Three Nights in August

by Buzz Bissinger

  III

  LA RUSSA FACES the media after the game, just outside the clubhouse. His hair is damp and his uniform sticky from the breezeless heat. The small, harsh lights on top of the television cameras glare into his eyes, like being inches away from a truck's headlights, making him even more uncomfortable-looking than he already is. He answers the obligatory questions with obligatory brevity.

  Once the press conference is over, he retreats immediately to his office. In the locker area, Stephenson, showered and in street clothes, finds himself surrounded by a circle of reporters and offers no excuse for what happened. "When you leave the ball up, more bad things are gonna happen than good things. And it's my fault."

  Afterward, several reporters go into La Russa's office. One of them, reiterating a question posed to him in the press conference, asks his opinion of Stephenson's pitch selection. La Russa cracks, unable to conceal his irritation, convinced that the intent of the question is to provoke him, get him to say something publicly negative in the heat of the moment. "I have no problem with the way he went about it. Did you hear me say that? So why would you ask that question? I have no problem with the way he went about it. He just didn't pitch well. Why would you ask that?"

  He won't show up a player publicly. But privately, he's deeply frustrated with Stephenson's ill-fated dependence on the fastball. He checks with the Secret Weapon to get an accurate tally of how many off-speed pitches Stephenson threw during his three innings: only twelve out of sixty-five, an unhealthy ratio. "The way he gets guys, he's got to be somewhere around even with his curve ball and his changeup," says La Russa as he unpeels his uniform. "But he kept going fastball, fastball, fastball..."

  By the time he changes into his street clothes, the clubhouse will be empty. He will eat in silence at J Bucks restaurant several miles from the stadium. He will have a book with him, Flags of Our Fathers, by James Bradley, about the battle of Iwo Jima. He will climb into his Cardinals-red Cadillac Escalade. He will return to where he lives in St. Louis, a residential suite in a hotel in the city's west end. And he will follow the routine that he has followed since he first went into the foxhole. He will pull out the little lineup cards that he uses to keep score during the games. They help him keep track and stay ahead when he manages, and now he's reviewing certain situations the players faced—the count, an RBI situation or a steal situation or a hit-and-run situation—and whether he reacted appropriately. He uses the cards to learn something about his team that may be of help in the future, just as he uses them to learn something about his opponent that may be of help in the future: little glints of their personalities that came out in pivotal plays. The cards may also reveal something about baseball he has never noticed before, a slice of insight in a game that, after 3,767 of them, still has the capacity to humble him.

  As he manages, he also makes tiny little lists of opportunities lost and not lost, moments when maybe he could have stolen a run or prevented one: how, for example, the Expos' Jose Vidro likes to punch it in the hole between first and second with a runner on first, so you shade the second baseman to take away the hole, even if it makes a normal double play more difficult, or that Expos pitcher Tomo Ohka is one of those inverse righties who pitches better against lefties, so you better stock your lineup accordingly. He learned to keep a list from Dick Williams, the manager of the A's when they won world championships in 1972 and 1973. Williams told him that if you don't make notes about a game as it's occurring and review them afterward, you will forget what happened, because of the daily grind of the season. But there aren't many notes here because, let's face it, the game was over by the floodgates of the third when Simon hit the three-run dinger into left.

  He will project ahead to Game 2, when Kerry Wood is slated to go for the Cubs. His matchup numbers against the Cardinals are similar to Prior's, cause enough for brooding. But the style with which Wood pitches creates an anxiety for La Russa more terrible than anything else he faces as a manager. He will ponder the lineup. There's not much he can do about the neophytes Bo Hart and Kerry Robinson at the top except stick with them, but he hopes he'll be able to restore Renteria to shortstop. He will pore over every detail.

  "I've been able to devote more concentration than most to it," he acknowledges. "My life revolves around the score." And then he admits, "I've had an incredible advantage at a terrific price."

  IV

  FOR EIGHT MONTHS a year, La Russa lives by himself. During spring training, he stays at a condominium near the Cardinals' complex in Jupiter. When the team moves north for the regular season, he stays in the residential hotel suite while his wife, Elaine, and their two daughters remain 2,000 miles away in Alamo near San Francisco. The support of La Russa's family has enabled him to focus his life 100 percent on baseball during the season. But the number of times he sees them during the season can be counted on two hands—a couple of series against the Giants and the occasional off day when he steals a plane to Oakland for a twenty-four-hour reunion. A plaque on a wall in the La Russas' home sums up their relationship: "We interrupt this marriage to bring you the baseball season."

  Their first daughter, Bianca, was born in September 1979, a month after her father had started managing the White Sox. Their second daughter, Devon, was born in August 1982. Their births came when La Russa was most vulnerable, or felt he was most vulnerable—still cutting his teeth as the White Sox' manager. Living in Des Moines, where La Russa had the Triple-A job with the White Sox, Elaine begged her husband not to make the move to the parent club in Chicago. She was eight months pregnant and the timing was beyond bad. Since their marriage on New Year's Eve in 1973, they had moved nearly forty times, shuttling between spring training and the baseball season and Tony's law school studies in the off-season. Most of their possessions were in storage, bed sheets often served as drapes, plants inevitably froze in the car on the way to some strange and faceless apartment filled with the sour odors of transience. The thought of moving again, when Elaine was about to give birth, filled her with dread. A child, Tony. We're having a child. But they moved anyway.

  Elaine played the baseball wife at first, quietly nursing Bianca in the stands soon after she was born. She loved the game—at least at first she loved it—and she loved even more to keep score. After the games, White Sox owner Bill Veeck held court at a bar called the Bard's Room in the upper reaches of Comiskey Park. Her husband's attendance was mandatory, so Elaine dutifully followed with Bianca, even though they weren't allowed in the actual bar itself, because women simply were not allowed: an unwanted governor on the bawdy, off-color atmosphere with which baseball defined itself back then. Instead, they sat in an adjacent room, falling asleep arm-in-arm until two or three or four in the morning, whenever Veeck, basically an insomniac, had had enough baseball talk for the night.

  Elaine also took her husband's intense temperament in stride, even when his body language, after a loss, said get the hell away from me. All coaches take losses hard. But Jim Leyland, who coached under La Russa and then went on himself to manage fourteen years for the Pirates and Florida and Colorado, believes that La Russa magnified the impact. "Losing hurts all of us, but it probably hurt Tony too much," said Leyland. And it hurt others as well.

  "I was paranoid about not doing the job right," said La Russa of those early years, paranoid about not being prepared, paranoid about missing some millimeter edge there for the taking if he could only find it. He found himself consumed by the philosophy of Paul Richards, who had managed in the big leagues for twelve years, was considered a master innovator, and was the director of the farm system for the Chicago White Sox when La Russa took over: It's your ass. It's your team. It's your responsibility. There's a strategy for every situation. So start making some decisions.

  Early in the 1983 season, Elaine was taking care of their daughters in Sarasota. The White Sox had just broken spring training there, and she planned to bring the children north to Chicago in late May or early June so the family could be together. One night, sh
e called from Florida: She had just been diagnosed with pneumonia and required hospitalization. La Russa responded to the news with a fateful decision, one that would cement his status as a baseball man but would also define him in another way.

  Based on a strong finish in 1982, the expectations were high for the White Sox in 1983. But the season got off to a wretched start, mired at 16 and 24. Floyd Bannister was having trouble winning anything. La Marr Hoyt had a record of 2 and 6 and Carlton Fisk was a mess at the plate. In the middle of May, the team lost eight of nine games. Toronto swept them; then Baltimore swept them. La Russa found himself fighting for his life, or what he mistook for his life. He had a team that was supposed to win, that had spent money on free agents and had good pitching and still wasn't winning. The only reason he was still around was because of the vision of White Sox owner Reinsdorf, who continued to stand by him. So he did what he thought he had to do: He called his sister in Tampa and asked whether she would take care of the kids so he could take care of baseball.

  Only with the benefit of hindsight, twenty years of it, did he realize that the right decision was the one he hadn't made. "How was I stupid enough? I should have left the team and taken care of my wife and kids. I've never forgiven myself for that and they've never forgotten."

  Looking back on it, Elaine remembers feeling "terribly hurt" when her husband failed to come to Florida. But she also thinks that he was so overwhelmed by the myriad responsibilities of managing—so scared by it on the one hand and so determined on the other to succeed at it—that he lost all sight that there was more to life than his professional life. "I think at that time he was basically clueless," she said. She also believes she enabled his pursuit by taking care of everything that was family-related, so he never had to assume any responsibility. "Don't worry about me," she said to him over the phone when he elected to stay with the team. "Do what you have to do, because I know it's tough for you." She wanted to be supportive, but she believes now that she made a mistake in not demanding more of him personally: insisting upon it. "I know it helped him become what he is and where is he now," she said. "But on a personal level, I should have been more of a Scarlett O'Hara. In retrospect, if I hadn't been so efficient, it would have forced him to become more of an equal partner. He knew that everything would be taken care of. I think it just fed into the monster."

  When La Russa moved to the Oakland A's in 1986 after getting fired by the White Sox, the dugout became a further entrapment. He joined the A's in the middle of the season—again carrying the weight of his enormous expectations—and the team responded to him. There came a game in August against the Yankees, one of those no-justice, manage-your-ass-off games in which the A's scratched back from a 6–5 deficit and brought an 8–6 lead into the top of the ninth, when all sorts of weird hell broke loose, the Yankees scoring three times on three singles and two walks and a sacrifice fly.

  His wife and daughters were at the game that night. He made them wait an hour and a half before he came out of the clubhouse. He drove home from the stadium silent and stone-faced. He started to give the girls a bath, but he lost his temper and his voice rose and Elaine finished bathing them.

  The A's played a night game the next day. It ended relatively early, and after it was over, he called Elaine and asked how long the girls were going to be up. Occasionally, if there was a night game followed by a day game, La Russa had slept in the clubhouse rather than get home late and head back to the park the next morning at 7:30. Elaine told him that the girls wanted to know how the A's had done: If they'd lost, she told her husband, the girls would prefer that their father spend the night at the clubhouse.

  When the A's later played the Detroit Tigers, La Russa told Tigers manager Sparky Anderson, whom he also admired deeply, what had happened. Anderson dressed him down and told him that he had to keep his priorities straight. La Russa knew that Anderson was right, but by his own admission, "I still didn't fix it enough. I just got better at hiding it. I still got to the park too early. I still stayed too late."

  Gradually, Elaine stopped taking the girls to the games; she didn't want them to become captive to the team's fortunes and their father's moods. "As I got more and more into it, more caught up, dumber and dumber," said La Russa, "she realized that the girls were not going to have a life."

  Elaine still loved baseball, but she felt she had to step away from it. She began to feel that baseball ruined families, not simply in terms of the eight months it kept a man from his family, but also in terms of its antifamily rituals. "Baseball is wonderful for separating families," she said. "They are real good at that. Back in Sarasota [during spring training with the White Sox], they still had a stag night. Families were not allowed." She became increasingly independent in the raising of her children: schooling them at home, encouraging their love of dance through the Oakland Ballet. She also saw that even when her husband was at home in body during the season, he was never there in spirit, so consumed by achieving success in Oakland that he went into a place all his own. There could be no balancing work life with home life, particularly because a manager's obligations, unlike a player's, were ceaseless. She had first met Tony in 1972 in Richmond, Virginia, when he was a minor-league player, and his focus then was simple: He wanted to hit .300. But when he became a manager, it was like a tidal wave hit: strategic responsibilities, off-the-field responsibilities, responsibility for players as needy and mercurial as they were so blessedly talented. When Tony had been a player, he and Elaine had shared everything, talked about everything. But as a manager, the last thing he wanted to talk about when he came home was his job after twelve nonstop hours of it each day, every day, from February to October.

  In 1996, when La Russa went to the Cardinals, Elaine elected to stay behind with the children to lead their own lives while he led his. It wasn't for want of love, because the love in the family was intense, but because it was best for everyone involved, a division of labor that made sense in terms of what was important to each of them: Elaine in charge of parenting Bianca and Devon on the West Coast, her husband in the Midwest with nothing between him and baseball. From her origins as a dutiful baseball wife, Elaine realized how crucial it had become for both her and her children to have an identity beyond what her husband and their father did for a living, that he was the only one with his name spread across his shoulders. Back in the days when she had gone to the games, she had always noticed the other baseball wives huddled around in their enclave in the stands. Without being dismissive, she came to the conclusion that they were little more than fans with better seats and greater entitlement. Where do you go beyond that? she wondered. What do you do? What is your life about? She also noticed something else: how many marriages fell apart once the baseball stopped. It wasn't something she wanted, just as she also knew that if she and the kids simply followed Tony to St. Louis, they would have only ended up resenting him for the disruption he had caused, for the fact that he still would be the man who wasn't there.

  "I know to somebody on the outside looking in, it must be strange and different and weird," she said of their separation for two-thirds of every year, "but it's what you have to do to make it work." And it had worked. It had kept their lives intact and made their marriage whole; the separation eased by phone calls to each other every night after every game. But it wasn't perfect, since few things ever are. "It's not the ideal. If I had written about my life and what I expected it to be, even in baseball, it would not be any way like it has been."

  As for La Russa himself, there is the hindsight of what didn't have to be, the excess of obsession and the toll it must take. "I have huge regrets about it because I could have done just as well in my job with less significant time spent apart," said La Russa. But what's been done can't be undone. The truth of that particularly struck him one weekend during spring training in the 2001 season, when he saw Mike Matheny and Matheny's wife, Kristin, walking hand in hand.

  When Matheny is disappointed with the way he plays, he gets a certain
look in his eye, what La Russa knows too well as the "lost look" of someone thrashing himself for something he felt he should have done. When he glimpsed Matheny away from the game simply holding hands with his wife, it so affected him that he did something he almost never does as a manager—he gave unsolicited advice that had nothing to do with baseball.

  "Look, you're not asking for this advice but I'm giving it to you. Ignore it. Tell me to shut up," La Russa said. "But it moved my heart to see you holding your wife's hand. Just before you held hands, you had that lost look because of something you did on the field—getting too hard on yourself. I made enormous mistakes with my wife and kids; now I have terrific regrets and it's too late to do much about it."

  He admired Matheny's willingness to take responsibility in an era when fewer and fewer athletes ever take responsibility. He didn't want Matheny to lose his capacity for self-critique, but he also urged him not to let those thoughts spill over into his family. "The more you think about it, it only gets worse," he told him. "And when you're with your family, there's nothing you can do about it until you get to the park tomorrow."

  He hoped that Matheny would listen to what he had to say, even though he knew it was something he was not remotely capable of himself. Which is why, as the clubhouse quickly empties out after Game 1 and the players attend to their lives beyond baseball—because there is life beyond baseball—La Russa is still there.

  GAME TWO