Late in the morning the next day, I drove there, picked up $50 worth of stuff for myself, then called Joe at the hotel and asked if he’d like me to grab him a sweater or something.
“Thanks,” he said. “What I could really use is some new underwear. Size 42.”
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At a moment like this, there’s only one more question.
“Boxers or briefs, Joe?”
“Boxers,” said the manager.
An hour later, before the team bus left for the final game of the series at Memorial Stadium, I went to the third floor of the Cross Keys Inn and presented Morgan with a bag of free underwear.
Joe smiled and thanked me.
I can’t remember who won any of those games, but I’ve never forgotten the time I bought underwear for the manager of the Boston Red Sox.
Ninety-five-year-old Joe Morgan died Saturday night, while Chad Tracy’s playoff-bound Sox were winning four straight against the Orioles in their wonderful “new” park at Camden Yards.
Morgan was a New England original. There will never be another.
He was one of us. He understood because he’d grown up in Walpole, gone to BC, and knew everything about the Boston baseball experience. He hitchhiked on the VFW Parkway, drove a snow plow on the Pike, and didn’t need notes on the Beanpot, the Swan Boats, or how every local baseball fan knew as much about the Red Sox as the manager of the Red Sox.
“Everybody played softball or baseball around here and they’re all managers,” he said this past May.
Morgan went 301-262 and won two AL East titles in his short tenure, has a plaque in the Red Sox Hall of Fame, and in retirement watched every game on TV.
There’s great Morgan-Tracy symmetry in this wonderous 2026 season.
A local hockey and baseball star who made it to the big leagues for parts of four seasons, Morgan was a career minor-league skipper — cresting at Triple-A Pawtucket — who took over as interim Red Sox manager when John McNamara was fired in July 1988. The team won Morgan’s first 12 games and 19 of 20, vaulting back into the pennant race and eventually copping the division.
Tracy, 41, is the son of big leaguer Jim Tracy and was in his fifth season with Boston’s AAA team at Worcester when the Sox fired Alex Cora and made him interim skipper on April 25. Two months into Tracy’s tenure, the Sox caught fire, winning 15 straight games to tie a record for the franchise and producing the best month in its 126-year history. Unlike Morgan, who was named permanent manager and got a contract extension in his first three weeks on the job, Tracy is still “interim.”
I called Morgan two and a half weeks ago to ask Joe why Tracy was still “interim.”
“It seems like it may be time for this guy,” Morgan said. “Why not?”
He reminded me that when he got his first contract extension to manage the Sox, it meant he would not have to cut his own cordwood for that cold baseball winter.
No one in Walpole needed Morgan’s autograph. At one time or another, Tollway Joe did just about every job in town, and a lot of folks had his signature on canceled checks.
Morgan had rare curiosity — ”Ever seen a catcher with a sore arm?,” he would ask — and was never afraid to say what was on his mind. He’d predict that Bruce Hurst “is going to spin a beauty;” tell the national media, “If you don’t live in Walpole, you’re just camping out;” and entertain with yarns about walking off Sam Bowen’s 600-foot minor league homer and managing the 33-inning game between Pawtucket and Rochester.
He famously stood up to fearsome star Jim Rice in his first week on the job; ”I’m the manager of this nine!,” Joe fumed when Rice didn’t like being subbed for a pinch-hitter. He sometimes called out his team for playing “dead-ass baseball,” and once while at lunch on the road with a table of sportswriters, looked up from his plate and asked, “How many of you guys have smoked marijuana?”
His tenure ended abruptly in October 1991. Even though Morgan had two AL East titles in his pocket and had managed to keep the sloppy ’91 Sox in the hunt deep into the final month of that season, which they finished 84-78, the Sox said they needed to promote Pawtucket skipper Butch Hobson, who was drawing a “lot of interest” from other teams.
Joe’s parting words: “These guys aren’t as good as everybody thinks they are.”
The Sox went 73-89 the following season, finished in last place, and never had a winning season under Hobson.
Joe Morgan. Red Sox legend. Number one manager of the Local Nine.
Dan Shaughnessy is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at daniel.shaughnessy@globe.com. Follow him @dan_shaughnessy.
