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From our Ewwwww! desk

Today’s Boston Globe debuted a three-part series of excerpts from Francona: The Red Sox Years, co-authored by former Sox manager Terry Francona and Globe sportswriter Dan Shaughnessy.

Inside Terry Francona’s Red Sox clubhouse

Terry Francona loved his corner office at Fenway, the same space where Joe Cronin closed his door and met with Ted Williams in the 1940s. It was remarkably unchanged through the decades. When the office door was open, anyone in the Sox clubhouse could see the manager sitting at his L-shaped desk.

Francona’s desk was outfitted with a land-line telephone and a printer, computer, and monitor. There were three drawers on the right side of the desk, which was a tad inconvenient for the left-handed manager. The office walls were adorned with black-and-white “subway” tiling, and there was natural light from two back-wall opaque windows — protected by diamond-patterned metal grates. In the dismal Fenway years in the early 1960s, unsuspecting Sox fans walking down Van Ness Street toward Jersey Street could have tapped on those frosted windows and interrupted Pinky Higgins making out his lineup card or perhaps swilling some scotch.

Several paragraphs later we get this: “The office had its own toilet, encased in a small corner stall just a few feet to the left of the desk. Privacy was minimal. In army barracks fashion, the latrine featured a brown swinging door, offering maximum exposure and minimal privacy. You could see under the door. You could see over the door. And you could hear the manager turning the pages of USA Today as he sat on the throne.”

The hardworking staff read on, confident that the authors had exhausted the possibilities of that topic. No such luck. Here’s what followed, in all its gruesome detail:

“This is a subject that’s unfortunately impossible to avoid,” said [former Red Sox general manager] Theo Epstein. “This gets back to what really appeals to Tito. He loves baseball. He loves the game. He physically loves the clubhouse. Emotionally, I think he loves to let go of the outside world. Some people compartmentalize the job. Tito compartmentalizes the real world, throws himself into the clubhouse, loves every aspect of the clubhouse. He loves being down there and loves nakedness, vulgarity. Loves joking around . . . loves playing cards. He loves everything about it. It’s part of the fabric of who he is.

“So the social norms about going to the bathroom, those don’t always translate to the clubhouse to begin with, and he took it to a whole other level because of how deeply he believed in the clubhouse ethos. He would find satisfaction in a way that wasn’t always satisfactory to others. He would stimulate the senses, all of them, olfactory, auditory. It was a way to disarm people too. I think he felt like once you had a conversation with him where he was involved in a natural act like that, he felt like it brought you closer to him. You were sort of in. He did it to media, PR guys, front office. It was basically impossible to have a conversation with him without seeing things that only a toilet paper holder should see.”

Really? We needed to know that? Ugh.