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Chasing Millar

Chasing Steinbrenner is the story of two journeys through baseball's most warped division. It chronicles the 2003 season of both the Red Sox and Blue Jays, and the people who run them. A few of the chapters regarding the Red Sox include the Contreras/Millar off-season, following Theo during opening day, and the inner-workings of a trading deadline deal.

Chasing Steinbrenner, published by Brasseys, will be available in late April.


Change your thoughts and you change your world. -- Norman Vincent Peale.

They sat at the table blinded by their belief.

The Millars could have very easily been distracted by their surroundings -- the room at the ritzy W Hotel in the heart of New York City and the three-piece-suit executives who filled out the fancy swivel chairs. If they took themselves out of their own skin for a moment, and gazed upon the afternoon meeting, then it would have been as believable as an Oliver Stone cinematic conspiracy theory.

But even with all the unfamiliarity, the Millars' focus could not be swayed. Kevin Millar did not want to go to Japan, plain and simple.

Just the mere notion that Millar, a 31-year-old who somehow humanly hyphenated the phrase "out-going," was being courted by any team outside the innocuous world of the independent leagues he had left behind 10 years before was baffling. It wasn't as if the right-handed, pull-hitter hadn't entrenched himself in the world of the majors. There was no arguing that he had become a very good major league player. It was just that Kevin had always been the chaser, not the subject of the chase.

The Dragons however, didn't care where Millar had come from. All they cared about was where he was going -- especially if it was anywhere but the Land of the Rising Sun.

The Chunichi representatives sat ominously across the table from Kevin, his wife, Jeana, his father, Chuck, and his agents, Sam and Seth Levinson. The group of Dragons' officials came from Japan to reiterate the terms of the agreement Millar had originally agreed to on January 8: He would earn $6.2 million to play for the Japanese Central League team for the next two seasons.

For Millar, a player who had begun his professional career making $320 every two weeks, the deal with Japan had been a jackpot. The season before, his fourth in the majors, Kevin hauled in $900,000 for hitting .306 and 16 home runs. But now he was begging out of getting his career deal, spending more than $10,000 for his wife and dad to join him in trying to seal his residence in the United States.

Nothing ever came easy for Kevin, and this was no different, except this time the fight had potentially life-altering ramifications. The meeting was the kind of moment Chuck had trained his son for. The family had a buzzword for peak performance in times of extraordinary pressure -- "It!"

"It!" was a state of mind. Remembering to prepare, work hard and be ready for anything before finally letting the moment transpire under the influence of nothing more than relaxation. "It!" was about allowing your instincts to take over.

Chuck had learned the power of "It!" in the most unusual of venues -- the bowling alleys of Southern California. His mother, Greta, had been a bowling instructor in the 1950's and had taught her son well enough so that he could finally use the sport for his financial gain. He always worried that his love of sports would yield him helpless in the professional world, but thanks to his mom's lessons and the pro bowling circuit called the Potbean League, for one year Chuck had his outlet.

They called it "bowling for hamburgers," but so many times it was a lot more. Winning a match could mean anything from $20 to $500. Chuck made more in his job as a lab technician, but the lessons learned in going up against the likes of Dave Hawthorne and Manny Manchester were priceless. In a nutshell, the message was that if you try too hard to knock down that '10 pin' it's usually not going to happen. Just throw the ball and don't give a shit. This was remembering "It!"

Now, with these strangers from a strange land putting the heat on, Kevin was being reminded of the family's mantra. "It!" was tattooed on his arm, and it was being ingrained in his brain.

Midway through the group's second meeting, it was Chuck who almost allowed his son's preparation and pre-get-together focus to slide into oblivion.

Kevin's dad initially appeared to be on his game, telling the Chunichi folks that with the impending military action in Iraq he wanted his entire family to be stateside. Chuck still had two sons in elementary school and didn't want them worrying about their big brother's safety overseas.

Team Chunichi said no problem, the team would put the kids up in one of the area's best schools and hire a security detail to protect them. And if that wasn't enough, the Dragons offered Chuck $1 million and a house. That's when the kicking started.

Kevin saw the look on his dad's face, and didn't like what he saw. The son started booting his father under the table, leading the pair to take an impromptu bathroom break. Once in the rest room the Millars just broke into laughter. Chuck was a lab technician who would commonly work two shifts a day, but was on the verge of turning his back on $1 million and a free house. It was all too surreal.

If there weren't going to be laughs, there would be tears -- some tears of frustration, but more tears of joy. The kid who didn't even hit cleanup for his youth baseball team was now telling his dad to politely dismiss more 0's on one check than either had thought they would see in a lifetime.

The Millars had come a long way, with a hotel bathroom suddenly serving as the journey's most memorable checkpoint.
-- .

"It just proves how good Millar is, and all this makes good headlines." -- Dragons' president Junnosuke Nishikawa.

J.L. was sent to Beaumont by the Dragons to basically not let Millar out of sight or mind. The intensity exuding from the Japanese team was wearing off on their representative in the United States. J.L. was everywhere, and so was his desperation. There were suggestions that he might commit suicide if he couldn't bring Kevin back to Nagoya. The man from Chunichi even asked the Millars for bank account numbers, Kevin's or his dad's, to put chunks of Chunichi money into (again, Chuck was tempted). Understanding the Japanese's end-of-the-world approach wasn't easily accomplished.

The pressure, and the presence of J.L., was getting unbearable for Millar. On top of his future;s uncertainties, he had also heard the rumors that the Japanese mafia might be involved. Then there was the time he returned from a workout to find 67 messages on his answering machine. "Why me?" he thought. Millar didn"t have anything against anybody. He just wanted to play in Boston, not Nagoya. Hadn"t Japanese outfielder Norihiro Nakamura done the same thing when he had agreed to a contract with the New York Mets a month earlier, only to back out at the last moment? The whole thing was out of hand. Millar had to get away.

So while J.L. was joined by more Chunichi reps in Beaumont, Levinson continued to grease whatever wheels he could, and Major League Baseball tried to figure out what to do, Millar headed to the land of all waiver claims in limbo -- Las Vegas.

Finally, Kevin could go back to being Kevin --carefree without fretting how he was going to fit into a lineup behind some guy named Kazuyoshi Tatsunami. Thanks to a high-roller friend, a lawyer whom Millar had met through his Harley-Davidson motorcycle dealings, he hopped aboard a Lear jet and wasted away the hours until decision day by stacking his buddy's chips (and there were a lot of them). And after the casino came an impromptu trip to South Dakota, where the posse decided to do a little pheasant hunting.

"Dad," Millar said to Chuck though his cell phone, "you're not going to believe this, but right now I'm riding down a dirt road in South Dakota with a million dollars of cash on my lap!" Life was good again for the Beaumont Basher.

Back in Boston, there was no getting away. There wasn't much of anything the Red Sox could do since Major League Baseball had told them to stay back in the shadows while an agreement was mediated with Chunichi. And whatever Epstein did know from MLB, it wasn't for public consumption in and around the Sox offices.

And, thus, the "Millar-O-Meter" was born.

Epstein would enter the office, the subsequent "How's it going?" would come from somewhere inside baseball operations and the general manager would inform the masses using an adjusted form of RPM's. When it came to cracking this case, nothing was coming easy.

The ordeal continued. Millar had gone to Vegas, taken his family to New York for the face-to-face with the Chunichi people, taken some time in California and finally returned to Beaumont to continue the waiting. The only certainty was that every morning was going to be full of questions and the closest answers could only be found by riding around on his Harley.

Finally, in the waning hours of Valentine's Day, Millar heard from the unfamiliar voice of Epstein. "You're a Boston Red Sox," his new boss said. Five hours later Kevin had loaded up his stuff and Jeana into his black Cadillac Escalade, put in a healthy pinch of Copenhagen chewing tobacco and driven straight through to the Red Sox's minor league complex on Edison Avenue in Fort Myers. The driving time was 16 hours, but it was well worth it after enduring the five-week sentence in the mitts of Chunichi.

One of the first people Millar saw upon venturing out onto the expansive fields where Boston began spring training was Epstein. They had never met, and had talked just a couple of times, but that didn't mean a hug wasn't in store. "I'm the invisible player, you're the invisible general manager and now we're together," said the exhausted but elated Beaumont Basher. It was, as Millar later said, like they had known each other their whole lives.

The wildest off-season a 29-year-old general manager had ever experienced was officially over with.

Nobody thought that trying to win a World Series was going to be easy.

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