A conversation with Colin Barnicle, director of Netflix’s new 2004 Red Sox docuseries

On Wednesday, Netflix’s ‘The Comeback: 2004 Red Sox’ docuseries made its debut.

Here’s director and lifelong Red Sox fan Colin Barnicle, in his own words. (This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.)

BH: You’re telling a story that’s been told so many times. How did you approach making it new again?

CB: I always felt that the comeback from three down wasn’t really the comeback we were focusing on, we were focusing on the comeback from 85 years of not winning. The bigger story for us was, how do you build a culture in the organization that’s different than the one of those eight decades? I always felt like it needed to be explained, you needed to go through the story with these characters up to the point where they get down 3-0 to understand how a team could feel like they could come back. Or how you would feel being Theo Epstein or John Henry or any of the characters in it, just the depth of horridness that they were feeling at that moment. And the universal thing of, how do you do anything that you’ve never done before?

BH: Something the doc does well is show how truly over it seemed when the Sox were down 3-0. The chain of events that begins with (Kevin) Millar’s at-bat still feels impossible. It’s almost like Marvel’s ‘Avengers: Infinity War’ when Dr. Strange tells Tony Stark that there’s only one timeline where the Avengers can win, out of 14 million possible timelines.

CB: Exactly. When Millar goes up to the plate against Mariano Rivera, we show the win percentage at that point, which was less than 2%. It’s 98% certain that you are going to lose this series, so for everything to come together the way it did, that was kind of our ethos: how do you come back, how does that even work? There’s a series of little comebacks and bigger comebacks that we were more focused on than the ‘down 3-0 storyline.’ That’s the end, we know the end. How did we even get to this point?

BH: Was there any new information that surprised you during this process?

CB: I think the biggest ‘holy (expletive)’ was the hidden microphone Doug Mirabelli found in the clubhouse at Yankee Stadium for Games 1 and 2. I didn’t know anything about that beforehand. We went through legal fact-checking, had to make sure this actually happened, and every single player was like, ‘Oh yeah, that happened. We had to take the team meetings on the bus, it was crazy.’

BH: Joe Torre and Gary Sheffield are interviewed, but the Yankees declined to participate. They told you that they don’t have rivals.

CB: It was horrifying, honestly, starting this project, because I was like, they’re our rivals. Then you start really looking at the facts and you’re like, wait, they’re not really rivals. There’s the Carlton Fisk/Thurman Munson fight, there were fights, but at the end of the day a rivalry needs to be on the scoreboard, and it never was. We never won that battle. Red Sox fans would chant ‘Yankees suck’ at anything and everything – we cut footage of people chanting it at a wedding – but they were winning constantly and we never did. The way I’ve been putting it is, if Rocky lost to Apollo Creed for 85 straight movies, you’re not going to say Rocky is a total rival of Apollo Creed.

BH: It’s true, a lot of the rivalry over the years was really just the animosity between the fan bases.

CB: That was a big thing for us, too, because these players are from all around the country, the world, so it’s not ingrained in them to hate the Yankees. But at some point, it did become personal. It became, ‘I don’t just want to win, I want to beat the Yankees. Winning is what we want to do but we want to do it by beating the Yankees.’ And that started way before Game 4 in 2004.

BH: People are very candid in the interviews. Is that because you’ve known them for such a long time, dating back to when you worked for the Red Sox?

CB: In ‘05, I was the office intern. I was terrible! And then ‘06 and ‘07, I was down in the clubhouse. Clearly they won in ‘07 because of my great laundry techniques! I think it helped that (my brother) Nick and I were around the ballpark a lot for our entire lives. They knew us on sight. Like, the players were like, ‘Oh this guy used to wash my jockstraps!’

BH: Someone who wasn’t there in ‘05, though, was Grady Little, who has some of the funniest quotes in the series.

CB: Grady was great. Grady was unbelievable. I didn’t think he would be in the doc for obvious reasons, but I called him and he said ‘Sure, come on down.’ I feel like his contribution to the ‘04 team has been scrubbed out. The team he inherited after 2001 had all sorts of problems and there’s new ownership, and he gets that team to 93 wins in ‘02 and then the ALCS in ‘03. He’s the guy that helped David Ortiz and Kevin Millar mature. These Red Sox icons, he was their first manager here. He even called himself the new Bill Buckner when we were talking to him. He was like, ‘Buckner had almost 2,800 hits, he won a batting title, he was really good, but he’s remembered for this one thing.’

BH: One thing that stands out is Larry Lucchino telling both Francona ‘This is (expletive) unacceptable’ when the Red Sox are playing .500 ball in the summer of ‘04, and then sharing the same sentiment with reporters. It’s not every day a team president publicly calls out their own team.

CB: Larry got that from his mentor, (former Baltimore Orioles owner) Edward Bennett Williams. They used to have this thing called contest living: each day you come in and fight the problem that you have. Larry was contest-living, he was pugilistic. A lot of the stuff that ended up on the cutting room floor for the doc was that beginning with the ownership, where Larry is actually fighting with (Yankees owner) George Steinbrenner. They had this deep history of combative nature that dated back to 1974, when Steinbrenner took a suspension for payments through a Watergate thing, and Larry was a lawyer on the opposite side of that commission. And that bled up to the 80s when Williams buys Baltimore and Larry is running the team, a Yankees’ division rival. Then when Larry’s with the Padres, they have to be held back at the owners’ meetings in ’93 or ’94, Larry and George, because they were going to fight each other! So it’s this deep-seated animosity that ownership already has for each other.

BH: What are some of the other stories that didn’t make the cut?

CB: We could’ve easily made this eight episodes. Keith Foulke told us that in the July 24 game, he’s getting ready to go out to the bullpen when Jason Varitek stuffs his mitt into Alex Rodriguez’s face. So Foulke’s like, ‘Let’s do this.’ He tells us, ‘Johnny Pesky is coming up the dugout steps, I think to get us, but we were already coming down, and I turn the corner and just lay him out. I’m thinking, ‘Oh my God, I’ve just killed a Red Sox icon!’ And then Pesky got up and was like, ‘Get out there!’ There’s a ton of stuff like that, so many stories we had to leave out. Tito (Francona) and Theo drinking Metamucil each game before having to play the Yankees. Before Game 4, Tito was like, ‘You should try this,’ so Theo tasted it. He told us, ‘It was awful but we won, so then Game 5 I gotta do it, and then Game 6, and then Game 7.’ The karaoke story with Kevin Millar is one of the funniest things ever; Grady calls a team meeting, and rolls a TV into the clubhouse in Texas and tells them that someone has done something very wrong and is in deep legal trouble. Millar tells us that they think it’s Pedro, who’s going for his citizenship, and that the Sox are about to lose their ace for some horrible reason. The video starts playing and there’s this official-looking FBI agent intro saying like, this degenerate has been going around from state to state doing these horrible things, and then it’s just Millar singing ‘Born in the USA” when he’s 19! Then, a week later they’re playing in Oakland and Millar is at first base in the seventh inning, he starts to hear ‘Born in the USA,’ looks up, and the video is being played on the scoreboard! But we couldn’t get the rights to the song.

BH: Would you and Netflix be willing to release stuff that didn’t make the cut?

CB: Oh yeah! We’re pushing for it. We have all this good stuff already put together.