A year after he embodied everything wrong with the Blue Jays, John Farrell is everything that’s right with the Red Sox.
Those who enjoy a good sit should consider a career as a major-league manager. You sit in your office, you sit in the dugout, you sit on a bus or a plane. Then, because you’re tired after all that sitting, you go to sleep and wake up to sit all over again. If you can’t sit, you can’t manage. It’s a prerequisite skill. But Boston Red Sox manager John Farrell is a bit different. He’s more of a stander. He likes to be on his feet for his post-game interviews, and he prefers to stand in the dugout during games. When his team takes batting practice, he often hangs out behind the batting cage watching his hitters or stations himself behind the third-base line, catching return throws from infielders taking ground balls. In the primordial practice that is baseball field managing, it is truly revolutionary stuff.
On this day in August, he’s standing sternly in the visitors dugout at Rogers Centre with some of his players, having a dip and watching the team he used to helm take batting practice. He fires darts of dark brown spit at the ground in front of him as his former No. 3 and No. 4 hitters—the fastball-clobbering Jose Bautista and Edwin Encarnacion—crack ball after ball into the outfield seats. Farrell never used to watch the opposition hit when he managed the Blue Jays. Hell, you rarely saw the man outside his office when he didn’t have to be. But a lot has changed in the short time since Farrell’s two years in Toronto came to an end, and that includes the 50-year-old’s managerial approach. He’s looser in Boston—more forthcoming and collegial with his players. Farrell is evolving, but his attempts to be on the players’ level, to gain their trust and earn their respect, is more than a natural process—it’s a concerted effort. “I’m trying to learn—I’m not perfect,” Farrell says through the slug in his lower lip, reflecting on his three years of major-league managing. “I think you always look to pay attention and re-evaluate yourself and find ways to improve.”
It’s all the Boston Red Sox could ask for. After two fair-to-middling seasons in Toronto, Farrell inherited a quasi-rebuilding team with an angry, fractured clubhouse when he took over the Red Sox in October. It was a group that had seen many of its peers sold off to other teams amid a bitter feud between the players and 2012 manager Bobby Valentine. The Red Sox had brought Valentine in to be an authoritative presence following the laissez-faire fiasco of 2011, when then-manager Terry Francona was criticized and eventually exiled for being too close to the players, some of whom were fond of drinking beer in the clubhouse during games. It took Valentine about a week and a half of the regular season before he was calling out a player in the media, going on a Boston radio station to harp on his third baseman Kevin Youkilis’s desire to play the game. That raised the ire of Dustin Pedroia and David Ortiz—the two biggest presences in the clubhouse—who defended their teammate and fired back at their manager publicly. Soon, Valentine was even losing the support of members of his coaching staff, taking to the airwaves again to say he felt undermined, particularly by pitching coach Bob McClure, who was eventually let go in mid-August. The whole season was a clinic in catastrophe, and one of the primary reasons Farrell was brought back into the fold—he was the Red Sox pitching coach for four seasons under Francona—was to restore some sense of order and harmony. Winning would be a nice bonus, but most figured if the Red Sox could simply get to the finish line without cannibalizing each other, the 2013 season would be deemed an unassailable success.
But, wouldn’t you know it, as August wound down, Farrell had the Red Sox in first place in the American League East, having already surpassed the club’s win total from 2012, when Boston won just 69 games, the franchise’s worst season since 1965. The club was calm, jovial and united. His players felt at ease and relaxed when they came to the ballpark. And he had the lead going into the stretch drive of the race for American League manager of the year. “It’s been challenging, as you’d expect. But it’s been rewarding, too,” Farrell says. “I’ve got a group of guys who love to compete. The game every night is the most important thing to them. It was one of the goals that we set on the first day of spring training.”
Farrell had to set that goal because ever since 2011’s infamous September collapse—Boston lost 18 of its final 24 contests, missing the playoffs by one game—the Red Sox seemed consumed with everything but the game: clubhouse feuds, lineup selections, who was saying what in the media. The franchise was so determined and unabashed in its pursuit of Farrell from the Blue Jays not only due to his familiarity with the franchise, but because he is the antidote to all that drama. Despite how things ended up, he had handled similarly tumultuous situations in Toronto with poise. He sat down Yunel Escobar for several one-on-one discussions regarding his behaviour, and deftly defused a volatile situation with Omar Vizquel, who publicly called out the coaching staff, by not sniping back through the media. Farrell takes his job very seriously, and it becomes clear when you spend any time around him that he does not suffer fools.
He’s also a staunch defender of his players—to opponents, umpires and often the media. “It’s important to build that rapport,” Farrell says, “so they know they have my support in challenging times.” Talk to any player in the Red Sox clubhouse and he will uniformly tell you how much he values playing for Farrell. How the atmosphere around the team has markedly improved and how much more encouraging it is to play for a manager who you know has your back.
But these are mere intangibles. Correlating these positive vibes with the performance on the field is tricky business. Who’s to say the clubhouse camaraderie isn’t a product of the team’s success instead of vice versa? It is and always will be nearly impossible to quantify how much a manager can affect his team’s win-loss record. Beyond filling out the lineup card and handling the bullpen in the middle-to-late innings, the manager is mostly helpless when it comes to influencing a ball game. They don’t throw the ball; they don’t swing the bat. And at the risk of over-simplification, those are generally the most important factors in winning and losing at baseball.
Having a healthy Ortiz and Jacoby Ellsbury in the lineup—they played just 90 and 74 games last year, respectively—does much more for this club than a manager ever could. But one can point to the bounce-back seasons of Jon Lester, John Lackey and Felix Doubront, three starters who worked closely with Farrell when he was the club’s pitching coach, as an example of his influence. Or the team’s vastly improved plate approach, which has taken Boston from having the second-worst walk rate in the majors in 2012 (6.9 percent) to third-best this season (9.5 percent). Or the utilization of infield shifts—an obsession of third-base coach and infield savant Brian Butterfield, who came to Boston from Toronto with Farrell—which has made an already good defensive team even tougher to sneak ground balls past. In fact, bringing Butterfield along with bench coach Torey Lovullo and hiring player-friendly pitching coach Juan Nieves away from the White Sox may have been the shrewdest manoeuvres Farrell has made so far. A functional coaching staff that gets along with the players—and, more importantly, with each other—is a luxury the Red Sox did not have in 2012. And so it may turn out that the most important moves Farrell made with the Red Sox came before the season even began, rather than at its conclusion, when the Red Sox hope to be contending for a World Series.
“You’re always learning—from the things that go well and the things that don’t work out so well,” Farrell says, looking out over the Rogers Centre turf. “I would hope that next year, I’m not the same as I was this year.” That might be a scary thought for Red Sox faithful, considering how decidedly well things have gone this season. But even as Boston marches toward the post-season as one of the best turnaround stories in recent MLB history, Farrell refuses to be complacent. The evolution is never-ending.