Farrell found safety net

Tom Farrell, lobsterman and minor league ballplayer, gave his son John the sea and he gave him baseball. The sea was a gift that slipped out of their hands, run aground by a dream father and son could not sustain.

"We couldn't rub two nickels together," John Farrell said of a family business that grew too fast, then came crashing down, "but we always ate lobster."

The baseball? The son, who had set lobster traps with his father from the time he was 7, all up and down the New York Bight, from Montauk on Long Island down the Jersey Shore to Cape May, turned to that gift only when the boat was gone, lost to creditors when his father declared bankruptcy and they were bound to the land. His father was a mason by trade, an oceanfaring man by desire. His son, who was in eighth grade when he invested what money he had saved in the down payment on his father's boat, hadn't contemplated a life that did not involve open water underneath. Baseball was a lifeline to a future he'd never imagined.

"In retrospect, if we hadn't gone bankrupt I probably wouldn't be sitting here today," said John Farrell, pitching coach of the Red Sox, who this season, Farrell's first in Boston, had the lowest earned run average in the American League. "I think that's where the silver lining begins. I had no intention of going to college. [Fishing] was going to be my path. As that bankruptcy hit, different paths had to be sought. I was recruited out of high school, and things blossomed from there."

Tom Farrell is gone now, dead these last five years, released from those long, hard days and nights of setting traps and laying bricks to support his wife, Suzanne, and their six children. But John, while losing what his family once lived for, fought about, and cried over, now plies another trade he also learned in part from his father. Tom Farrell had made it as high as Double A with the Cleveland Indians, pitching in 1953 for Reading, Pa., with Herb Score and Joe Altobelli and Rocky Colavito, all of whom would leave Tom Farrell behind as they advanced to the major leagues.

But Tom Farrell remembered. And what he saw and what he learned, he shared with his son, who would go on to prosper as a ballplayer at Oklahoma State before being drafted by the Indians, his father's team, in 1984.

"He spent time dissecting deliveries on TV," Farrell said. "As a young kid, I grew up watching Tom Seaver. That was the old, drop-and-drive style prevalent in the '50s and '60s. That was a discussion point very rare in households, to talk about deliveries and pitching, but he was able to draw on his experiences."

There was one thing more. "The greatest thing he instilled in me was a work ethic," Farrell said. "I think many times of a lesson from commercial fishing, that there is a lot of work that has to be done that you don't get paid for. I was able to make that analogy when I was getting ready for a season, getting ready for spring training and I was on my own. That was an easy picture to grasp onto, in my mind."

John Farrell, who shares the same birthday as Roger Clemens (Aug. 4, 1962) but unlike Clemens was forced to endure two reconstructive surgeries on his pitching elbow, which caused him to miss two full seasons and limited him to six appearances in his last three years in the big leagues, is a big man, broad-shouldered and powerfully built. He has a physical presence that is not easily ignored.

"For me," said Ross Atkins, who succeeded Farrell as the Indians' director of player development after Farrell spent five years harvesting a bounty of young talent that includes most of the key components of the team that will face the Sox tonight in the American League Championship Series, "when I look down at the list of what John Farrell brings to the table, his physical presence is at the bottom."

Atkins, who served as Farrell's assistant, talks of things like discipline and hard work, communication and respect. "He never shuns any responsibility - if it's something he can handle and take care of, he takes care of it," Atkins said. "Nothing is pushed off to the side."

But most of all, he says, there is this.

"Humility," Atkins said, a rare quality in the world they occupy.

Maybe you learn humility when your ship goes under. Maybe you learn it from a mother who never complained that there wasn't enough room for eight people in a house with just three bedrooms and one bath, who was unwavering in her love and support even as your father showed the strain and frustration of hard work unrewarded.

Or maybe you learn it when you're standing in the visitors' bullpen at Fenway Park one afternoon, 10 months into rehabilitating from your first elbow surgery, and the first pitch you throw you hear something that sounds like a piece of paper being torn in two, and you know immediately what you heard is something terrible.

"I feel like I've experienced every side a player can experience," Farrell said, "with the exception of winning a World Series. Having pitched consecutive years with over 200 innings, having won in double digits, and on a personal level, a [near no-hitter]. Two reconstructive surgeries. Having been released and made it back after 2 1/2 [years] of rehabilitation. That's all given me a more well-rounded series of experiences when I deal with players. Now I think I can look at things a little more objectively and give a little first-hand knowledge of an experience a player might encounter.

"You might say, on the one hand, boy, I got the short end of the stick. I am who I am today because of all those experiences."

When John Farrell couldn't pitch anymore, he went back to Oklahoma State as an assistant coach, but he stayed in touch with Mark Shapiro, the Indians' farm director who had traded him, released him, and pretty much told him time was running out, but always had done so with honesty and directness and compassion.

Shapiro may have been the boss who fired him, but he also became a friend. Six months into his stay at Oklahoma State, Shapiro offered him a spot with the Indians as assistant farm director. Farrell, who had just moved his family to Stillwater, said no.

But when Shapiro was promoted to general manager in November 2001 and offered Farrell his old job, Farrell didn't hesitate.

But for Farrell, who still subscribes to fishing trade journals and will wander down to Boston Harbor just to watch the boats, the playing field was like the sea: You can never leave it completely behind. He had played with Terry Francona on the Indians; they had become fast friends, Francona and Farrell and their wives.

So last fall, when Theo Epstein called Shapiro to ask for permission to talk with Farrell, he was ready to succumb to the siren song. He accepted the offer from Epstein, a man whose leadership he admired, to work side by side with Francona, something the friends had often talked about.

"There's a competitiveness," Farrell said, "that only the dugout can bring out in people, those who have been a player at this level. I'm convinced you never lose that. It's always there."

The fisherman's son had come home.