Joe morgan baseball red sox

The rumors were swirling in July 1988. The Boston Red Sox were 43-42 and nine games behind the first-place Detroit Tigers in the American League East. Would Boston make a change at the top? “It would come as a surprise to me,” said manager John McNamara, when he was told about speculation that he would be fired by the All-Star break.1 But on July 14, McNamara was replaced by third-base coach and longtime minor-league manager Joe Morgan.

Morgan, a lifelong Red Sox fan and a native of Walpole, Massachusetts, a Boston suburb, made it clear he was the man for the job, any “interim” label aside. “Lou Gorman [general manager] took me aside and said, ‘We’re letting McNamara go and we want you to take over until we can find someone permanent.’ I said, ‘Well don’t look too hard because he’s standing right in front of you and you’re talking to him.’”2

What happened next would be remembered fondly as “Morgan Magic.” The Red Sox won their first 12 games with Morgan at the helm, capped off by Roger Clemens’s shutout of the Texas Rangers on July 25. Morgan, with the interim tag now removed, gave the credit to the players. “I didn’t make a whole lot of changes,” he recalled. “I gave [Todd] Benzinger more at-bats and I put

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