Three Nights in August Read online

  He requested a table for one; after a loss, he liked eating alone. There was no worse social interaction in the complicated history of social interaction than trying to make conversation with Tony La Russa after a defeat, idle chitchat bouncing off a face that with each innocuous and annoying word spoken, looked more and more like a glacier with a migraine. And he wasn't entirely alone, anyway. He at least had his book with him because he always brought a book, potboiler plot, with him when he ate by himself: in this case, James Paterson's The Jester, an appropriate title, given what had happened in the ninth to give the Braves the 4–2 win.

  He tried to concentrate on The Jester as he ate. He flipped through the pages as he simultaneously poked around his salad and his baked potato, but it was of no use. He had worked his way through the tattered bullpen because he had had no choice but to work his way through the tattered bullpen. But as soon as that disturbing vision left, another took its place. Now he fixated on tomorrow's lineup with the lefty Mike Hampton going for Atlanta. When he thought about the lineup, there loomed the elbow of the great Pujols.

  Almost as soon as La Russa started managing in the major leagues in 1979, he discovered that most hitters, like mules in their ruts, hate to be meddled with. They hate trying a new stance or a new swing, even if it may lead to improvement, believing that they must be doing something right to have gotten to where they have gotten. As a result, when someone starts telling them to do this and do that—someone who may have had trouble hitting .200 in the major leagues—they tend not to have a particularly open mind. They operate on the superstition that if they do anything differently—anything, from stepping on a chalk line as they approach the batter's box to the mechanics of the swing itself—the delicate assembly line they have concocted will collapse. It's a mindset opposed to that of pitchers, La Russa has also found over the years. Pitchers will experiment with a new pitch daily—throw with their toes, spray it out their butt, flick it off their tongue—if they think it might gain them something.

  Because most hitters don't like any change in their routine, lineups are, from a manager's perspective, as much rooted in Freudian analysis as they are in the traditional elements of wanting someone who makes good contact to hit lead-off and putting your power hitters in the middle, and so on and so forth. A manager has to take into account every hitter's whim, superstition, ego, and reality, difficult enough on a good night but on this particular night in the dark wood Jacuzzi of Morton's, further hampered by the glaring absence of Pujols.

  Pujols normally batted third, so that was an immediate hole needing to be filled. But it wasn't that simple: Filling Pujols's slot meant changing other hitters' routines, a situation La Russa describes as the "consequences of consequences." Scott Rolen moved to the third spot from his customary fifth position. But Rolen liked hitting fifth. He had been flourishing there, so sweetly sandwiched between Jim Edmonds and Tino Martinez. Fifth is where he wanted to be. Fifth is where he should be. La Russa had already moved him to third in the middle of the Arizona series, and his bat had gone silent. So then he had moved Rolen back to fifth and put Edgar Renteria in the third spot. But that led only to another consequence of consequence; deep down, Renteria liked hitting seventh because he drove in a bunch of runs in that slot.

  The lineup was in tatters without the great Pujols: the karmic gestalt of it completely disrupted, a Freudian analysis cut abruptly short, feng shui in crisis. But life is unfair, and La Russa had no choice but to remove an index card from his breast pocket and scratch out a lineup for tomorrow's game. He knew he would give the first baseman Martinez a rest, as it was a day game, and Martinez was an eleven-year veteran who could use the time off after playing the night before. It gave him another hole to fill, and he picked Eddie Perez off the bench to play first. It wasn't a bad choice at all, as Perez, a free swinger, had some pop in the bat.

  Then he started thinking about Perez a little bit: The best way to use Perez—to get the most out of him—was to be judicious. He could take it deep, which is why he was such a nice player to use off the bench in the late innings and even to start in small doses. But if, in the baseball vernacular, he got too "exposed"—if he was playing so much that pitchers started routinely exploiting the holes in his swing—his effectiveness could be curtailed. So he had to be careful with how much he used Perez.

  On the bottom of the little index card he was using to scrawl out his lineup was Pujols's name, alongside the other bench players who might be called on to pinch-hit. With the injured elbow, that's all that Pujols was now: a bench player, a possible pinch hitter good for one at-bat. The more he stared at Pujols's name, the more it looked like a waste there at the bottom of the card, on the bench. And then he started thinking about first base, and it hit him: What about putting Pujols at first base?

  When La Russa had been a player in the 1960s and 1970s, virtually all his career was spent in the minors. He had learned a lot there, perhaps most of all that it was called the minors for a reason. He knew early on, particularly after he hurt his shoulder, that he was never going to have much of a big-league career. He continued to plug away, trying to compensate for lack of talent with drive and hustle, although he knew that these fine and admirable qualities were a poor substitute for it. He also studied: sat on that bench in the dugout, watching managers make moves, wondering why they had made them, and asking afterward why they had made them and refusing to go away until they had given a sufficiently exhaustive answer. He learned from one of his managers, Loren Babe, that in some situations, you have no choice but to sacrifice defense altogether to get the offense you need. Babe gave a player in this category—offensive asset, defensive drawback—three at-bats, getting him out of there by the sixth so as not to risk some defensive late-in-game lapse that could not be overcome. That's what led La Russa to the unlikely notion of Pujols at first base.

  But Pujols wasn't simply a defensive liability. Because of his elbow, he couldn't throw anything beyond a soft toss. It made the idea of playing him at first seem, like many ideas, nice and intriguing and totally impractical, fractured La Russa logic. But he continued to chew on it. He refused to let go of it, convinced that something was still there, something that could still work. What if La Russa played Pujols at first and ordered him not to throw, no matter how great the temptation?

  He walked from Morton's to the Ritz-Carlton Hotel with a new spring in his step. He got into bed, lay on a skyscraper of pillows, and, naturally, stayed awake. But instead of seeing lollipops over the plate, he now saw an elbow with angel's wings. After he woke up the next morning, he continued to think about it. He thought about it some more on the way from the hotel to the visitor's clubhouse at Turner Field, and when he got to the clubhouse, he found Barry Weinberg, the trainer, to tell him of his scheme.

  Weinberg dutifully processed La Russa's scenario and offered a clear and specific reaction—You can't do it! —for the obvious reason that if Pujols in the heat of the moment did make a real throw, it could be a career-threatening injury. La Russa listened to Weinberg's reaction. He always listened to Weinberg's reaction because they had been together for nearly twenty years. He was quite fond of Weinberg and sometimes had dinner with him after the team won. He clearly respected Weinberg. And then he called Pujols into the little office.

  Pujols was circumspect when he came in, a body language of politeness at odds not only with his 6'4", 225-pound frame but also with the superstar status that with each day was only further entombing him. He was already a great player—maybe the greatest young player the game had seen since Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams—but he didn't express it with an equal measure of physical arrogance. When La Russa spoke to him about something, he listened because that's what a player was supposed to do.

  La Russa started the conversation by asking Pujols who was the best major-league manager he had ever played for. Pujols dutifully answered, "Tony," which was true as well as tactful, as La Russa was the only major-league manager Pujols had ever played for.
<
br />   "We get along good, don't we?" asked La Russa.

  "Yes," replied Pujols.

  "Well, you know what, you can get me fired by throwing the ball. If you throw the ball, I'll quit."

  Pujols nodded that he understood.

  "All we have to do is have you lay out for three weeks and you come out 100 percent. So you have to trust me on this strategy, because it gives us a better chance to win."

  So Pujols started at first. And it took all of one inning, actually less than that, for the danger of La Russa's scheme to become apparent. In the bottom of the first, Rafael Furcal got on for Atlanta. It brought up Marcus Giles, who tried to sacrifice Furcal to second with a bunt toward Pujols. Furcal made it to second, and he could have easily made it to third had he known that Pujols was under orders not to throw the ball. There were no more major episodes at first base after that, but the Cardinals ended up losing to the Braves 4–3 anyway, when the bullpen imploded again and gave up two runs in the bottom of the ninth.

  The team dragged into the Westin Diplomat in Miami at about 3 A.M . after the American Airlines charter flight from Atlanta. The players, exhausted, went to bed. But La Russa couldn't sleep. With the three-game sweep by the Braves, the road trip from hell was half done, and the devil seemed in no mood to relent, not with A.J.Burnett and Josh Beckett and Brad Penny pitching for the Marlins: guys who effortlessly threw 94 mph and 95 mph. In his sleeplessness, he began to further examine the Pujols experiment.

  Florida was a different team from Atlanta. The Marlins led the league in stolen bases, with Juan Pierre and Luis Castillo, guys who drove you nuts on the basepaths. And with the word trickling out that Pujols couldn't throw—as a baseball dugout was a greater cauldron of gossip than a Flatbush nail salon—La Russa knew there were even more liabilities. A pitcher, for example, couldn't even make a pick-off move to first, because a runner, aware that Pujols couldn't throw properly, would simply take off to second as if it were a free base. So starting Pujols at first was out, particularly as Martinez was coming back into the lineup anyway to face the Marlin trio of right-handers. But then La Russa considered the outfield dimensions in Florida. Left field there was relatively small, with most of the room in center and right. He conjured and pondered—a little bit of this, a little bit of that—until he had another potion.

  The next morning, he couldn't wait to try out his newest remedy on somebody. As was his pregame habit, he picked up pitching coach Dave Duncan, bullpen coach Marty Mason, and third-base coach Jose Oquendo in the hotel lobby and they all rode together to the stadium. By now, La Russa was bursting with excitement; on the way there, he told them about his plan to play Pujols in left field and set out the rules he'd devised to make it work:

  If there's a base hit to left field, Renteria runs out from the shortstop position so Pujols can simply flip the ball to him, which presumably will prevent a runner from trying to stretch a single into a double with the ball in Renteria's glove.

  If the ball is hit to left center, Pujols fields it and flips it to center fielder Edmonds, who, as Pujols's surrogate, makes the throw back in to prevent an extra base.

  If a runner on first tries to tag up and go to second on a fly ball to left, Pujols lets him tag up.

  Duncan and Oquendo and Mason were receptive. But once in the clubhouse, La Russa had to run the idea past Weinberg because everything involving the players' health had to be run past the trainer. Weinberg's usual answer, based on caution intrinsic to his line of work, was no, so La Russa wasn't surprised when Weinberg said that it was an even worse idea than the first-base experiment.

  "Tony, he's gonna get hurt. He can't throw."

  "I know he can't throw."

  La Russa then called the general manager, Walt Jocketty. As it turned out, Jocketty was already aware of his plan. Weinberg, wanting to stop the madness before it became reality, had called him first. But Jocketty became supportive after La Russa convinced him that Pujols, with his intellect for the game, would not give in to any dangerous impulses. It couldn't be said of all players. Maybe it couldn't even be said about most players. But it could be said about Pujols, for whom a nod was more than simply defense against a further lecture.

  La Russa knew that it was a risky tactic. He knew that there might be terrible repercussions if it went south, for Pujols and for him. He could be fired if it didn't work: probably should be fired because he had jeopardized the exceptional future of an exceptional player. But he also knew that he needed Pujols in the lineup. So he wrote him into left field.

  Pujols came up in the top of the first against Burnett. He was hitting third, Rolen fifth, and Renteria seventh. The correct feng shui of the lineup had been restored. Things felt good again. The order of things had been restored. There was a man on first and one out when Pujols settled in at the plate.

  He homered on the first pitch. From the corner of his most peculiar office, La Russa whispered the only thing he could possibly whisper: "Son of a bitch. " Because sometimes it really did work: as it did then, as it must now in the high heat of August—heat born for baseball—with the Cubs coming to town the way every team comes to town this season and all seasons. A three-game series.

  GAME ONE

  1. Fear Factor

  I

  WITH THE SERIES against the Cubs set to begin tonight in a matter of hours, Tony La Russa is doing what he has done since he first became a major-league manager at the uncertain age of thirty-four. He is managing out of fear, preparing as if he has never managed before, striving to prove to the world that he possesses the combination of skills essential to the trade: part tactician, part psychologist, and part riverboat gambler.

  What few words he utters from his office in the bowels of Busch Stadium are less words than they are contorted mumbles so low off the surface of the floor, you need a fishing net to scoop them up. He is dressed in Cardinals-red undergarments, and, because his office is off to the side of the main locker area, he is oblivious to the players who trickle in one at a time to eventually get dressed. They are easygoing and relaxed, all about the sublimation of pressure. It's pretty much a given in baseball—unlike other sports—that the more hyped you get, the worse off you will be. But La Russa is all about pressure.

  Tension emanates from his face like a lighthouse beacon in the fog, visible from miles away. He is already moving into his zone of concentration: the tunnel, as he calls it. By game time, he will be so deep in the tunnel, so riveted on the vagaries of the field in front of him, that the rest of the spectacle—the swells of the crowd, the incessant seagull screech of the vendors, the out-of-town scoreboard with its inning-by-inning warnings—will have no meaning to him. He won't even be aware of them, as if the game exists for him in a pure extract of silence. He isn't quite in that place yet, and from his office, he occasionally does acknowledge a world outside his own. He scowls when somebody turns up the music in the locker room and a blast of "P.I.M.P." by 50 Cent rages into his office without even as much as a courtesy knock, the decibels so high it would blow the door down anyway. He occasionally peeks at the two television sets that hang at opposite corners from the ceiling of his office: one TV running the satellite feed of Cincinnati playing at Pittsburgh and the other showing an old John Wayne movie, The Fighting Kentuckians. "Now that's my kind of movie," he says, but he draws no comfort when Wayne starts to sing. "John Wayne singing. That's nice," he says with misery, momentarily lifting his head from the sheaf of the latest statistics on his upcoming opponent. Then he turns back to the columnar murk of the stats in his ceaseless search for slivery edges, possible aberrations that may be of use during the game.

  The stapled packet contains the usual baseball breakdown: at-bats and hits and extra-base hits and walks and strikeouts and average for hitters, wins and losses, and innings pitched and runs allowed and hits allowed and home runs allowed by pitchers. La Russa pays special attention to the individual matchups, an essential ingredient of his approach to managing. These sheets detail how each of his hitte
rs has done against Cubs pitchers and how his pitchers have done against Cubs hitters, as well as the flip side: the individual performances of Cubs hitters against Cardinals pitchers and Cubs pitchers against Cardinals hitters.

  The term bench player doesn't really apply to the Cardinals, because La Russa so frequently plugs utility players into the lineup based on little opportunities he unearths by sifting through the results of their previous experience with players on the opposing team. These individual matchups are so integral to his strategy that he copies them onto 5-by-7-inch preprinted cards that managers normally use to make out the game's lineup. With ritualistic precision, he folds the cards down the middle ten minutes before game time and then slips them into the back pocket of his uniform. During a game, he pulls them out continually, almost like worry beads, peering at them as if in search of evidence that everything is fine, that he is doing exactly what he needs to be doing. More practically, he refers to them when deciding who to bring on in relief or who may be the best candidate to pinch-hit.

  Matchups aren't foolproof to La Russa, perhaps because nothing is foolproof in baseball. They have their weaknesses, particularly if the statistics are several years old. But they do provide the best indicator of what the competition will be between a pitcher and a hitter. There are some hitters who, never mind their mediocre batting averages, simply tag the living crap out of some pitchers. Conversely, there are pitchers, despite soggy ERAs, who simply do well against particular high-stroke hitters.