Q&A With Colin Barnicle, Director of New Netflix Docuseries on 2004 Boston Red Sox

The docuseries debuts today.

The Comeback: 2004 Boston Red Sox is now available on Netflix. / Netflix

The Comeback: 2004 Boston Red Sox is a new Netflix docuseries debuting today. Directed by Colin Barnicle, a lifelong Sox fan who even served as a clubbie for the team, the three-part series digs in deep on the epic Yankees-Red Sox drama that spanned two seasons and created some of the best baseball imagery we've ever seen.

It features new exclusive interviews with Pedro Martinez, David Ortiz, Roger Clemens, Kevin Millar, Joe Torre, Gary Sheffield, Johnny Damon, Terry Francona, Curt Schilling, Jason Varitek, Dave Roberts, Theo Epstein, John Henry and many more.

Sports Illustrated was given a preview and the project exceeded all expectations. It's incredibly thorough and fresh, a pretty astounding accomplishment considering that so many have tried to tell this story. Even though viewers know how things are going to end, there is legitimate suspense. Part of this is due to the sheer amount of baseball highlights, each one a reminder of all the crazy things that happened when one of the greatest rivalries in sports was at its greatest.

Barnicle spoke to Sports Illustrated about the series.

Sports Illustrated: You were interviewed during a Red Sox-Yankees game this year and you said you wanted to tell the story of how the Red Sox did this. Why was that your goal and what is the short answer to that question?

Colin Barnicle: It's like the most covered story in baseball, maybe in sports, in the last 20 years. There's a lot out there on them coming back from 3-0 and I always felt like the story only covered the end. It only covered that 2004 season or just the playoffs. When we were looking at it, they came back from 3-0 but they did it somehow. I was like how did they actually do this? So we started at the end and we worked backward. How they did it was from the ownership making the decision to go all-in financially to the front office—Theo Epstein, Jed Hoyer—deciding hey, we're going to take the analytical route, which was not popular back then. So they were kind of out on a limb there. And then the clubhouse. The Kevin Millars of it all deciding—the line about the Red Sox used to be 25 guys, 25 cabs, an isolated sort of team— and changing that.

So it was really how you change the culture of an organization that has lost for 80 years. It's not a rivalry if you lose 85 times in a row. How did they change that from the top-down and from the bottom-up? Taking every aspect: the ownership, what's happening in the front office, what's happening in the clubhouse. It seems like a straight line nowadays but they made bad decisions, poor decisions that affected the clubhouse sometimes and in the clubhouse they were fighting. It wasn't super smooth at all points. I just felt like all those little details added up to how you would be able to come back from 3-0.

SI: The way that you structured this was super smart. The first episode dives into the Curse of the Bambino and all that but rather quickly you set the stage so it's accessible for people who aren't huge baseball fans. But 2003 was in so many ways the perfect microcosm of all the worst things that could possibly happen to this franchise. At one point did you know that was going to be the structure you were going to aim to create?

CB: I was actually at Game 7 in 2003 so it's always had such a huge, outsized presence in my mind. And I also thought 2003 is, like you said, the perfect microcosm of what the Red Sox were for 85 years. Take you right to the edge and then it all falls apart. So I felt like narratively, for someone who isn't super into baseball, who isn't into the Red Sox, this is a good indication of what fans would go through. Very simply, it was let the viewer buy into who these players are personally.

I also felt like from a fanbase, you already have that antagonism with the Yankees. But I was super interested in hearing when it became personal for the players themselves because at some point it did. It wasn't like that at the beginning. It kind of became that to them and it really started in 2003 as moments kept popping up. As we started interviewing players, we have it in there, that July series they played where things escalate a little bit and it just keeps ramping up for the players themselves. I was like, okay, this is a watershed moment to them. It wouldn't be something as a fan that you would really realize was happening but it was happening in the clubhouse behind closed doors. I thought we should tell the story of not only the team, but the team in the front office and what they're going through to build a lineup and a rotation that can overcome 86 years of totally just unbelievably losing.

SI: It's such a storybook thing that happened and it's legend now 20 years later. And it obviously meant and means so much to so many. Yet one of the things that struck me is how much of this incredible story boils down to people just doing their jobs and making decisions and how the course of history can change on all of them.

CB: The story nowadays, 20 years later, it seems like every decision was the right decision. And I was like that can't be true, it's baseball and you fail seven out of 10 times. Theo's perspective I always thought was super unique because he's from Boston. Not a lot of general managers at that time were born and bred in the cities that they would end up heading. He had that unique perspective. It just seemed like every step of the way, they needed to overcome this severe self-doubt that they had. When John Henry hires Theo, he's not 100 percent sure this is the right move. He's kind of questioning it. He's like, okay we went after the big fish in Billy Beane, didn't get him and now we have to pivot to a then-28-year-old kid who had had one year as an assistant general manager and by his own admission had never led anything. He probably had two suits in his closet, lived with three other guys down the street. It's not exactly the ideal situation for John Henry who just spent a record amount to buy the Red Sox. It's going out on a limb and there's a lot of self-doubt there.

Theo himself totally understood the idea that if you're GM of the Red Sox and they're playing well Fenway is alive and electric and you're a hero. When it inevitably goes bad, as it always did, it's like a long death march and you are a social pariah. He understood that more so than any other general manager in baseball at the time. Fighting through the self-doubt. Kevin Millar, his career is over. He's going to Japan. How do you get back into Major League Baseball and start being a good hitter again? David Ortiz, released by the Twins. Bill Mueller, who won a batting title in 2003, he's coming back from a horrific knee injury so it's not exactly the team you'd put together to face the Yankees. Three guys on the way out of baseball, a 28-year-old GM and the owners sitting there thinking I spent three-quarters of a billion dollars for this?

SI: For like 73 percent of this documentary it feels like the Red Sox are going to lose even though I knew what was going to happen. How did you manage to put some suspense in something where everyone knows the ending? Did you have to show some patience and restraint to not get to the part where they win too quickly?

CB: I felt like our ethos was always to let the characters take you through the story rather than be putting the story on an outline and trying to fit the characters on there. It did naturally work out because as they take you through the story you can see their personal stakes in it. It's more like their nervousness or their angst coming through rather than a story where it's like hey, there's two outs in the ninth. It was taking the characters and letting them tell the story as presently as they can. Their angst would build up. We felt like if we could just get that on screen and let the characters take you through it that their natural emotions, it would fulfill the tension of the series.

SI: Take us back to 2004. When you were watching as a fan did you realize in the moment that this was some of the most special baseball we'd ever see in our lifetimes? It feels like it was one of those rare times when it was sort of obvious.

CB: I remember growing up in 1999 when we played the Yankees in the ALCS that year and we won one game and they won four. I think Reggie Jefferson was our DH and it was basically Nomar and Pedro as our team. When the new ownership came in, there were All-Stars at every position and there were All-Stars throughout the rotation. It felt like the Red Sox in some ways were becoming the Yankees. Episode 2 gets into that. They're outspending everyone to get the best players and building this All-Star team but it also affects the clubhouse culture. What made the 2003 team special gets thrown off in 2004. When I watching those games, first of all they were like five hours long. It really was like seeing in the 90s when you'd turn on pay-per-view and see Holyfield versus Tyson. It felt like we were finally a heavyweight whereas before it felt like we were the underdogs because we haven't won in 80 years but also we're the underdogs because their team is so much better. In 2003 and 2004 it felt like okay, we can go toe-to-toe here. This is a really good team.

SI: For a lot of younger people this might be their first introduction to this chapter in sports history. Did you consider that it could be the primary text for people to learn about something and does that responsibility sit heavy?

CB: I have four girls and they'll see this at some point. I remember we went down, we had interviewed Kevin Millar and then we went down a second time. He was there with his two teenage sons and they were born after '04. So they didn't live through this and we were showing them some of the clips of some of the games. They didn't know the outcome of this regular season game or that their dad hit three home runs the night before this big July 24 fight. They didn't know any of that. That was rather early in our process and I remember my brother and I sitting there thinking this is interesting. You tell the story as presently as possible because there's a huge swath of baseball fans from 9 to 25 years-old where this is not a memory of theirs, they didn't live this. As much as you can live in the moment of these games, we should do that.

SI: What does the scale of a project like this look like? Do you know how many people you ended up talking to? Where does one even start?

CB: I think we have over 30 people who have sat down for this. I think we called over 150 people to sit down. Most of our time we would talk to everybody at the ballpark, everybody outside Yankee Stadium. We went up there multiple times just to talk to people around the stadium about their memories of it just to get a sense of if we were missing anything. A lot of stuff that doesn't even get into the series. There's a water main break before Game 7 2003 outside Yankee Stadium and it delays Jason Giambi getting to the stadium and that's why he's hitting seventh in that lineup that night. That's why he's up in the seventh inning and he hits another home run against Pedro. We were like okay all this stuff, it never really gets into the film on camera but it has to get in there through osmosis. Every little detail needed to be taken care of. Did we know everything that happened? So we called 150 people asking them to sit down, it's sort of like hosting a wedding.

In addition to that I'd say we talked to maybe 200 people just walking around, taking notes on what they remember and then reading every bit of information. We got every Red Sox guide book and every Yankees guide book from 1983 on and we read through all of those. Some of that stuff doesn't come up in the series but it's something that maybe you'd use as a one-off question. Most of what's on-screen is not the work we did for it but we feel like it got there anyway.

SI: Was it challenging for you to be fair to the Yankees? How do you feel like you did there? It seems like there's a good sense of respect shown to them so how did you approach that?

CB: We approached it by saying this isn't a rivalry in 2003 and 2004. It just not. They've won for 85 straight years. The Red Sox can say we're right there, we're always right there. But I think the line I've been saying is if Apollo Creed beat Rocky Balboa for 85 straight movies you're not going to go see the 86th movie and think that these guys are toe-to-toe. I just felt like that the Yankees are the best team in the world, they're the most successful franchise in sports in the 20th century, that's just who they are and the Red Sox are not. It's kind of like that whole Boston thing of being fatalistic and sarcastic and like a little bitter about your circumstances when it comes to your sports teams. It almost lends to pettiness. The whole Yankees Suck chant that you hear in there a lot, I'm sure I did it when I was in Fenway Park. But deep down you know they really don't, they've won 26 times and we have a big donut hole up there at zero. They don't stink. They're really good and we're not really good. Taking you through that: they are the gold standard and the Red Sox are not but the Red Sox can try to do some things that get up to that level if they just make hard decisions.