AL crown just the way Tito ‘drew it up

TORONTO — The cigar smoke was filling up the visiting manager’s clubhouse in the bowels of Rogers Centre, but the bag sitting on a shelf had been kept safe and dry from the champagne-spraying madness taking place just a few yards down the hall.

Terry Francona rummaged around in that bag and pulled out his iPhone.

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“Watch this,” the man they call Tito said. “He’ll be the first call.”

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Sure enough, there it was, buried amid the avalanche of voicemails and the 186 text messages that had flooded Francona’s phone in less than an hour. The missed call had come in mere seconds after 6:46 p.m. ET Wednesday, when the Cleveland Indians, with a 3-0 victory over the Blue Jays, had clinched the American League pennant and their first ticket to the World Series in nearly two decades. The caller ID confirmed Francona’s hypothesis:

Dad.

The real Tito Francona.

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That’s where this story starts, because that’s where Francona’s baseball story starts, shadowing his dad at old Municipal Stadium. The tug of the heart is a powerful thing, and in this case, it was enough to get a two-time World Series-winning skipper to at least consider coming to Cleveland, a place where an accomplishment like this can’t possibly come without collaboration and an enormous amount of creativity. Francona knew how much it would mean to his father, the former outfielder who spent six years with the Indians’ organization and never let it leave his blood, to see the Tribe on the World Series stage.

“This has been good for him,” the younger Tito said. “He’s getting older, but he’s been glued to every game. His whole day is wrapped around what time the game starts.”

From there, we jump — run, rather — to the two treadmills side by side at the Anaheim Marriott at the Winter Meetings in December 1999. Mark Shapiro, the young assistant general manager of the Indians, found himself working out beside Francona, skipper for the Phillies.

“We had Bud Black, John Farrell, [agent] Pat Rooney — a lot of common friends,” Shapiro recalled. “So it was easy for me to start a conversation.”

And, it turns out, a friendship.

When Francona was dismissed by the Phils after the following season, it was only natural for the Indians to bring him aboard as a special advisor while he waited for his next managerial opportunity — the one where he would make history, build a legacy and, after things went sour in Boston in that awful September 2011, become perhaps the most valuable free-agent manager in the game.

Where are the Indians right now if Francona doesn’t spend an uncomfortable season on ESPN before looking for his next gig? Where are they if Shapiro doesn’t squeeze a workout into the typically swamped schedule at the Winter Meetings? Where are they if Frank “Trader” Lane doesn’t deal Larry Doby, the man who broke the color barrier in the AL, for a young and hungry kid from western Pennsylvania.

They aren’t in the World Series.

Every manager gets credit when a club wins. Every …

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