GOODYEAR, Ariz. — When he was a freshman at the University of Arizona, with an English exam coming up, Terry Francona knew that he’d be able to take a dictionary in with him to use as he took the test.
“I was panicking,” Francona said. “You could take a dictionary in. I wrote the essays in the margins of the dictionaries. It took me days. Then I got in there, and I knew it.”
He knew what he had written without looking. He didn’t even need the dictionary, he didn’t use it and obviously he didn’t do anything that would put him in trouble. In that moment, Francona found his writing style. “If I write it out word for word, I remember it,” Francona said. Francona gives a speech to the team every year before the first official full-team workout. This year, that speech took place at 9 a.m. sharp on Monday. Everyone here knows that the speech means so much to Francona. He says that he puts much more time into preparing it than you might think…