Brad Mills: A baseball life that forged an unshakeable friendship with Terry Francona
Pat McManamon Feb 5, 2020 14
This baseball life started on Highway 99 as it heads north through the flat central farming valley of central California en route to San Francisco or Oakland.
As a boy as young as 5, Brad Mills and his three brothers rode with their parents as their father made the four-drive from Exeter to Candlestick Park or Oakland-Alameda Coliseum to see the Giants or A’s. En route, Dad would talk baseball, the players, the stars, how they played the game and what made them major leaguers.
“Because of that, I fell in love with the sport, at a very young age,” Mills said recently from his ranch in Granbury, Texas. As Mills spoke, he was just a little less than two weeks from heading to his seventh spring training with the Cleveland Indians, continuing a long baseball journey that now has him as the bench coach and trusted confidant to manager Terry Francona.
It’s a journey that has taken Mills from a two-story home surrounded by orange groves in the San Joaquin Valley to stops as varied as the University of Arizona, Wytheville (Va.), Peoria (Ill.) and Las Vegas. And in the big leagues from Philadelphia to Boston to Houston to Cleveland.
Along the way, Mills met a skinny, long-haired kid at Arizona, and a bond was forged. Watch an Indians game and Francona is always positioned at the right edge of the dugout. Never far from him is the guy Francona and the Indians simply call Millsie.
They are a pair of baseball lifers, guys who love and respect the game — and each other. They are strategists never far apart. They are also friends for four decades, a relationship that allows them to share lives and careers. Roommates in college and the minor leagues, they’ve won World Series, taken the Indians to Game 7 of the 2016 Fall Classic, and been part of teams in Cleveland that the last four seasons have averaged 95 wins.
Though they have been separated, they are nearly inseparable.
“I know down deep that without Millsie by my side I’d have never gotten where I am,” Francona said. “And to be honest with you, I don’t think I would want to.”
“We’re close, we’re friends and we’ve spent a lot of time together,” Mills said. “That probably makes me work all that much harder. Simply because I’m trying to do something for him. I want him to look good.”
The first time Mills met Francona was when both were entering Arizona in 1977. Francona was the hotshot freshman recruit out of high school, Mills the hotshot recruit out of the College of the Sequoias, a community college in Visalia, Calif. Mills was well aware of Francona; his name had made the rounds in the amateur baseball world. They were the only two players given full scholarships at one of the best college programs in the country.
The night before the first team meeting, players got together in a dorm lounge area. As players mingled, Mills introduced himself to his new teammates.
“There was a guy laying on the couch,” Mills said. “He’s got hair down past his shoulders. Long stringy hair. He’s got a T-shirt on, jean cutoff shorts, with straggling strings and red high-top Chuck Taylors.
“I stick out my hand and said, ‘Hi, I’m Brad Mills.’ He doesn’t even get up. He sticks his hand up and says, ‘I’m Terry Francona.’
“I said, ‘You’re Terry Francona? You gotta be kidding me?’
“He looks at me, and says, ‘Nope, I’m Terry.’”
Whatever image Mills had of Francona before the meeting, it was not what he experienced.
“Talk about a disappointment,” he said.
Francona laughs and acknowledges that Mills will always make fun of the way he looked (he had his hair cut by the next day on orders of manager Jerry Kindall). But the two became roommates, and a friendship formed that lasted as they made their way through the minor leagues.
In baseball parlance, friendships involve constantly trading barbs.
Francona often talks about how Mills had to always have the heat turned up in motel and hotel rooms because he had injured his arm. The heat, Mills said, freed up his shoulder so he could throw. Francona remembers another day in 1981.
“We were wrestling and he dislocated my finger; my pinky was sticking out to the left,” Francona said. “Well, shoot, he was more worried about him getting in trouble than my finger.”
Francona popped it back in place, and about 10 days later was called up to Montreal.
“If you see the first pictures of me, I had my fingers taped together,” he said. “I never told anybody what happened. Millsie was just worried about not getting in trouble.”
“Millsie and Tito almost seem like fraternity brothers,” Indians pitcher Mike Clevinger said. “Almost like I’d want to go toss one back with them, 20 years ago.”
(David Richard / USA Today)
Mills grew up on a cattle ranch outside Exeter, a valley town of about 10,000 that calls itself the “Citrus Capital of the World” and sits just west of the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas. His father raised cattle, but also had his own orange grove and managed groves for growers in the valley. The two-story family home sat in the midst of so many groves that Mills said all he could see from his second-story room were orange trees, his nearest “neighbor” a mile away.
Mills said on the drive home from Giants or A’s (and occasional Dodgers) night games that the kids would all sleep until his Dad pulled in about 2 or 3 in the morning. He’d be back up at 6 and would slowly get his rest the next few nights. There was nothing easy about his work.
Jim Mills played baseball in high school and always gravitated to friends who loved the game. Brad remembers playing catch with his dad outside the house and hitting ground balls to him and his brothers. The chimney had an outside cleanout for ashes, and Mills would use that as a target for tennis balls.
“That’s how I practiced my pitching,” he said.
Driving to Giants games made Mills a fan of Willie Mays, and when he first tried out for Little League, Mills wanted to be like Mays so he joined the outfielders and told the coach he was a center fielder.
“At the dinner table, I told my dad, and he shook his finger at me and said, ‘Son, you’re an infielder. Your next practice you go back and tell them you’re an infielder,’” Mills said.
Mills did as he was told, though the coach, at first, resisted.
“I said it doesn’t work that way,” Mills said. “If my dad says I’m not an outfielder, I’m an infielder.’”
The coach asked whether Mills could pitch, and he said yes. Which he did before eventually filling his father’s requirement and moving to the infield. He would go on to play third base at Exeter Union High School and have his No. 7 retired in 2010.
“What was neat more than anything else was not that they retired my number, but they retired my number and we had such a good team,” Mills said. “We won some championships. To say, ‘I got my number retired, but, hey, we were a good team,’ that was really cool.”
At Arizona, Francona played left field, Mills third base. Mills said Francona always knew before the ball was in play what he was going to do and that he never threw to the wrong base or missed a cutoff man.
“The way he played the game, it was just how my dad explained to me how to play the game,” Mills said.
Which, given the relationship between father and son, has to be some high praise.
In 1979, Mills was selected in the 17th round of the amateur draft by the Expos. In 1980, Francona was a first-round pick by Montreal after he had hit .401 with 84 RBI his final season when the Wildcats won the College World Series. That was the same year Mills made it to the major leagues.
“I was fortunate in one sense,” he said. “I got to the big leagues in less than a year, which doesn’t happen very much. But I was from a small town, a small high school. All of a sudden I’m in the bright lights. Things got away from me a little bit. I had to learn and develop and grow up.
“The misfortune was I didn’t get a chance to develop, how to behave and how to grow up. Just how to be a person. The background from my parents helped, but the whole major-league scene, facing the Nolan Ryans or the Steve Carltons or Tom Seavers, you better grow up quick or you go home.”
Brad Mills, standing second from right, at 1981 Montreal spring training. (AP)
Mills played in 106 major-league games from 1980 to ’83, mainly at third base or as a pinch hitter. Francona’s career lasted until 1990 before knee injuries took too much of a toll. A knee injury also ended Mills’ career as he tore his ACL, MCL and cartilage when his cleat caught in second base when he was playing for the AAA Iowa Cubs in 1986. Mills tried to come back the spring after the surgery, but the knee didn’t respond. The Cubs asked him to join the minor-league staff, and a new career was born.
His knee now? “Pure titanium,” he said. Mills had a complete replacement in 2011. Francona? He has had both knees replaced.
Mills did have one handshake with history in his playing career. In 1983, he was the 3,509th hitter to strike out against Nolan Ryan, which broke Walter Johnson’s major-league record.
“It had to be somebody,” Mills said. “That’s been a trivia question more than once in the ballparks I’ve been in.”
Mills easily relates the story. Before the game the Expos players all threw money in a pool, betting who would be “the strikeout.” The game was in Montreal, so nobody in the dugout kept track of how close Ryan was. In the eighth inning, Mills was called to pinch-hit.
“Tim Blackwell struck out right in front of me, so I’m standing there thinking that it had to be close,” Mills said.
Mills got two strikes, then took a fastball he thought was away. As a left-handed hitter, he could see directly into the Astros’ dugout and when he took the pitch everyone jumped up to celebrate, only to stop when the pitch was called a ball.
“I stepped out and thought, ‘This is it,’” Mills said. “The count is 1-and-2 and I said, ‘I’m in trouble.’”
He struck out on the next pitch. But not on Ryan’s signature fastball.
“It was a curveball,” Mills said, still incredulous Ryan didn’t set the mark with a fastball. “I was looking for the fastball. That’s how he made all his money. He threw me a curveball. He froze me.”
Does Francona remind Mills of this event?
“Oh, yeah,” Francona said. “I kid him about a lot of stuff. I kid him about things that other people can’t. He gives me a little wiggle room, but there’s a look he gives me when I know it’s time to stop.”
Talk to Mills and one sentence he continually uses is “let me tell you a little story about that.” A baseball life of 40 years will produce many of those tales. Mills’ career as a manager and coach started soon after he realized his knee would not let him play. And his career is a walking bit of Americana about the national pastime and its reach.
In 1987, the Cubs made him manager in Wytheville, a rookie league team in a small southwest Virginia town about 80 miles southwest of Roanoke named after George Wythe, mentor to Thomas Jefferson and a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Games were played in Withers Park.
“It had a hill in center field, I mean a huge hill in center field,” Mills said. “It was 380 feet to center and the center fielder had to run up the hill to catch the ball. There was a jail right next to the ballpark. We’d be playing and all the inmates would line up and watch us play. They’d be over there hooting and hollering.”
The next stop was Charleston, W.Va., in Class A ball. The 1988 season was the first that major-league teams could add a fifth farm team, and Charleston was the Cubs’ “extra” team. There were prospects — Alex Arias among them — but many of the players were lucky to be on a team.
“The worst ballclub you’ve ever seen,” Mills said. “And I was a bad manager.”
That team hit .220 and scored 413 runs in 137 games.
“We used to joke that if we got a three-ball count we had a rally,” Mills said.
Next came one season in Peoria in the Midwest League, where Mills made a lasting friendship with owner and local legend Pete Vonachen. A year in Winston-Salem followed, where Mills made a habit of getting up early in the morning to throw batting practice or hit ground balls after managing at night.
“That was a little difficult for the manager,” Mills quipped.
At Colorado Springs, he was part of the expansion season of the Colorado Rockies and was able to take part in a team building itself literally from nothing. His final minor-league team was in Las Vegas, where Cubs manager David Ross was the catcher. Mills was well aware of where he was working, so he asked the Dodgers whether he could bring the team in four or five days early for workouts.
“This was AAA, so the guys were fairly old,” Mills said. “I told them to go ahead for the first couple days and do whatever you want. If you have to call me to get you out of jail or whatever, I will, but nothing after those first few days. We had a workout every afternoon about 4 so they could sleep in.
“But that season, you know what, they were fine. Just telling them that before the season kind of made it a little bit easier the rest of the way. I didn’t have to get anybody out of jail, nobody got arrested, which I was thrilled about.”
In managing in the minors, Mills harkened back to his minor-league career when Felipe Alou was his manager. A gentleman’s gentleman, Alou would regularly throw early batting practice to Mills, and after one game when he had three errors, Alou had Mills stick around.
“He must have hit me 100 ground balls,” Mills said. “And I knew he was doing it because he wanted me to get better. He cared about me and he wanted me to get better.
“When I work with guys now that’s still the biggest thing — it’s helping a guy be the best he can be.”
“You know, managing the way Millsie did through all those towns — and a lot of guys do it — is the ultimate learning experience,” Francona said. “He started at the very bottom. He’s done every job. He learned the right way.
“You’re everything to those kids. You help them find apartments; you do everything. The managers had to do so much. Millsie is living proof of all that.”
When Francona’s playing career ended, the White Sox approached him about managing. The first person he consulted was Mills.
“He came to Tucson and we talked until early in the morning about stuff,” Francona said. “I was thinking, ‘I’m not ready for this.’ He gave me some things to think about that I hadn’t. He’d been doing it for a while and had gone through the ultimate learning experience.”
“I don’t know what it is about Millsie,” Clevinger said. “He’s always a great dude and I’ve never even heard him, like, bark at anybody, but he’s one dude that … he just has that presence about him and that matter of fact. You trust what he’s saying because you know there’s a lot of time and effort and there’s real love and want in what he’s doing with his work.”
(Brad Rempel / USA Today)
Through all the travel and moves and in-season and out-of-season lives, there has been one constant for Mills: Ronda, his wife of 42 years, or every one of the 41 years Mills has been in baseball.
The two met when Mills was a senior in high school when he found two seats next to her at a sold-out junior college football game. Mills was acquainted with Ronda through sister churches the two attended, but they didn’t know each other well until that night. The next night was their first date. Four years later they were married.
Mills talks about Ronda as if she is superhuman. It’s clear she is his hero. Every year, no matter where he played or managed, Ronda would bring the family to the town he worked in. Every year, she would take care of the household and the children when he was away.
“Sometimes she probably has felt that she had to play second fiddle to baseball, which I’m not proud of,” Mills said. “I hope in the last 15 or 20 years of our marriage I’m starting to make some adjustments the other way.
“She’s a pretty special girl.”
The couple have three children — daughters Taylor and Rochelle and son Beau, a former first-round pick of the Indians — and 10 grandchildren. Beau and his family bought a house on the same 70-acre ranch outside Granbury, Texas, where Brad and Ronda moved the last year. There Beau runs the Red Laces Cattle Co., which raises 2,000-pound bulls that will buck in the high-stakes bull-riding world.
In the offseason, Brad helps on the ranch, which he said at last count has 27 bulls and 70 heifers and cows, and are expecting 40 calves in the next two months.
Mills’ offseason day usually starts about 5 or 5:30 in the morning. He gets up, has coffee, some quiet time and makes a list of what he wants to get done that day. Ronda gets up later, and Brad might ask her plans for the day; when she says she has none he is befuddled.
“I’ll say to her, ‘How do you not know what you’re going to do in a day?’” Mills said. “‘I’ve been planning since 5 in the morning.’
“I think that drives her nuts.”
That Mills is so structured is probably something that allows Mills and Francona to work so well together. As much as they like each other, they are not much alike. Former Indians reliever Andrew Miller once even called Mills “the anti-Tito.”
“I think we’re more like Oscar and Felix,” Francona said, referring to “The Odd Couple.” “He’s organized and neat. I’m probably … the opposite.”
“They keep each other in check,” pitcher Shane Bieber said. “For a player to see two coaches get along like they do, it’s really incredible. And Tito’s not always the easiest guy to handle, so Millsie does an unbelievable job.”
Mills joined Francona’s staff in 1997 as the first-base coach when Francona was a first-year manager in Philadelphia. Since, the two have been inseparable, but for a two-year stretch when Mills managed a building and an overmatched Houston team. In Boston, Mills was Francona’s bench coach as the Red Sox won two World Series. In 2013, Mills was the first person Francona called when he was hired in Cleveland. He spent a year as third-base coach, then moved in the dugout the next season.
“I always thought that I would coach for him,” Francona said. “It turned out for whatever reason it’s been the other way around.”
Finding a photo of Mills in the dugout without Francona right next to him is almost impossible. The two are that close.
“He’s got a ton of responsibilities, and that’s because I trust him so much,” Francona said. “He treats people great. He handles things. He’s been doing it forever, and it’s important for him to do it right. And I appreciate that.”
A partial list of duties includes coaching outfielders, calling for pickoffs, helping set up spring training and being with Francona for every strategic decision made in games.
“Oh, my goodness,” Francona said. “When you’ve been together with somebody for 40 years, you kind of know him about as well as you know yourself. Besides the fact that I think he’s a really great baseball person, when you know somebody that well you don’t have to check the temperature. If he has something to say, he says it. If I have something to say, I say it.
“He’s good anyway, but because of our relationship it works so well.”
During games, Mills and Francona rarely look at each other. Instead, they stare at the field, studying the game, assessing pitches, pondering strategies.
“We talk about everything,” Francona said. “Really it doesn’t have to be anything formal. We’re just always talking.”
Their thinking doesn’t even have to match.
“He throws stuff out there just to give me something to think about, knowing it might not be what he really wants to do,” Francona said. “He’ll even tell me that, ‘I’m not too sure how I feel about it either; I just wanted to give you something to think about.’
“He’ll ask me something during a ballgame,” Mills said, “and I’ll answer and he’ll say, ‘Nah, we’re not gonna do that.’ And that’s OK. Other times he’ll say OK. It just works out.”
Putting the pair’s relationship into words could be summed up by Francona saying that from the day they met in Arizona they “grew to be like brothers.” Summing up 40 years of a work and life relationship leads to the same keywords Francona uses about his approach to managing. Humble. Professional. Play and act the right way. Have respect, for each other and the game.
“I can’t think of anybody I respect more than Millsie just because of the way he carries himself and the way he treats people,” Francona said. “I don’t know if I’ve ever heard Millsie say something bad about somebody. And I’ve known him since 1977. That’s as high a compliment as I can give somebody.”
“This might sound kind of corny, but I try to live each day in a good way with people that I meet, whether it’s you or someone else,” Mills said. “That they take away something. Those things added up at the end I hope are good.”
(Top photo: David Maxwell / Getty Images)
