Read Red Sox Rule for Free Online Page A

with no process to them. Epstein believed he’d get more out of a conversation about baserunning, defense, and pitching if he knew how Francona prioritized those things.
    It was half test, half talking point. Epstein quickly noticed that Francona had some law school in his answers, not in terms of being legalistic, but in the way his responses were layered. He seemed to consider, naturally and thoroughly, a handful of possibilities before making a decision, and the decision itself was delivered in a few seconds. After a while, it was an interview in name only. It had become a skull session, and it was so fun that they had barely noticed that 1:00 had become 3:00 in a blink. And that was before the true test, the one that would cause beads of sweat to form on Francona’s head.
    They had all moved into a Fenway suite with a flat-screen TV already in place. Francona sat on a brown leather couch, and Epstein and Byrnes handed him a partial line score from an A’s–Angels game. They explained that they wanted to see him in action. Talking about baseball was fun and all, but they really wanted to see how he applied all those sensible principles of his. Anyone could have a great day interviewing, right? How would he respond when they turned on the TV in this wood-paneled room and dropped him in the middle of the seventh inning?
    Francona knew about games that seemed to have their own V-8 engines, games that moved ten times as fast in the dugout as they appeared to in the seats or in the press box. On nights like those in Philadelphia, he’d look at his longtime baseball brother, Brad Mills, and say, “Stay with me, Millsie.” But Millsie wasn’t in that Fenway suite. It was Francona and that game, a Lamborghini that wanted to drive itself. It was the dirtiest trick to play on a manager whocares about preparation: asking him to make decisions in someone else’s game without the benefit of that person’s information.
    Epstein put the DVD on pause and set the scene: “It’s the seventh inning, you’re managing Oakland, and Barry Zito is on the mound. He has thrown one hundred and five pitches, and here’s your chart of who’s available in the bullpen. Here’s who the other team has coming up. Here’s where you are in the season…” He pushed PLAY and said, “You have two minutes.”
    Once again, that sport coat was in a heap somewhere. The tie was loosened. The sweat spread. Streams of information tumbled out of him: “I see this head-to-head matchup but I don’t put too much weight into it because that was from a couple years ago…This left-right split is pretty consistent, so I’m going to rely on that…I see on the bullpen chart that my guy has been used three days in a row, so I’m not going to use him even though we need to win this game—he can’t pitch four days in a row.”
    He was involved in this simulation now. Rocking, cursing, sweating. It wasn’t his game, but he knew things about all these players. Even though he felt like he was sinking at times, he was making an impression because he seemed to have a dossier on everyone at his fingertips. He made Epstein and Byrnes laugh at one point when he worked his way through the seventh and eighth innings, with designs on giving the ball to Oakland closer Keith Foulke. But when Epstein pushed PLAY , Foulke was nowhere to be found. “Well,” Francona deadpanned, “I always knew Macha was a dumbass.”
    It was a good line, but it wasn’t the real story. The truth was that the interviewers had picked a game in which Foulke wasn’t with the team. Still, Francona had made a point regarding a closer. He thought having one was essential for a manager. He told his interviewers that he agreed that crucial outs existed in the seventhand eighth innings, too, but a closer was the light that a manager worked his way toward during the game.
    “By the way,” he said, wiping away sweat, “we’ve talked a lot about preparation today, but I want you guys to