How Reds' Terry Francona went from getting fired twice to making history with 2,000 wins

It was April 1, 1997.

“Dodgers?” Terry Francona said.

“Yeah, Schilling, Bottalico,” he added.

You always remember your first. 

That even goes for Francona, the Cincinnati Reds manager who often claims he can’t remember yesterday.

One thousand, nine hundred ninety-nine managerial victories later, Francona won’t claim that it meant all that much what he did that day so many years ago or necessarily any given day in between that led him to this point, to this elite place in MLB history.

And he swears he hasn’t spent a minute of his 24-season managing career thinking about what history might say about all those days, all those teams, all those wins.

“Because I don’t ever want to be in this game for the wrong reasons,” said Francona, who became the 13th manager in history to win 2,000 games when the Reds beat the Colorado Rockies on Sunday at Great American Ball Park.

If anything, he said, thinking back to that game at Dodger Stadium 28 years ago, “I actually thought it was going to be kind of easy.

“Schill pitched eight, Bottalico pitched one,” he said with a laugh, “and then I don’t think we won a game the rest of the road trip.”

Talk about April Fool's Day.

In fact, those Philadelphia Phillies lost their next four, 10 of their next 12, and finished in last place in the National League East, even with a rising ace in Schilling and returning All-Star closer Bottalico (and not much in between).

And if Francona learned how hard it was to win even his second big-league game as a manager, you should have seen the final potholed stretch to get to 2,000, the Reds going three straight series without winning one until facing the historically awful Rockies. And needing a comeback, walkoff win in the ninth Saturday just to eke out that series win.

That’s how hard it is to win major league baseball games.

Which makes it no wonder that a man who has been on big-league fields since he followed his dad around in the 1960s (before his own 10-year MLB career) would be so reluctant to opine on the meaning of joining a Hall of Fame list of managers with as many wins as he has.

“Just means I’m old,” he said.

It’s also possible it means more than that, and that he shares a common thread with others in the 2K pantheon — which includes two others who managed the Reds, Hall of Famer Sparky Anderson and presumptive Hall of Famer Dusty Baker. A common thread that goes beyond the sheer longevity.

“I think you have to be progressive,” said Chris Valaika, who’s in his fourth season as Francona’s hitting coach and also played for Baker in Cincinnati. “Both of those guys were. For them to last as long as they have throughout the decades of their careers, I think it’s a credit to them being the learners they are and being adaptable.

“I never got to play for Tito. But having worked for him for three (-plus) years now, and getting to play for Dusty in my time here, there’s a ton of similarities in just how they run their meetings and control the clubhouse,” Valaika said. “How they run a game is very similar. What they value with the veteran presences that they bring around with players, but also knowing how to push buttons and get younger guys better and find ways to win games with them.”

In fact, among the 13 managers with 2,000 wins, he has a better winning percentage (.538) than five of them. Three on the list have losing records, including top-ranked Connie Mack (3,731-3,948) and the only other active manager on the list, Texas Rangers skipper Bruce Bochy (2,218-2,234 through Saturday). Bucky Harris (2,158-2,219) is the other.

Boston Red Sox manager Alex Cora, who once played for Francona and managed against Baker, Bochy and 2,010-win Joe Torre, said that elite group had something else in common.

“Those guys let the star players be the star players, man,” said Cora. “They don’t get in the middle. Obviously, there’s a lot of communication and connection with those guys. But in the end, he let David (Ortiz) do his thing, Curt (Schilling), Pedro (Martinez), Manny (Ramirez) in a sense, do his thing.”

That might have come especially natural for Francona by the time he got to the big leagues after having “managed” Michael Jordan at Double-A Birmingham in his first pro managing gig as the Bulls superstar made international headlines by taking a reprieve from basketball to try baseball in the 1990s.

With a star-filled roster in Boston, he developed a tight bond with bigger-than-life clubhouse leader Ortiz and had little choice but to let Manny be Manny (like every manager who had the eccentric Ramirez before or after).

“It’s also the respect he shows to the 25th guy, 26th guy,” Cora said. “You see him in the other dugout, communicating with those kids. It’s a different group for him (in Cincinnati vs. Boston). And he’s doing an outstanding job.”

Of course, the best managers also tend to have the best players.

Anderson was always quick to point out how much of a genius he became when he inherited a team with Pete Rose, Johnny Bench and Tony Perez, and how much smarter he got again when Joe Morgan joined the team.

But, to Valaika’s point, Anderson also was progressive. He was ahead of the sport when he navigated good-but-not-great pitching staffs to lean heavily on strong bullpens to win 1975 and ’76 championships — to the degree of setting an MLB record in ’75 for consecutive non-complete games (45) and getting booed by fans for his quick-hook tendencies.

The extension of that is hiring good coaches, Cora said, calling it another common thread among the managers he’s seen in the 2K club.

“And he delegates,” Cora said of Francona. “That’s something he told me one afternoon here (at Fenway Park) in the dugout before a game: ‘When you become a manager you have to delegate.’ And he’s done an amazing job of that.”

Valaika said he’s watched in both Baker and Francona a delegating talent that starts with clear and consistent communication and expectations with coaches. But it also involves the individual player relationships that Cora mentioned — right down to one-on-one meetings with every player in camp this spring, for example.

“They’re the ultimate connectors,” Valaika said. “They bring the groups together. Those are people that players want to play for. Coaches want to coach for them. That speaks to who they are as people.

“I don’t think it’s any mystery that that’s why those guys have had the illustrious careers they’ve had.”

Francona built his career amid remarkably different challenges, from a bad Phillies team – "We were terrible," said Reds broadcaster Jeff Brantley, a reliever for Francona's 1999 Phillies – to a loaded Red Sox team to a bottom-spending, high-tech Cleveland organization and now to the Reds.

From that first win to 500 to 1,000 to 1,500 and now to 2,000 on a path that is certain to lead to Cooperstown.

Don’t expect Francona to remember each victory milestone along the way. As he likes to suggest, he can’t remember what he had for breakfast.

Nine years, two months, two weeks and one firing after No. 1, he earned his next big one, No.500.

It took barely five years to earn his next 500 as his career accelerated during eight seasons with the Red Sox after aggressive, young general manager Theo Epstein hired him to manage the big-spending, big-slugging and championship-starved Sox ahead of the 2004 season.

The big mile-marker victories:

• 500 — May 15, 2006, at Baltimore. Josh Beckett pitches the first seven innings in an 11-1 victory over the Orioles, with Jason Varitek, Mike Lowell and Wily Mo Pena driving in a combined 10 runs.
• 1,000 — July 23, 2011, at Fenway Park. Beckett pitches seven again, and Francona-converted closer Jonathan Papelbon gets the save in a 3-1 win over the Seattle Mariners. “I’m just glad to win in any way. But, yeah, I guess it felt good,” Francona told Boston media after becoming the 57th manager in history to reach that mark. Said Beckett, channeling his manager’s wise-ass nature: “If he was a pitcher, it would be more impressive.”
• 1,500 — May 3, 2018, in Cleveland. Adam Plutko pitched 7 1/3 innings, and Francisco Lindor and Jose Ramirez had big days at the plate as the Guardians beat the Toronto Blue Jays 13-4 in the second game of a doubleheader. Francona was the 24th manager to win 1,500.

Those don’t count, of course, the 44 postseason wins, including the 11 in 2004 on the way to busting the 86-year-old Curse of the Bambino in Boston.

Cora, himself a World Series-winning manager, who’s still looking for No. 575 in his career, seems to have trouble comprehending what it would take to reach the Baker-Bochy-Francona club.

“I don’t think I’m going to get that close. I’m not managing 25 years,” he said.

Brantley said he’s witnessed an evolved manager today compared to when he played for the Phillies in Francona’s third season in Philadelphia.

“The change I see — and I hear it from players as much as anything — is that there’s not a whole lot of wasted time between a mistake and correcting a mistake,” Brantley said. “I’m not a mind reader, but just watching him when he was first managing, it seemed like a mistake would happen and he would hope a player would correct it on his own, and if he didn’t, then he would go do it.

“Now it’s immediate. He’s checking those boxes right away.”

Just ask Reds center fielder TJ Friedl or shortstop Elly De La Cruz. Friedl got a conversation from Francona in the dugout in the half-inning after forgetting the number of outs and running the Reds out of an inning in Milwaukee in April. Last month, De La Cruz nearly cost the Reds a game against the Yankees with a base-running gaffe after forgetting the score in extra innings, and Francona addressed it immediately, eliciting an apology.

Neither mistake has been repeated by the player.

“My thing is, we’re going to make mistakes. But when we make them, I just don’t want it to happen again,” Francona said.

Brantley has played for five managers in his career that have totaled 9,177 wins, including three in the 2K club:  Tony La Russa (2,884), Baker and Francona. He also played for Davey Johnson (1,372) and Roger Craig (738).

“All those guys have their unique way of personal motivation for each player,” Brantley said. “Those guys weren’t big on holding big meetings in a room with the whole team. But they were great at individual conversations and prodding you in a certain direction or with encouragement. And they all did it in a different way.”

The common thread with that was authenticity. But always with clarity of expectations and firmness of purpose, regardless of the level of humor or the communication style.

“Davey was always joking around, and Dusty, too,” Brantley said. “But it wasn’t always about being funny. They were trying to move you in a different direction if you were struggling a little bit. I think Tito qualifies in that same vein.

“There’s a serious side to those guys,” Brantley added. “And they show it in a game. Or if somebody – an umpire or another team – shows disrespect to one of their players, that’s when they would show their ire.”

Francona has 52 career ejections, twice as many as Baker, four fewer than Anderson and 36 fewer than Bochy.

But as Brantley and others alluded, those moments are overshadowed by the humor and consistent upbeat environment.

That probably has a lot to do with Francona’s lifetime connection at the hip — and soul — with ballparks and clubhouses, a love affair that drew him back out of retirement for this last three-year shot at October with the Reds.

It’s certainly why he’s chosen to do it for so long. And his reluctance to think about in more profound terms is almost certainly part of the reason others have clamored to bring him into their ranks for so many years.

“Even when I was in Double-A,I felt like if you put guys in the organization first and yourself a distant last, things will work out,” Francona said.

“Then you look up 40 years later, and I’m still doing it.”

Terry Francona by the numbers

• 3,719: Games managed
• 24: Seasons managed
• 4: Teams (Phillies, Red Sox, Indians/Guardians, Reds)
• 2,000: Wins (13th all-time)
• 1,719: Losses
• .538: Winning percentage
• 3: Manager of the Year awards (all with Cleveland in 2013, 2016, 2022)
• 11: Playoff seasons
• 44-34: Postseason record
• .564: Postseason winning percentage
• 2: World Series championships (Red Sox, 2004 and 2007)
• 3: League championships (also 2016 Cleveland)

This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: What sets 2K skippers Terry Francona, Dusty Baker, Sparky Anderson apart