The Rookie

Red Sox GM Theo Epstein, new to the spotlight, draws strength from a special home team
By Bella English, Globe Staff, 12/5/2002

The view from Theo Epstein's office at Fenway Park includes a billboard that depicts a Red Sox player with the question ''Cursed?'' Underneath, it continues: ''Yeah, with the best fans in baseball.''

That, of course, depends on how you define ''best.'' If ''best'' means fanatic, crazed, heartsick, fickle, rambunctious, and often downright hostile - do we have to invoke Bill Buckner's name here? - then OK, Boston fans are the best.

Epstein, the brand new general manager of the Red Sox, knows about the long-suffering fans of Fenway: ''I was one of them,'' he says. From childhood until he left for college, he and his family attended 15 home games a year. When asked whether he ever booed the Sox, Epstein pauses.

''I tend not to be a booer. I tend to sit quietly with my arms crossed in front of me. When we're not winning, I'm very unhappy. The staff is pretty unhappy. And the fans are exceptionally unhappy.''

But back to that billboard. Are the Red Sox really cursed by the ghost of Babe Ruth?

''I don't really believe in curses,'' Epstein says, flashing a broad grin. ''Look, I can't sit here and deny that the Red Sox have broken their fans' hearts for the better part of a century. But I think with the right approach, tremendous resources, great ownership, and hard work, we can put ourselves in the position to win the World Series. It's just a matter of time.''

Speaking of time, Theo Epstein has always been a young man in a hurry.

Some of his best baseball hits came when he was a toddler, he says, only half-joking. He ruined his pitching by learning to throw a curveball before his arm was ready. As a college intern for the Baltimore Orioles, he conceived and organized a huge commemoration for surviving Negro League players. He went to law school while working for the San Diego Padres. And now, at 28, he's the youngest GM in baseball history.

Family of achievers

Theo Epstein is now in the driver's - some might say suicide - seat of the Boston Red Sox. Clearly, brains and focus got him there fast. But he attributes much of his success to the home he grew up in.

Epstein has a twin brother and older sister, both doing well in their chosen fields. His father, Leslie, is an acclaimed novelist and director of the creative writing program at Boston University. And his mother, Ilene, is, as he puts it, part of ''a great Brookline institution.''

''The Studio,'' he says. It's the fashionable women's clothing store near Coolidge Corner that Ilene Epstein, her twin sister, Sandy, and best friend Marcie Brawer have run for nearly 25 years. It is also, he reveals, ''where I saw my first naked lady.'' (As boys, he and his brother, Paul, used to hang out there, waiting for their mother.)

There seems to be a creative strain running through the Epstein family. Leslie Epstein's father, Philip, and his father's identical twin, Julius, won the Academy Award for best screenplay for ''Casablanca.'' Theo's sister, Anya, 32, followed the family tradition: she wrote scripts for the NBC series ''Homicide: Life on the Street'' and is now writing screenplays. She is married to Dan Futterman, an actor. His twin, Paul, is a social worker and soccer coach at Brookline High School, where the boys graduated in 1991.

Growing up, the Epstein parents had high expectations. ''There were raised eyebrows over low B's or C's because they knew I could do better if I tried,'' says Theo. In college, he ''really kind of stopped working because I was into other things. I think my father saw I wasn't going to be one of those typical Yale students who spent hour after hour in the library trying to get an A instead of an A-minus.''

He finds it amusing when others talk about his high-achieving family. To him, it was a relaxed household, full of love.

''When I think of my family, I think of my dad locked in his office, writing about a sentence a day, with classical music on; my sister locked in her room with bad pop music on, talking to her friends on the phone; my mom hustling home from work to make an unbelievable dinner in 30 minutes; and my brother and I beating the heck out of each other in the hallway,'' he says. ''Those are my memories.''

But he is unabashedly proud of his family's accomplishments: his father's writing and teaching; his sister, ''so talented as a writer and producer and now as a great mother''; his brother's work with children (''What he does is so much more important than anything I'll ever do'').

And then there's mom. Ilene Epstein never went to college. ''She overcame a very difficult childhood,'' says Theo, one that included being bounced between foster homes. ''She's certainly an inspiration with her entrepreneurship and business savvy and what she's been able to accomplish.''

A life around the field

Being part of the Red Sox family seemed almost preordained for Epstein. ''I was probably a Red Sox fan before I even knew it,'' he says, adding that his father, even while living in New York, despised the Yankees and adored the Sox - something that the twin toddlers absorbed. At age 4, Theo and his family moved to Boston, where they lived a mile from Fenway Park. Today, he lives ''a block and a half from Gate D,'' walks to work, and tells time by looking out his seventh-floor living-room window, from which he can see the clock and scoreboard at Fenway.

He says he's confident about his baseball-management skills but nervous about other aspects of the new job, notably the lack of privacy. He pauses, then adds: ''Actually, I'll be pretty nervous 162 times next year,'' the number of games on the schedule. He notes that his old boss in San Diego, Kevin Towers, put on 30 pounds his first year as the Padres GM.

''We called watching a game with him nine innings of pain,'' says Epstein.

Nail-biting, not bingeing, might be more Epstein's style. Late at night, to unwind, he'll strum his acoustic guitar or surf the Internet. He also runs and lifts weights. ''If I didn't, I'd wither away. I'm really skinny, '' he says. He's 6-1 and rangy, while fraternal twin Paul - delivered a minute earlier, by caesarean section - is 6-4 and strapping.

Growing up, the brothers played both soccer and baseball, though Paul favored soccer, Theo baseball. Theo played on the Brookline High School team but says his baseball skills peaked at age 3, when his parents would take the boys to Central Park and pitch to them.

''I'd hit them over the fence. People would gather to watch the little kid,'' says Epstein. ''But that came about 20 years too early to maximize my earning potential.'' He made the Brookline Little League All-Stars but says he was ''a second-tier player'' as a pitcher at Brookline High School. Paul says his brother ''didn't have overpowering physical gifts, but I think he made up for it with pitcher's intellect. He didn't have the fastest fastball, but he had a good sense of what pitch to put where.''

Though his parents attended all of the boys' soccer games, they had a hard time watching Theo on the mound, worrying he'd lose. ''I was too nervous,'' says his mother, who has saved all the boys' trophies and sports memorabilia - her ''archival vaults'' - in the comfortable old Brookline apartment where she raised three kids and where she is now compiling a scrapbook of Theo's latest venture.

As close as Theo is to Paul, Ilene Epstein is to her identical twin, Sandy Gradman. The two work together and live three blocks apart. When Gradman was diagnosed with breast cancer two years ago, she says, her nephew Theo called her constantly from San Diego.

''Theo is just brilliant, but ... he is completely without the ego a kid like that can have,'' Gradman says. ''I'm sure he'll make mistakes along the way, but I think he'll be very successful.''

Though the entire family is close, Theo and Paul often operated as a unit, and sports was their life. They'd turn the long hallway of the apartment into ''a baseball infield, a basketball court, a football field, a hockey rink, a boxing ring, and a bowling alley,'' Paul says.

Growing up, the boys watched so many sports events on television that their father made a deal: For every minute of TV, there would be a minute of reading. It taught the boys a set of skills - but not the one their father had in mind. ''How to beat the system,'' Theo says. ''It was the ever-popular locking yourself in the room with a book, shuffling the pages loudly while quietly listening to the game on the radio.''

''The rule,'' agrees his father, ''was loosely enforced.''

''Their obsession with baseball was very, very extreme,'' says Anya, who lives in New York and recently taught her toddler to say, ''Yay Sox!'' on the phone to Uncle Theo. ''The TV was always turned to sports. I had to fight for my hour of `Little House on the Prairie.'''

They used to drive the neighbors crazy, too.

''The people downstairs used to bang on the pipes,'' says Paul. ''If things got really bad, they would come knock on the door, and we would run to the bathroom and leave our parents to deal with it.'' In high school, the self-described ''late bloomers'' didn't drink or party. ''We lived through sports,'' Paul says. After one particularly noisy home game, a downstairs neighbor demanded to see the boys.

''You guys are 15 years old!'' he scolded. ''You should be out drinking beer and chasing girls!''

When the twins went their separate ways for college - Theo following his sister to Yale, Paul heading to Wesleyan University in Connecticut - they spoke every day on the phone, a tradition that continues. And when Theo returned to Boston last March to become the Red Sox' assistant general manager, Paul was most excited about signing him up for his weekend soccer team.

Though they were inseparable as children, the twins haven't done everything in lock step. Paul and Anya were engaged within a month of each other, and Paul married fellow social worker Saskia Grinberg nearly two years ago. ''I think Theo was quite relieved, because he said it bought him more time from my mom,'' Anya says, laughing.

But not from the Boston media. He's now being called Boston's most eligible bachelor - something his twin says he finds ''hilarious.'' Theo would like to set the record straight.

''I am involved,'' he says, adding that he wants to ''protect the privacy of the relationship.'' He will allow that she's 24 and a consultant in the biotech industry. How serious is it?

''Let's put it this way. It's been six months,'' he says. ''I haven't had many serious relationships because I usually get the six-month itch, and I haven't gotten that.''

Problems to solve

Though he says that his family and friends, not baseball, are his life, Epstein might be stretching the truth. He's at Fenway about 100 hours a week during homestands, he travels with the team, and he puts in up to 80 hours a week at work during the off-season.

For a while, Epstein considered becoming a journalist, but a stint as sports editor of the Yale Daily News changed his mind. He wanted to be part of a team effort, and being a reporter was, he says, a ''very individualistic pursuit.''

He worked summers during college as an intern for the Orioles and then moved with Orioles owner and CEO Larry Lucchino to the Padres, working his way up to a position as head of baseball operations. Meanwhile, he attended law school at the University of San Diego at the suggestion of Padres management, which thought it would help his career in baseball. ''What made it a slam-dunk for me was that no one else in the Padres had a law degree,'' says Epstein. ''Many of the agents are lawyers, and it also helped me with critical thinking.''

In Epstein's small, sparse office, there are just three pictures on the walls, all of them with Ted Williams, who retired as a player more than a decade before he was born. ''Certain geniuses come around every few generations,'' he says. The Red Sox management hands out copies of Williams's booklet, ''The Science of Hitting,'' to its minor-league players.

But after two years of fast starts and dismal finishes, the Sox need more than a booklet to win a World Series, or even a pennant.

''I think the team is better than they played the last four months of the season, but not as good as the first two months of play,'' Epstein says. He knows the Sox need to bolster their bullpen, and he mentions his first acquisition as GM, pitcher Ryan Rupe, claimed on waivers from the Tampa Bay Devil Rays.

Epstein would probably agree with the Yogi Berra saying, ''Ninety percent of this game is half mental.'' He knows the Sox can't out-spend the Yankees, but they might be able to out-fox them. To that end, Red Sox management runs computer studies, looking for certain statistical indicators to identify future stars among minor-league players. That, along with traditional scouting, should give the Sox the ''difference makers'' they need, Epstein believes.

Epstein also mentions ''not overpaying'' for top major-league talent - like, perhaps, Pedro Martinez, who will make $15 million this year. Ask Epstein if Martinez is worth it, and he stalls for time before answering.

''That's a difficult question,'' he says. ''In baseball, it's hard to define exactly what players are worth.'' But the boy wonder is slick. He adds, ''If any starting pitcher is worth it, it would be Pedro.''

Soon, Epstein will move into a larger office, though he loves his view of the billboard and of the Cask 'N Flagon, a popular pregame watering hole. The trappings of power mean little to him; what happens on the field is what counts.

This is a young man in a hurry, and the fans are sure to be right at his heels.

This story ran on page B10 of the Boston Globe on 12/5/2002.
© Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company.