1 2 3 4 5 R H E
CUBS 0 0 0 0 0 0 3 0
CARDINALS 0 0 0 0 3 0 0
Leading off the bottom of the fifth, Williams burnishes his reputation as a great hitting pitcher by singling on a 1-and-1 curve that hangs a little high. It brings up Kerry Robinson, the Cards' lead-off man pro tem, and now La Russa has another crucial decision to make. But it won't sneak up on him, the very panic of indecision because a decision is demanded. In keeping with his mantra that the only way to keep up with the game is to stay ahead of it, he started playing out different what-ifs before the Cardinals came to bat in the fifth, the same as he does before every offensive inning. Leaving the foxhole and retreating to the back bench in the left corner of the dugout, pulling out his cheat sheets to make sure no nugget of prior information is missed, he considers the possibility of having Robinson bunt if Williams gets on base. By examining the scenarios this way, La Russa will be ready for the moment whatever moment arises—putting out his signs quickly to the players involved so there is no confusion or hesitation. The variable here, because in baseball there is always a variable, boils down to this in the bottom of the fifth: how hard to push in a 0–0 game that shows no signs of yielding runs without a fight.
First, La Russa considers Wood's pitch count. It stands at seventy-nine, which hardly suggests that the Cardinals are about to get rid of him, particularly as Baker is infamous for taking his starting pitchers deep into games. No one in the major leagues did it more last season; nineteen times he kept his starters in for more than 120 pitches. But once Wood's pitch count creeps over 100, even Baker has to think about calling the bullpen. The Cubs' bullpen is their soft spot; their setup men are greeted with relief by opposing hitters, vulnerable fill-ins after starters as good as Prior and Wood and Zambrano, their closer, Joe Borowski, getting through on grit without classic closer material. So, from La Russa's perspective, the most exploitable aspect of Wood's performance tonight is his pitch count. The best way to win against any top-shelf pitcher is not always trying to rack up runs against him, because however much you try, you may not rack up any. Instead, the most effective path is to work the count, resist the itch to chase after junk food off the plate, realize that a foul ball sometimes has more value than a fair one because it lengthens your at-bat.
If Wood's count were a little bit higher—if La Russa could look over at Baker in the visitor's dugout and know that he was thinking bullpen —pushing for a run now might not matter much. With Wood gone, a run would be easier to come by. But he'll be around for a while.
So pushing is important to La Russa, but how important? Because doing so entails some likely sacrifice. A successful bunt by Robinson moves Williams to second, with Hart and Pujols up next to try to drive him in. With Williams standing on first now, La Russa's internal debate takes up the antibunt argument in full drive: Robinson got a base hit last time.
It's only the fifth, and you want to do a little something more than get the runner over.
There's something else unsettling him: who's on first. If Robinson bunts, Williams will have to dig for second. He's fully capable of doing that, but La Russa doesn't want him to run hard and chance an injury when he's pitching so well. (For the same reason, La Russa is also leaning away from putting on a hit-and-run here.) He juggles all these variables in a couple of seconds. No amount of pre-inning planning could buy him any time here; baseball follows its timepiece, not his, and he has to pull the trigger.
He places his faith in Robinson's bat: His fine piece of hitting last time up takes precedence. Wood throws a fastball high to make the count 1 and 0. He does the exact same thing on the next pitch to make the count 2 and 0. It's a hitter's count, and if Robinson gets a pitch to hit, he's going to get it now. Wood no longer has the luxury of trying something nasty off the plate. He's going to go with his strength, which is his fastball.
It's a 95-mph fastball. But lacking movement or location, the fastest fastball has all the subtlety of a streaker—little to it beyond the gainly flab of the buttocks. This fastball is down the pipe, just like that pitch the Phillies threw at him was down the pipe, about belt-high. It is the pitch to hit.
Robinson doesn't lift his bat. Everything that favored him suddenly dissolves. Wood, knowing that he got away with something and feeling good about it, hits the outside corner for a strike to make it 2 and 2. That gives him a little breathing room to expand the zone, which he does by throwing a 12-to-6 curve for strike 3.
Hart bounces up to the plate and hits a little nubber down the first-base line, slow enough so that the only play is to first for the second out. That summons Pujols, with Williams on second. La Russa draws a breath, wondering whether this is the moment of headball he's been dreading, particularly with first base open. Wood throws a fastball a little bit up in the zone, and Pujols swings through it.
It gives Wood the crucial first-pitch strike, but against Pujols, it has the effect only of making things a little more balanced for the pitcher. Wood knows this, as this is the twenty-fourth time he has faced Pujols, with the outcome seven hits and three homers. The other Cubs know this. The fans know this. And so does La Russa. Alhough he has managed Harold Baines and Carlton Fisk and Jose Canseco and Rickey Henderson and Mark McGwire, and although he is not prone to gratuity, La Russa calls Pujols the best player he has ever managed. He is loathe to ever single a player out, but he is also convinced that Baines and Henderson and all the rest—given the opportunity to play with Pujols season after season—would also conclude that he is the best. Pujols has the consummate qualities that every manager looks for in a player: good hands, a strong and accurate arm, instinctive hitting reflexes. But it's more than just the skill: In the best of times and the worst of times of baseball, the constant thundercloud of money overhanging the game, Pujols tries to exploit his skills every day through every at-bat.
He has achieved the status of superstar. His statistics are too irrepressible for him to be treated otherwise. But because he plays in a small media market, he is a superstar of unknown portfolio, rarely mentioned in the same breath as Alex Rodriguez or Barry Bonds, although the numbers he has put up his first two seasons are the best that any player in the history of the game has ever put up:*
This season his numbers are even better, on a pace once again to hit thirty or more homers, drive in a hundred or more runs, score a hundred or more runs, and hit well over .300.
Wood follows his fastball with a curve up and away. Pujols doesn't chase, and the count goes to 1 and 1. It's typical of Pujols to lay off the pitch, his whole approach a remarkable combination of preparation, concentration, adjustment, and self-discipline. It is a combination that La Russa has seen before but never quite like this, the thick mix of all these different portions. It also explodes the supposition that hitting is fundamentally some inexplicable natural talent that cannot be substantially refined or perfected, something either you have or don't have. For Pujols, talent is where he begins.
II
HE SLIPPED IN out of nowhere. He wasn't a big-time bonus baby. He wasn't a first-round pick or even a tenth-round pick. At the outset, he seemed like nothing beyond a guy with a pretty good bat and an interesting glove who could tell people in twenty years around the grill that he once had a shot.
He was born with the real first name of Jose in Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic. His family came to New York, where he was raised by his grandmother. After he saw a man get shot outside a grocery store as a teenager, she moved the kids to Missouri. He went to Fort Osage High School in Independence, then to Maple Woods Community College. A highly respected college coach who watched him play in a summer league over in Hays never thought that Pujols would make it, and he wasn't singing a solo. Pujols's body was soft. He was considered slow, never better than 4.6 or 4.7 seconds to first. His bat was slow as well, and he rarely pulled the ball. In a world buzzing with scouts and the coming of the next new thing—in which promising players are tracked from the age of twelve by the publication Basebal
l America —Pujols was the antithesis of the prodigal player. Before he was drafted, he was mentioned only once in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, in 1997, as a "player to watch" in the Class 4A Missouri high school baseball tournament, alongside such unfamiliar names as Chris Francka and Eric O'Connor.
The Cardinals made him a thirteenth-round pick in the 1999 draft, the 402nd player taken overall, signing him for around $30,000. In the annual "Down on the Farm" story in the Post-Dispatch in April 2000, he was listed as a future possibility for the Cardinals at third base, although the story made it clear that Chris Haas was considered to have the rosier prospects. He was still obscure, another player in the minor-league shuffle of Johnson City and Peoria and Potomac and New Haven and Memphis. But then he took off, first in Peoria, then in Potomac, ending up the season in Triple-A Memphis, where he clinched the Pacific Coast League playoffs over Salt Lake City with a homer in the thirteenth inning. He went to the Arizona Fall League afterward, and although he hit well, there was continued concern about his weight. The Cardinals set him up with a nutritionist and a strength coach. He came to spring training in 2001 with a body toned and svelte. On a Wednesday afternoon during a throw-away intrasquad game at Roger Dean Stadium, he hit a pitch that went over the left-field wall and smashed into the adjacent offices of the Montreal Expos—perhaps the most exciting thing that had happened to the Expos in their history—and La Russa wondered just what kind of prospect he had on his hands.
Younger players, particularly those who had spent most of the previous season at Class A ball, viewed spring training as a vacation because they figured they had no shot to make it. They floated through the bunt drills and the cut-off drills and the soft-toss drills in the mesh of the neatly laid-out batting cages with sweet smiles on their faces, just happy to be there and waiting for the next roster cutdown when they would be returned to the hinterland for further tenderizing. A manager, at least a manager with a clue, went out of his way to give a prospect a positive spring by keeping him out of difficult situations, to nurture his head a little bit. But Pujols was different, so different that La Russa did the exact opposite, had him bat cleanup, put him in day in and day out against the best pitchers, because he had to see what was really there. "He has a serious, mature approach," La Russa told reporters at the time. "He's almost too good to be true."
But he still felt compelled to test Pujols, unwilling to give him a spot on the club if there wasn't ample opportunity for playing time. Shortly before spring training ended, the Cardinals played Atlanta at the Braves' complex in Disneyworld in Orlando. La Russa didn't have Pujols in the lineup that day, instead making sure that the regulars got in some final at-bats before the regular season began. Mark McGwire started at first, took his three cuts, then headed for the shower and stood behind La Russa in the dugout runway in his street clothes. The game was tied in the ninth when La Russa called on Pujols to pinch-hit against Matt Whiteside. Amid all the curiosity about his immediate future, Pujols didn't just hit the ball, he hit it over the scoreboard in center field. From behind, La Russa suddenly felt McGwire's huge hand smacking him across the back, a little bit like being hit with the wing of a 747. "Dude, I told you, he's on the club!" McGwire said to his manager. While La Russa knew at that moment that McGwire was right, he still subjected himself to second-guessing when the Cards ended up losing that game. His father was there that day, and afterward, when he saw his son, his comment was succinct and to the point: "You should have played Pujols the whole game."
Since then, he has only gotten better, his determination unwavering despite the fact that every day, he gets more and more attention—his performance this season at the All-Star Home Run derby in Chicago, where he hit fourteen home runs in the semifinals, a kind of coming-out party for him—a nation discovering what only a few truly knew before.
Just like pitching well, hitting well is a mental act masquerading as a physical one. A lot of hitters become afraid to consistently do well because it creates expectation and extra pressure—the curse of responsibility to perform. So they disengage their higher faculties and simply guess what a pitcher might throw. They don't go through the admittedly laborious study of video beforehand to try to pick up patterns, which is why some of them keep the bat on their shoulders when they should swing and swing when they should keep the bat on their shoulders. They also feel the creep of self-satisfaction, willing, if they get two hits in the first two or three at-bats, to let it go at that, 2 for 4 a perfectly nice day's work in the big leagues, the tired truism that if a hitter went 2 for 4 every day, he would be the greatest hitter ever.
But Pujols was different from the beginning and stayed that way. "He has this relentless ability about not throwing at-bats away," says La Russa. "A lot of players throw an at-bat or two away every couple of games. They don't concentrate the same way."
Like other players who routinely hit over .300, Pujols is equipped with what La Russa calls "high batting average mentality." Going into each at-bat, he has a specific war room strategy for countering the pitcher's likely line of attack. He also works continually on what La Russa calls a "very productive high average stroke." After developing a relationship with Alex Rodriguez through a mutual friend, he traveled to Rodriguez's home in Miami one winter, and together they worked on about fifteen different drills off a batting tee that Rodriguez had developed, further advancing a hitting style to all parts of the field that isn't just pull-happy. He's perfected a stroke in the mold of the revolutionary batting instructor Charley Lau, passed down from generation to generation of great hitters from George Brett to Hal McRae to Fisk to Wade Boggs to McGwire and now to Rodriguez and Pujols.
Lau was the batting instructor for the White Sox when La Russa managed there after having already left his trademark on the Yankees and the Kansas City Royals. Lau died tragically of cancer in 1984, but he left a profound legacy. La Russa believes that Lau single-handedly influenced the game of baseball more than any other individual in the past quarter century, because of the way he used video when nobody really knew what video was. He broke down the swing frame by frame, saw that great hitters have certain absolutes. He studied the swing, examined it, instead of simply assuming the mechanics of it, and he figured out a new approach for it, saw the similarities between hitting and a golf swing but also made sure that the absolutes of the great hitters were never shed. Head on the ball at all times. Weight shift from back to front. An inside path to the ball that, if you're a righty, aims for center and right center. Top to bottom swing with no uppercut. And great extension, which is why the top hand comes off the bat of some hitters as they finish to give them the right arc through the ball. Pujols inherited the Lau style without ever meeting him, of course. So have hundreds of other hitters.
Before every game, Pujols keeps to himself in the clubhouse. He is not a talker. He makes himself available to his teammates, but he views reporters with sulky perspective, as if he is suddenly being encircled by a large cluster of dermatologic oddities that don't spread infection but do cause copious itching if they hover around too long. His face seems hung with a "do not disturb" sign. He has no time for the obvious answers to the obvious questions from the radio and television boys looking for their soundbites. He is busy in these moments, intensely busy, shuffling back and forth between the clubhouse and the blessed off-limits-to-reporters sanctuary of the darkened little video room where the Secret Weapon is screening tape of today's opposing starter. It is difficult to characterize Pujols's expression as he watches one of the monitors. It isn't rapaciousness or blood lust or any kind of particularly strong emotion. In baseball, less on the outside is usually more on the inside. But there is the glimmer of desire, almost a kind of dreaminess, the eyes narrowing ever so slightly as he watches, a big cat who, when the time is right, will consume the mouse who needs a mound to stand tall.
He showed that look four days earlier in preparation for Kevin Millwood, the Phillies' starting pitcher. He watched Millwood pitch against the Brewers, reacquaintin
g himself over and over with the cutter away that Millwood deploys against righties. He showed that look when he watched footage of his own two homers in one recent game against Cincinnati, the first on a sinker that seemed impossible to hit, much less tattoo, almost surfing the dirt. He replayed the first homer in slow motion, silently following the trajectory of the pitch followed by the trajectory of his bat with that high-finish stroke, the reaffirming of mechanics and muscle memory. He showed that look when he hit a home run against Prior earlier in the season in the bottom of the eighth to tie the game at 1–1.
As good as his swing is, Pujols still treats it as a work to be meticulously refined, studied, examined, pulled apart, mercilessly critiqued. He adjusts it continually, bearing in mind the natural human tendency toward entropy and the fact that no two pitchers are any more perfectly alike than any two snowflakes or two fingerprints are alike. He has sustained periods of Zen, such as the thirty-game hitting streak that ended only the week before. But on certain days, in quiet conversation with Chad Blair, he assesses the complex components of his swing that have failed a little bit: too down on his legs, moving around too much, too busy at the plate.
Pujols's obsession over video isn't relegated simply to the small hours before a game. He has also retreated to the clubhouse for a fix during games, disappearing from the dugout to confer with the Secret Weapon about what has gone wrong with the at-bat he has just taken. In early May against the Expos, Claudio Vargas was pitching and beforehand was talking it up a little bit, telling a mutual friend of Pujols's that he was coming to town to strike him out. And in fact Vargas had done just that on the first at-bat in the minimum three pitches. "He got me that time, but I got three more at-bats," he said to Blair, meticulously charting the game pitch by pitch with the perfect vantage point of that camera in center field. Pujols watched what Vargas had done to him, how he had gotten him out. He studied his hands, his stride in reaction to Vargas and made the adjustments he thought necessary. But actually he had it all wrong: He didn't need three more at-bats to right the equation. He needed only one more, when he hit a 452-foot shot to center field.
Three Nights in August Page 17
