Terry Francona stands as the best Red Sox manager of your lifetime, your dad’s, and any other generation’s on your family tree for many reasons. One of the most important is that he could relate first-hand and viscerally to so many experiences and career stages his players were going through.
Francona experienced the game from various vantage points as a player and manager before arriving in Boston in December 2003 and writing out the lineup cards that changed history 10 months later.
He was a hotshot prospect with the Expos (Sports Illustrated profiled him and some kid named Ripken before the 1982 season), a young player frustrated by injuries (knee problems derailed his career), a journeyman just hanging on (the 1988 Indians had five future big-league managers on their roster), an upstart minor league manager who masterfully dealt with a most unusual circumstance (managing Michael Jordan in Double A in 1994), and a big-league manager undercut by a hopelessly flawed roster (he was 78 games under .