Three Nights in August Read online

  I quickly saw how truly gifted a writer Buzz is and how knowledgeable he is about baseball. As we worked together, Buzz's role gradually changed: Our collaboration became Buzz telling the story based on information he got from me and many others—managers, coaches, scouts, front-office people, and players—along with observations he made during a season spent watching the St. Louis Cardinals more closely than any writer has ever watched a ballclub before. All along, I've been aware of the contents of Three Nights in August, but it was Buzz who selected which people and events to feature and what stories to tell.

  This book is about one three-game series between two teams in 2003. But Buzz and I agreed from the start that Three Nights should really be about baseball in general. Much of what you will read here would apply to any team at any time, in any season. My decisions and mistakes are mine alone, but all major-league managers have faced similar situations and have made similar decisions and similar mistakes. In much the same way, the players you'll read about here are particular people, but many of them also represent types of player: the clever veteran, the eager rookie, the spoiled star, the frustrated benchwarmer, the schizophrenic pitcher, the impulsive hitter, among others. Players like these can be found on just about every major-league team, just about every season.

  So this book is about the constants of the game. But it is also very much about change. Baseball has changed enormously since I got into it forty years ago. This book describes some of the most notable developments: the growing importance of video, the decline of base stealing, the sharp drop in complete games, the sharp rise in home runs, and so on. The biggest transformation of all has taken place above players' necks.

  In the past, the game was simpler. I am not saying it was easier to be a successful major leaguer, just that there were fewer distractions then. A player's survival was tied primarily to playing as good and as hard as he could. He had to focus on mastering the game's fundamentals, because next year's earnings depended on this year's productivity, and there were several replacements waiting in the minor-league talent pool if you failed to produce. If your team made it to the World Series, your bonus check would provide much-needed extra income.

  Now a World Series bonus is little incentive for most players, who earn seven or eight figures a year. Now the pool of potential replacements waiting in the minors is much smaller. Now players' contracts give them the opportunity to earn significant money and security regardless of injury or productivity. Now a player's agent, family, friends, and union encourage him to concentrate on his individual numbers, regardless of how much those stats might contribute to the team's effort to win games, because his personal stats dictate how big his salary will be. Now the players' relationship with the media is contentious and the influence of the players' union overpowering.

  Now managers and coaches must battle against all that in persuading their teams to play hard enough and selflessly enough to win ballgames. In spring training and throughout the regular season, we establish and explain the fundamental skills players must master to play the game right. But we spend much more time motivating guys to max out their concentration and effort in practice and competition, convincing them to make winning their first priority. So, in that sense, motivation has become more fundamental than the fundamentals. Even the most selfish player can be inspired to put his team first once he realizes he can gain personally from the club's success. If a club becomes a serious contender, every player earns extra credit that can be cashed in at contract time, because the team's impressive performance makes his own performance look more impressive.

  Every successful team has fortune on its side. In each organization where I've managed, good fortune has been a constant teammate. I know of no other manager for whom so many pieces have fallen into place as they have for me. Any manager or coach will tell you that the most essential ingredient of success is quality players, and I've had more than my share of them on the Chicago White Sox, Oakland A's, and St. Louis Cardinals.

  I've also been fortunate to work for three franchises whose every level has shown the will and the skill to win. In an era when players' attitudes and relationships to their clubs are so fragile, these three teams have had an edge because their players have sensed this coordinated commitment to win throughout the organization. The standards set by Bill Veeck, Jerry Reinsdorf, and the White Sox ownership; Walter Haas and his family with the A's; and Bill DeWitt and the Cardinals ownership were as high as they get. The front offices of Roland Hemond with the White Sox; Sandy Alderson with the A's; Walt Jocketty with the Cardinals; as well as the coaches, trainers, and everyone associated with those three teams—did their utmost to realize those high standards.

  My greatest fortune has been the support of my wife, Elaine, and our daughters, Bianca and Devon. Baseball is very hard on families: No other sport requires so much time on the road. Even when your team's playing at home, you spend roughly twelve hours a day, six days a week at the stadium, so your wife unfairly bears the demands and responsibilities of raising your family. Elaine has borne those burdens better than any man could ask for—with strength, with independence—and to a great degree, I owe the resilience of my family and my success as a manager to her.

  Prologue

  TONY LA RUSSA definitely saw things that kept him up at night: changeups without change, sinkers lacking sink, curves refusing curve. Not to mention the time that Fassero, after being told to throw some garbage nowhere near the plate—bowl it, roll it, slice it, dice it, bounce it if he had to—had thrown it so up and so over that Garciaparra couldn't help but lace it past second to tie the game in extra innings. For four months now, that vision had haunted La Russa, not what Fassero had done but what La Russa hadn't done: hadn't adequately prepared Fassero for the moment, leaving Fassero exposed.

  The explanation for his sleeplessness was simple, maybe. When anybody does the same thing for as long as he had, going on a quarter century, he was bound to see things he couldn't set aside no matter how hard he tried to rationalize. Another explanation was his own personality: intense, smoldering, a glowing object of glower. He barely smiled even when something wonderful happened, as if he were willing himself not to. Some thought he worked too hard, grinded away at it when he would have been better off forgetting it, took the bad things into the night when he should have slept. Even he knew he had gone too far, had made personal compromises he knew were wrong, but it wasn't simply an occupation to him or even a preoccupation.

  It was something he loved. And like other managers who have spent most of their lives around the game, he had an obsessive mind for it: no at-bat unsung, no pitch ever forgotten, no possibility of simply turning it all off at night. He retained more anecdotes—more memories of balls and strikes and beanballs and stolen signs and games won that should have been lost and games lost that should have been won—than any of the half-pound encyclopedias that came out like clockwork. His meticulous personality accounted only partly for his late-night visions. Maybe the very oddity of his chosen profession was also to blame. Maybe it was the fact that he couldn't simply call an employee in when he had performed badly, couldn't simply talk to him privately. With thousands of people watching, he instead had to walk out and fetch the poor soul as if he were a suicide-in-waiting, then take his weapon away from him because clearly he could no longer be trusted with it, might somehow do further harm than he already had. Or maybe it was all those hand gestures he performed six days a week and sometimes seven: the pantomime of wipes and swipes and scratches.

  As much as his job tormented him, he knew that managing a baseball team was a wonderful way to spend a life. It could be thrilling when it went right: when you did something that pushed in a run here and there, when you set up a defense and the ball, often so recalcitrant, obediently played right into the hands of that defense. There was exceptional excitement in the fact that for all the preparation you did, and Tony La Russa was always preparing, the game could never be scripted. As much as he knew—and he had spen
t his life trying to know—things he never could have imagined still routinely happened, an odd fantastic play that even if it went against you still made you secretly smile in wonder. When the game did work right, hummed along with that perfect hum that every fan recognizes, La Russa would think, simply: "Beautiful. Just beautiful baseball."

  If the amount of time he had been at it—the very attitude he had about it—made him something of a throwback, it shouldn't imply that he was simply some tired relic waiting for his retirement papers. No one currently managing had won as many games; he was eighth on the all-time list going into this 2003 season and likely to be as high as third by the time he was finished. No one in the modern history of the game had managed for twenty-four consecutive years—starting in 1979 with the White Sox, then with the Athletics, and now with the Cardinals for nearly a decade—an amazing feat of security in a job that had no security. No one else had won the Manager of the Year Award five times, across four decades, in both leagues, with each of the three teams he had managed: the White Sox in 1983 when he was still in his Wonder Boy thirties, twice with the Oakland A's in 1988 and 1992 in his forties, and then with the Cardinals in 1996 and 2002.

  Along the way, in a game generally terrified of innovation, La Russa, now fifty-eight, had come up with innovations. He had refined the concept of the closer into a one-inning pitcher with the exclusive territory of the ninth. He had made a science of situational matchups between hitter and pitcher in the late innings. (Once he used five pitchers in the space of eight pitches.) And, as if to prove that an obsessive mind was hardly perfect, he had even challenged the hallowed concept of the starting rotation. Briefly, instead of having a single starting pitcher for each game, he went with a starting grouping of pitchers in which each one was not allowed to pitch longer than three innings. It was in keeping with his reputation for continual tinkering—too much tinkering in the eyes of some—and it was quietly shelved after a handful of games.

  After twenty-four years of managing, it was difficult to imagine that he had ever done anything else. He seemed like someone who had bypassed infancy and childhood and adolescence to appear one day in his chosen profession: He seemed that intimate with it. But he still sensed the intrinsic bizarreness of what he did—the idea of spending his life in what looked like a seedy basement nightclub with a long bench instead of chairs and paper cups instead of shot glasses, a club whose denizens had temperaments as stable as a Silicon Valley IPO. Day in and day out, he had to tell them what to do, even though they made millions more than he did and weren't above back-stabbing betrayal and knew that ultimately, he was a lot more expendable than they were. Even so, he controlled their work schedules, kept them in a game or took them out, got them up or sat them down. As a result, he often humiliated them simply by doing his job. They vented their anger through pouty eyes refusing to look at him from the length of that stark bench. They had pride, enormous pride, at least the ones worth worrying about did. They played with a magic to them that he had never had when he'd played, which made the idea of his telling them what to do—deciding the daily flow of their lives—even more dicey.

  He made the decisions he made because of a belief that the whole was always more important than the parts. He likened the team to twenty-five puzzle pieces in which everyone threw his piece in. He kept telling them that, and they nodded when he did, having learned early in their entitled lives that the best way to avoid a lecture was to nod. He told them he loved them, cared about them, needed them. And then he did what he had to do: pinch-hit for them, remove them from that rise of dirt, swap them out for someone with a more reliable glove. And then the next day, he had to tell them all over again how much he loved and needed them.

  So it was odd, very odd, perhaps the oddest job in America. As odd as an editor editing his upcoming crop of books on a Central Park bench with all his authors gathered around him fuming over every red line and crossout. As odd as a CEO closing a plant by telling each employee that he had found some workers in India who do it smarter and better and cheaper: In other words, you're all being permanently pinch-hit for, but don't get me wrong, I still think you're all great!

  Day in and day out, he persevered in the face of the fact that when you're a manager, you never have a 100 percent happy day. There was always something taking away from it, inevitably a burnt ego, somebody who felt scorned or didn't get the start he deserved or the at-bat. He still did the things he had to do, and even when he did them right—knew he had done them right—they still went to hell because the game was eternally mischievous, or "cruel," as he liked to put it, simply cruel. Whether Matt Morris would be able to land on his injured ankle when he pitched: That kept him up at night. The seeming indifference of J.D. Drew, his talent only adding to his indifference: That kept him up at night. Kerry Robinson's refusal to follow instructions or stick to fundamentals: That kept him up at night. Trying to figure out what to say to Woody Williams after a particularly heartbreaking loss when he had pitched his brains out: That not only kept La Russa up at night but also had him walking the empty streets of Chicago at 2 A.M. in search of the right words.

  Sometimes, he stayed awake to work things out: find an answer in the seeming absence of any, pick a situation apart and put it back together and pick it apart and put it back together again. Beneath his taciturn exterior was an optimist, someone convinced that if you thought about something hard enough, grinded through it enough, examined every possible alternative enough, it could be fixed. That is what happened with the elbow.

  The elbow was all he saw at night for a while: not simply anybody's elbow but the elbow of the great Pujols, the best hitter in baseball, even if the only people who knew it for sure at the beginning of 2003 lived in St. Louis. In his first two seasons in the majors, Albert Pujols had hit over .300, driven in more than a hundred runs, and hit more than thirty home runs. And although it was early in 2003, only his third season, he was hitting the ball even better than he had the first two: on his way, if he kept it up, to hitting more than thirty home runs once again and driving in more than a hundred runs once again and leading the league in average. It was wonderful for Pujols, obviously, another rapid step up the ladder to pre-eminence. But it was also wonderful for the Cardinals: more than wonderful, as their pitching was already in the toilet, with both the starters and the relievers combining to run up the highest ERA in the league. The team couldn't succeed without Pujols's hitting.

  And then he injured his elbow on a throw from his position in left field and wouldn't be able to throw with any force for three weeks. In the American League, this wouldn't have been a terrible problem. He couldn't field, maybe, but he still could have his regular place in the batting order; he'd simply be the designated hitter. But in the National League, in which the dimensions of managing afford far less latitude than in its junior counterpart and therefore far more complication, it meant that Pujols could only pinch-hit until his elbow healed.

  This could not have happened at a worse moment. The Cardinals had lost two out of three to Arizona in St. Louis, and Arizona was a down club, hitting poorly, waiting to be plucked. Now the Cardinals were going off on a brutal six-game swing to Atlanta and Florida. Yes, it was only April. But La Russa had learned long ago that April is a great time to push, when most other teams are simply trying to settle in, still trying to figure out whether the puzzle pieces actually amount to anything beyond pieces. He had learned that from Sparky Anderson, and the best proof of that had been the Tigers in 1984 under Anderson's skipperdom, when they had started the season 35–5 on their way to winning a World Series.

  So much for this year's April push. But La Russa was worried by the road trip in particular because his team rarely played well in Atlanta. Part of it was psychological, maybe: his nemesis Bobby Cox simply a craggy, crafty old fox who regularly beat him. Part of it was also style: The Braves worked the outside of the plate better than any other team in baseball—made a meal out of it as a matter of policy and instructed pitchers who c
ame over, such as Russ Ortiz from San Francisco, to hit that outside corner for a first-pitch strike, the most important pitch in any at-bat—and then get nasty the rest of the at-bat with a mixture on and off the edges of the plate. He was also worried about the Marlins. He knew that they were stoked with pitching, because he had seen them probably half a dozen times in spring training. The Cardinals would be facing their three right-handed stallions still in the brim of their twenties.

  The Cards lost the first game in Atlanta. Then they lost the second when Jeff Fassero, on in relief, just lollipopped one up there, put it right on the plate when the one thing, once again, he should have done was put it off the plate. He made the kind of mistake you maybe expected from a rookie but not from a twelve-year veteran, as if he were bored by relieving. And it was unfair to simply single out Fassero, as all the relievers had been ineffective, making fatal mistakes.

  After the game, as the team bus made its way to the hotel, La Russa suddenly told the driver to stop. To the players, the game was just another game, a tiny forgotten sliver in the longest season in professional sports. They were in the back of the bus, talking, chirping, making plans for what to do with the night ahead. But La Russa was miserable; losing made him miserable, and being in the suffocating bus made him more miserable. So he got off and walked over to Morton's Steak House just off of Peach Street in downtown Atlanta. It was an odd choice for a strict vegetarian who refuses to eat anything that, as he puts it, once had a face on it. But Morton's was warm and clubby, and given that La Russa lived in a hotel not only when the team played away but also when it played at home, the restaurant was probably as close as he got to the feel of an intimate dining room during the season.