Critics of Terry Francona once said he let the players, especially pitcher Curt Schilling, run the show in Philadelphia. But in Boston, he has been a master handler of personnel.

AP photo / Chris Gardner

Considering that Santa Claus got booed in Philadelphia, it hardly should be surprising that Terry Francona didn’t get much love — brotherly or otherwise — in the city that, from a sports standpoint, couldn’t be more inaccurately nicknamed.

Among his more vocal detractors was former Journal sportswriter and Providence native Angelo Cataldi, who left his hometown to cover the Eagles for The Philadelphia Inquirer and then went on to a successful career in sports-talk radio, hosting a highly rated show on station WIP.

When the Red Sox hired Francona to replace Grady Little for the 2004 season, Cataldi was asked by Journal sports editor Art Martone to write a guest piece about “Tito.”

As hatchet jobs go, it made “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” seem like laser surgery.

“After Francona was fired as manager of the Phillies,” Cataldi wrote, “we all assumed the only thing he’d ever manage was a convenience store.”

Cataldi called him “an atrocious manager,” citing Francona’s 285-363 record with “an underachieving Phillies team that collapsed at the end of every season.”

“As a tactician,” Cataldi said of Francona, “he was clueless. As a disciplinarian, he was laughably inept. The running joke in Philly is that Curt Schilling was the first player-manager in baseball since Pete Rose. Schilling decided when he pitched, how long he pitched and what was on the postgame buffet table.

“When [Francona] was fired,” continued Cataldi, “the only complaint from the fans was: ‘What took you so long?’ ”

Now, five years later, Francona has two World Series championship rings — the first won by a Red Sox manager since 1918 — and has led the Sox into the postseason four times in his first five seasons on the job.

His winning percentage of .580 (a record of 503-364 heading into the three-game series with the Yankees) is second only to Joe McCarthy’s (.606, from 1948-50) among those who managed at least 350 games for the Red Sox. In his sixth season on the job, Francona has the longest continuous tenure in the Boston dugout since Joe Cronin managed the team from 1935-47.

The dramatic turnabout in Francona’s managerial fortunes is not unlike that of Patriots coach Bill Belichick.

I’ve got to admit, I never thought Belichick would turn out to be a great head coach — or even an average one, for that matter. I just didn’t see it happening. Not after what I’d seen in Cleveland, where he was reviled, rather than revered, after four losing seasons in five years. And certainly not after watching his rambling resignation speech as “HC of the NYJ” — the curt, and more than a little bizarre, phraseology he used in the hastily scrawled note he wrote to say he would not be succeeding his longtime mentor, Bill Parcells, as head coach of the New York Jets.

That was on Jan. 4, 2000, and Belichick then seemed much closer to a reincarnation of Captain Queeg than the second coming of Vince Lombardi. All that was missing were the ball bearings. And, it appeared, perhaps a few of Belichick’s marbles. Looking even more disheveled than usual, Belichick was dissembling, disingenuous and disoriented during a rambling, voice-cracking, somewhat surreal — and certainly downright weird — news conference.

Yet Belichick has become the most successful coach in the Patriots’ half-century of history. He has taken the team to four Super Bowls in the last eight years and has won three of them, going 16-0 in 2007, and compiling a record that makes him a likely candidate for the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

How to account for it? What has Belichick done differently in New England, as compared to Cleveland? And why has Francona been so much more successful in Boston than he was in Philadelphia?

One of the best explanations about Belichick was given during the week before the Pats’ first Super Bowl win by defensive lineman Anthony Pleasant, who played for him not only in Cleveland and New England but also in New York with the Jets.

“When he left Cleveland,” Pleasant said then, “I didn’t think he’d get another job as a head coach. He did some things that didn’t go over very well. He didn’t listen to anybody. He didn’t relate to the players. He’s not like that anymore. He’s not a know-it-all with a chip on his shoulder like he was with the Browns. He’s not the same person. He learned from his mistakes.”

With the Red Sox, Francona has been the ideal manager.

Much as Joe Torre did during his successful — and surprisingly lengthy, given the volatility of ownership and lofty expectations — 12-year run as manager of the Yankees, Francona maintains an even keel while dealing with high-priced, highly egotistical players in what can be a media maelstrom.

Francona is more personable than Belichick, both with his players and with the media. He is very much a “players’ manager,” and sometimes is loyal to a fault, as has arguably been the case with the woefully struggling David Ortiz this season. But that formula has worked well for him in Boston, enabling him to keep the Sox in the playoff picture year after year despite the disruptions caused by the likes of Manny Ramirez.

Far from being “atrocious,” as Cataldi called him, Francona has been amazingly successful as manager of the Red Sox — just as Belichick, to my pleasant surprise, has gone from being hated in Cleveland to venerated in New England.

jdonalds@projo.com