embrace and something I actually enjoyed.”
He cited COO Jeff Wilpon as one who told him that he was making a “big impact” on the farm system with his initiatives but then disappeared to let Alderson do the club’s dirty work. Which bothered him.
“You would like somebody like that to step up and have the courage to tell it to you straight and not hide behind it,” Francona noted. “That is kind of a general theme there, where [Wilpon’s] presence, whether direct or not, is kind of always in the background, hovering over stuff and sometimes it’s not even real and it has an impact, which is going to make things hard.”
The late Tito Francona insisted that son Terry earn everything he got in baseball without his assistance. “No, I never helped him. He asked me once, ‘How come you never help me?’ I had a nephew. ‘You’re always helping him,’” Terry said.
“In the long run,” dad told son, “if you’re going to play ball, you do it yourself. No one is going to be there with you. He didn’t need any help.”
Would it then be a stretch to assume that Terry couldn’t or wouldn’t appeal to the Lords of baseball on Nick’s behalf? Not at all. “I have a son that I love,” he remarked with a deep sigh. “And this is the only job I have had. So I’ve tried to remain, not neutral, but away from it.”
And why would he intercede anyway?
Approach aside, his son was absolutely right in both unfortunate instances. And he needed no help to say what he had to say.
“Getting fired, especially twice, isn’t fun and really makes things hard. But there are some things that are worth being fired for.”
Well put. Spoken like a true Francona.
[Editor’s Note: This piece was written by Mr. Kaplan in April 2019.]
