Three Nights in August

by Buzz Bissinger

  In the middle of May, the Cardinals were mired at 16 and 16 after losing two out of three to the Montreal Expos. They were lurching along, vainly trying to find a way. La Russa's contract was up for renewal after the season. The front office approached him then about re-upping, but he didn't want to negotiate, in part because he thought it would look bad to players who were potential free agents and wanted their own contracts negotiated, but also because he wasn't convinced that the Cards would even want him back if the team continued in its mediocrity. It was his ninth year with the team, and the history of managing suggested that nine years with one team was maybe too long.

  But then, at the end of the month, something happened, and the twenty-five pieces of the puzzle became a team. Using the unit of the three-game series as a yardstick, the Cardinals played twenty-one of them from June to the end of August. They swept eight, lost only three, and had a record of 87–44 going into September in running away with the division. Their record at the end of the season—105 wins and only 57 losses—was the best in baseball.

  The Cardinals opened the playoffs by beating the Dodgers three games to one to advance to the National League Championship series against the Astros. In the aura of the irresistible "reverse the curse" narrative as the Red Sox improbably prevailed over the Yankees in the ALCS by winning four straight games after falling behind 3–0, the Cardinals-Astros series was barely noticed. But it too was brilliantly played, filled with the flip-flop of drama, the Cardinals going ahead two games to nothing at Busch, then losing three in a row to Houston in their boisterous house, then returning to St. Louis to win the next two, including the final seventh game against eventual National League Cy Young Award winner Roger Clemens.

  Then came the World Series and the Red Sox thrashing. First and foremost, La Russa believes that Boston deserved to win because they were the better team, got the pitching they needed when they needed it, got the timely two-out hits by making pressure their friend. But he also believes that there is no way—at least no rational way—the Cardinals should have gotten swept. The team was too gifted for that to happen. Except that it did happen.

  After his typical sleepless search for pragmatic explanations to unintended results, he now wonders if it all moved a little bit too quickly, a film at fast-forward where everything just became blurred. After the epic win in Game 7 against Clemens, La Russa tried to tell his team that there was still work to be done. "We just earned a ring, but it's not the ring," he said. But he also honored human nature; for various players who had been on the team for several years, finally winning the NLCS—after two failed tries in 2000 and 2002—was a huge monkey off their backs. The same was true for La Russa himself: an end to the local media's intimations that he clutched in the clutch.

  The team celebrated hard that night, lingering in the clubhouse until three or four in the morning, feeling both the joy and the relief that destiny was still theirs. They got to their respective homes late, stole a little sleep, began to make travel arrangements for their families, heard from people they hadn't heard from in a thousand years yearning for World Series tickets, arrived at a hotel parking lot near the airport at 11:30 A.M. , and by noon were on a plane to a cold, sodden Boston to face a Red Sox team buoyed by both talent and mythology.

  If it wasn't the World Series, La Russa would not have had the team work out that day. But because it was the World Series, they were required to make an appearance. They arrived in Boston at 4:45 P.M. , then got a police escort to Fenway Park because they were late. They were supposed to start working out at 5:00, but didn't arrive until 5:15 and had to wait for the equipment. After their workout ended, the last bus left Fenway at 8:15 P.M. and made its way to the hotel the Cardinals had been placed at by the Red Sox—since it was the home team's responsibility—located not downtown near Fenway, but forty minutes away in Quincy. The Cardinals were told that there were several large conventions in Boston that had taken up all premium downtown hotel space.

  When a team loses, and loses badly, all explanations sound like excuses. The fact of the matter, as La Russa put it, is "that either you do or you don't and we didn't." But he did feel that in the rush to the World Series, the team lost an edge.

  Game 1 the following night, in contrast to the sweet spectacle of both the American League and National League Championship series, was like a sloppy Little League game. The chilly weather made the ball slick, which in turn made it difficult for starter Woody Williams to ever get the right feel and establish effective command. Early in the game, when Matheny set up down and in against Orlando Cabrera and Williams ended up hitting him on the shoulder, La Russa could feel the curse of his own Bambino. Cardinals pitchers gave up eight walks. Red Sox pitchers gave up six of their own, and the Boston defense made four errors.

  In the top of the eighth, the Cards scored twice to tie the score at 9–9. They had the bases loaded and only one out with Rolen due up followed by Edmonds. During the season, the two of them had combined for seventy-six home runs and 235 RBIs while each hitting over .300. But in what may have been the most pivotal at-bats of the World Series, Rolen popped out to third. Edmonds then struck out looking to end the inning. A superb chance to steal a win at Fenway had been lost, and what it portended was even worse. Rolen would ultimately go 0 for 15 in the World Series and Edmonds 1 for 15. (Throw in Reggie Sanders, who batted sixth in the first three games, and the Cardinals four-, five-, and six-hitters went a combined 1 for 39.) When Mark Bellhorn hit a two-run homer off reliever Julian Tavarez in the bottom of the eighth to give the Sox an 11–9 lead that would hold up, it really did seem that the Bambino had simply switched sides.

  The eerie fate of indignity only continued in Fenway's parking lot, where the Cardinals' last bus sat idle for twenty minutes because it was blocked by a security guard's car. The bus arrived at the Marriott in Quincy at 1:45 A.M. The hotel had agreed to keep its restaurant open an hour after the last bus arrived. The hotel staff was less specific about what kind of food would be served; when La Russa walked into the dining room, he saw players and their families eating hamburgers and pizza: basic junk food. This wasn't a World Series moment. It was dreary and depressing, and La Russa blamed himself because he should have seen it coming. In the aftermath, arrangements were made for one of Boston's better downtown restaurants to stay open after Game 6 so players and their families could feel as if they were in the World Series, instead of the high school state playoffs. But there would be no Game 6.

  In Game 2, Matt Morris retired the first two batters, then walked the next two to face Jason Varitek. Duncan had told Morris and Matheny in the pregame deconstruction of the Red Sox hitters not to throw a changeup to Varitek. But with the count 1 and 2, Morris still threw a changeup because he thought he had Varitek set up for the pitch. Varitek stroked a two-run triple.

  In the same game, Reggie Sanders missed second base on his way to third on a successful hit-and-run and had to go back to second. It was the kind of fundamental miscue the Cardinals had almost never committed during the season, and the ecosystem of baseball wouldn't tolerate it now. A batter later, La Russa pulled a run-and-hit with Matheny at the plate. The runners went early and Matheny hit the ball sharply. But third baseman Bill Mueller, coming toward the bag to cover Sanders' attempted steal, serendipitously found himself in perfect position to snag the ball and easily put the tag on Sanders for a double play, because Sanders was coming right at him. The irony was that Mueller's positioning would have been different had Sanders made it to third in the first place; Mueller wouldn't have been racing to the bag to cover a steal because there would have been no steal, which would have meant Matheny's line drive snaking down the line instead of being caught, which would have meant a possible crooked number instead of an inning-ending double play.

  Schilling was on the mound for the Red Sox in Game 2. La Russa had seen him enough to know that this wasn't vintage Schilling. His Frankenstein ankle, the tendon held together by stitches blotched with blood, was clearly botherin
g him. He was hittable, but he also made pitches when he needed them, particularly with his off-speed. When he needed to get his forkball down, he didn't miss by throwing it over the plate—an example of how to compete under pressure that the Cardinals starters could not emulate.

  The Cards lost the second game 6–2 to fall behind in the World Series two games to zero. La Russa assembled the team afterward. What he told them was similar to what he had told them after Game 5 of the NLCS, when the Astros had risen from the dead to win three straight at home and take a 3–2 series lead. "Listen, nobody controls what we think and how we are going to act. You are going to get blistered right now and overwhelmed with people in the media trying to tell you how you should feel. How you guys are getting ready to mug a great season. But we control. The big thing is we control how we feel and how we act and how we play." La Russa knew his team had not been itself in the first two games at Fenway. But they were going back to Busch Stadium now, and Busch had been the postseason Promised Land for the team. They hadn't yet lost a playoff game there, and they were too good to fold up now. Which made what happened at Busch—the Cardinals scoring a total of one run in the next two games, while losing both—the part of the World Series that haunts him the most. Because what did happen? Where did the offense—the best in the major leagues—go? Why for the first time all year, with the possible exception of a three-game series sweep by the Pirates at the end of June, did the Cardinals start taking poor at-bats—uppercut fly-ball swings—instead of hitting through the ball hard to take advantage of a Red Sox defense that had made eight errors in the first two games?

  Beyond the strategy and the psychological head games, managing is the art of survival: learning somehow not to become crippled by the decisions that even when you make them right, still turn out to be wrong, not to mention all the things you cannot control no matter how much you want to control them. Over the past quarter century, La Russa had learned to survive in the foxhole by examining his own actions first: a detached clinical examination to avoid wallowing in the mud of what just occurred. As he stood in the corner of the dugout waiting for Francona, he knew that his team had just played its worst baseball of the entire season: silent bats, poor base running, over-the-plate pitching. He also knew that he had just lost his eighth straight World Series game; the last time he had been to the Series, fourteen years earlier in 1990, had also been a four-game sweep.

  In fact, La Russa's whole managerial experience in the Fall Classic had the pallor of Greek tragedy. He had been in the Series four times and the number of games he had managed, seventeen, was only one more than the minimum of sixteen. In 1988, he had lost in five games, after the Kirk Gibson home run that had rocked the world. In 1990 and 2004, his teams had been swept. In his one World Series win in 1989, his Oakland A's had swept the Giants, but even this victory had been improbably upstaged: interrupted by an earthquake and the indelible image of players on the field with their families just before Game 3, frozen with the terror of not knowing if Candlestick Park would hold together.

  That kind of history could eat away at a man. He could become spooked, jinxed, irreparably tortured. But La Russa hearkened back to Paul Richards and the most enduring piece of advice he has ever received, as much about life as about managing: It's your ass, it's your team, so take responsibility. The fault was not his players, because they had been too brilliant all season long to simply collapse like this. He concluded instead that the fault was his, something he didn't do—a breakdown of his obligation to prepare his players, never mind how hard he had tried. But he also knew that simply taking the blame, an act of ultimately meaningless self-flagellation, wasn't enough.

  So the day after the Series ended, as players flushed out a season's accumulation of balls and bats and gloves from their lockers, he met with his coaches to constructively delineate what had happened, why the bats had gone silent, why the pitchers couldn't find the black of the plate. They mused over the edge that had been lost in the fast-forward rush to the World Series. They wondered if the euphoria of winning the pennant, beating no less a force than Clemens, had been too euphoric. La Russa himself wondered if maybe the team had over-prepared, affected by a comment ESPN announcer and Hall-of-Famer Joe Morgan made to him afterward that in his own World Series experience, he didn't want a lot of information, just the bare bones of how hard a particular pitcher threw and how he used his off-speed. La Russa and his staff also discussed personnel changes, because it was inevitable that some players who had been cornerstones of the Cardinals in 2004 would be gone in 2005, either through free agency or salary realities or trade.

  The questions came easier than the answers, but during the off-season, La Russa would be determined to find them. And the one thing he would not do is let the World Series overshadow a magnificent season. There were the obvious proofs: winning more games than any team in baseball, taking the division by thirteen games, winning the National League Pennant. There was the team itself, with its stoked lineup and vintage five-man rotation and fine mix of relief with two lights-out lefty specialists: a team that hit hard and ran hard and defended hard and gave pleasure to rival scouts and front-office men and managers who always thirst for baseball played right. But there were also the smaller subtleties, the little edges, not as apparent to the outside world perhaps but just as important and maybe even more memorable.

  When the Cardinals clinched the NLCS, Elaine La Russa and the La Russas' daughter Devon were there. As soon as the game ended, their husband and father looked up to the stands and beckoned them to join him. They descended along with the players' families, a flood onto the field. Bianca, their elder daughter, hadn't come because she had nobly agreed to stay behind in California to take care of the house and the large brood of pets. Elaine thought of her in that instant, wished she could be here. But it was still a joyous moment for Elaine—no, a perfect moment—a long way from the stag-night parties and men-only restrictions of the Bard's Room of Comiskey. For the first time in a long time, she fell in love with baseball again, felt the beauty of it. As she looked at her husband, she also felt something else, something that she hadn't always felt during the preoccupation of his career. She felt that he was thrilled she and Devon were there, that as much as he reveled in the joy of winning the National League Pennant, there was something else he reveled in more, and that was his family.

  Two days later, when the Cardinals conducted their workout before Game 1 of the World Series in the frigid froth of Boston, La Russa wanted his players to do what they had to do on the field and then get back to the clubhouse as quickly as possible. Like a mother hen, he walked the outfield shooing his players inside. But Cal Eldred lingered despite the cold. Standing before the Green Monster of Fenway, he had a huge smile on his face, soaking in every second of the fact that after fourteen years of ups and downs and too many elbow reconstructions for any elbow to bear, he had arrived. He didn't want to leave no matter how cold it was, so La Russa let Cal Eldred be. He just let him be, in the shadow of the Green Monster.

  Six days later, after the World Series ended and La Russa walked through the tunnel to the clubhouse, he saw his players for what would be the last official time. There was nothing to say, all the bullets spent. If they were complicated men, they were also professionals, and no empty words of solace from a manager would do any good anyway.

  In a couple of minutes the media would burst into the clubhouse with their predictable stream of hard questions. But for now, the clubhouse was sacred, intimate, a team and only a team. The players stood in front of their lockers in silence, perhaps because they were still expecting their manager to give some little speech. Instead, La Russa did something he had never done before. He had his coaches and all the clubhouse personnel form two lines. Then one of the lines went to the right and the other to the left to shake hands with each player, circling until they were done. La Russa knew what his players had done during the season. He loved them for that—took great pride in them as a manager and as a man—and
this was the best way he could think of to tell them he would never forget it.

  Postscript

  THE CARDINALS

  Rick Ankiel, following rehabilitation from reconstructive elbow surgery, pitched in the major leagues for the first time since 2001, after being activated by the Cardinals in September 2004. He gave up one walk over ten innings in five relief appearances. In October 2004, he won his first major-league game since April 8, 2001, surrendering one run in four innings to the Milwaukee Brewers.

  Chad Blair continued in his role as the Cardinals' video coordinator in 2004.

  Miguel Cairo, after hitting .245 for the Cards in 2003 as a utility player—in which he played first base, second, shortstop, third, and the outfield—became a free agent and signed with the Yankees in 2004. He emerged as the team's regular second baseman and hit .292.

  J.D. Drew was traded after the 2003 season, along with Eli Marrero, to the Braves for pitchers Jason Marquis, Ray King, and prospect Adam Wainwright. La Russa's feeling about Drew—that he might thrive with a different manager—was proven true. Healthy most of the season in his free-agent year, Drew had over 500 at-bats for the first time in his career, hitting .305 with thirty-one home runs and ninety-five RBIs. But the trade was one of those rare ones in baseball that benefited both sides. Marquis established himself as a bona fide starting pitcher at the age of twenty-five, going 15 and 7. Coming out of the bullpen, the lefty King had an ERA of 2.61 and gave up only forty-three hits in sixty-two innings. Despite Drew's breakout year, the Braves still chose to let him test the free-agent market. He signed a five-year, $55 million contract with the Dodgers.