Page 174 - 1975 BoSox

’75—THE RED SOX TEAM THAT SAVED BASEBALL 167
Mike Greenwell hit .233.Tom Brunansky led the team with 15 homers and 74 RBIs.
e 1993 season saw the batting average improve to .264 with the emergence of Mo Vaughn (29 homers, 101 RBIs). However, Roger Clemens had his worst season as a professional (11-14, 4.46 ERA, a season in which he had been bitten on the pitching hand by his dog) and the team was again mired in the second divi- sion, nishing fth in the AL East with a mediocre 80-82 record.
e players strike shortened the 1994 season, and the Red Sox compiled a 54-61 record and nished fourth in the AL East. Clemens led the sta with a 9-7 record. e o ense, led by Vaughn and John Valentin, hit a combined .263 (12th in the AL) while the team ERA of 4.93 (ninth in the AL) is the only other fact one needs to gure out what happened with this team. New general manager Dan Duquette shipped players in and out trying to light a re under the Red Sox. After the season he decided to ship out his manager as well, ring Hobson and bringing in Kevin Kennedy to manage the team.
Don Zimmer served as Hobson’s bench coach in 1992 and theorized in his book Zim that substance abuse, alcohol in particular, played a role in Hobson’s failure as a Red Sox manager. His substance-abuse problem was exposed to all in May 1996. After his dismissal from the Red Sox, Hobson became the manager of the Triple-A Scranton/Wilkes-Barre Red Barons. On May 4, 1996, his team was in Pawtucket to play the PawSox. Hobson was arrested in his hotel room on a felony charge of cocaine possession. Approximately 2.6 grams of cocaine (about $120 in value) were alleged to have been found in Hobson’s shaving kit, having been sent to Hobson in a Federal Express package by a former friend from Alabama named Jerry Poe. Poe owed Hobson money and sent the supposedly unso- licited drugs in payment of that debt. On August 8, 1996, Hobson was red by the Philadelphia Phillies, Scranton’s parent club. He was able to resolve the drug charge without a guilty nding in exchange for enter- ing a rst-o ender program and performing approxi-
mately 60 hours of community service. He denied ever using cocaine while managing the Red Sox or the Red Barons. He has acknowledged a past history with the drug that began when he was a player. “I came up in an era when that (using drugs) was what you were supposed to do. As a good old boy from Alabama, I thought that was the way to t in. It probably cost me three or four years of base- ball,” he said.4
After his termination from the Red Barons, it was the Red Sox who gave Hobson another chance. In February 1997 he was hired as a special-assignment scout. In 1998 he continued his comeback as manager of the Sarasota Red Sox in the Class-A Florida State League. Finally, on December 2, 1999, Hobson re- turned to New England as the manager of the Nashua (New Hampshire) Pride of the independent Atlantic League. As the third manager in the team’s history, Hobson led the 2000 Pride to the Atlantic League title. e championship was New Hampshire’s rst professional sports title in over 50 years. Hobson’s 2001 squad was eliminated in the rst round of the playo s. In 2003 the Pride returned to the championship series before they lost in ve games to the Somerset Patriots, the team they had swept for the 2000 title.
In 2007 Hobson led the Pride to another champion- ship, the Can-Am League crown. In 2011, he became manager of the Independent Atlantic League’s Lancaster (Pennsylvania) Barnstormers. In 2014 the Barnstormers won the league championship.
Hobson has three grown daughters, Allene, Libby, and Polly, from his rst marriage, and three boys, K.C., Hank, and Noah, and a daughter, Olivia, from his second marriage, to his wife, Krystine.
Note
A version of this biography was originally published in ‘75: e Red Sox Team at Saved Baseball, edited by Bill Nowlin and Cecilia Tan, and published by Rounder Books in 2005.