“We probably ordered chicken from Popeye’s like once a month,’’ said Lester. “But that’s not the reason we lost.
“It was a ninth-inning rally beer … Was it a bad habit? Yes, I should have been on the bench more than I was. But we just played bad baseball as a team in September. We stunk. To be honest, we were doing the same things all season when we had the best record in baseball.’’
Little comfort there.
In addition to admitting the beer/chicken report, Lester gave up something that reflects poorly on the managerial reign of Terry Francona.
“People knew how Tito was and we pushed the envelope with it,’’ said Lester. “We never had rules, we never had that iron-fist mentality.’’
Wow. Francona’s still got steel-belted radial tracks on his backside from last week’s Bob Hohler opus, and now one of his trusted warriors has tossed him under the Fenway Fung Wah.
No doubt Lester is speaking the truth, but it’s astonishing to have this come from a young man Francona embraced and protected like a son.
Francona was more than a manager to Lester. He was a virtual dad. When Lester was diagnosed with cancer, Francona made it his mission to shield the young lefty from all outside forces. Woe was any reporter who tried to contact anyone in Lester’s family when the southpaw was undergoing treatment. There were tears in Francona’s eyes when Lester won the final game of the 2007 World Series and it wasn’t because the Sox were champs. Francona was overcome by Lester’s brave journey back from cancer.
And now we get the truth we feared all along; the inmates were running the asylum. Francona treated them like men and they responded by walking all over him. He bit his lip and took bullets for his guys and this is how they rewarded him. The “players manager’’ wound up getting treated like the “players doormat.’’
