Lefebvre, too, is an ardent believer in La Russa’s information-intensive approach to each series in the season. “The aim,” he says, “is to make our hitters a little more calculating. Not to tell them how to hit, but to get them thinking about particular pitchers.”
Aggressiveness by batters can be devastating for a pitcher whose preferred pattern is to get ahead in the count and then nibble at the strike zone. A team that comes to the plate hacking on first pitches will prevent him from getting comfortable. He will have to start nibbling with the first pitch; he will fall behind in a lot of counts. And suddenly the batting average of the Athletics will be, in effect, 50 points higher. Roger Craig, a former pitcher and now manager of the San Francisco Giants, puts Lefebvre’s point this way: “The most important pitch in baseball is strike one. If you’re hitting .350 and I get a strike on you, now you’ve become a .250 hitter if I do my job.”
Lefebvre wants to know the sort of information an advance scout can provide. How does a particular pitcher start off particular kinds of hitters? If he misses with his first pitch, is there a pattern to his next pitches? “A lot of pitchers,” Lefebvre says, “are what we call ‘two-lane’ pitchers—sinker in, slider away.” One chart on Boggs shows that he took 38 consecutive first pitches from right-handed pitchers. So two things are certain. One is that the pitcher should lay the first pitch to Boggs in, not bothering to nibble or be fancy. The other is that doing so will help only a bit with the best two-strike hitter in baseball. But every little bit helps with a Boggs.
Lefebvre remembers a little nugget of information that was unearthed in a hitters’ meeting on a day the Athletics were to face the slow, nibbling “junk” thrown by the Yankees’ Tommy John. “Tommy John did not make his living throwing strikes. He threw mostly borderline pitches and balls. He pitched most guys low-and-away, low-and-away, so for years we told everybody to move up on him. But he only moved his pitches a little farther away. However, Don Baylor had some success by backing up. It forced John to adapt to Baylor, pitch more up, partly because it changed the umpire’s perspective of where the ball is [relative to Baylor’s strike zone].” The day Baylor told this to the hitters’ meeting the Athletics pounded John.
La Russa and Lefebvre say there are six ways a pitcher becomes vulnerable. Three of them are at specific points in the game. The first is when he is facing the first batter in the first inning. The pitcher has felt sharp in the pregame warm-up in the bull pen, but there he faced no batter, no pressure, no umpire. Also, he is not as loose as he was in the pregame warm-ups—not as sure which pitches will be working—and he is working from a different mound. So you want to make the first inning particularly tough, beginning with the leadoff man. He should plant doubts in the pitcher’s mind by working the count. If he makes an out he should at least hit the ball hard. That will get the pitcher thinking that he doesn’t have all the stuff he thought he had. When La Russa managed the 1989 American League All-Star team, he decided, at the suggestion of Dave Duncan, to bat Bo Jackson in the leadoff spot. La Russa’s aim was to make the National League’s starting pitcher, Rick Reuschel, as “uncomfortable” as possible as quickly as possible. Jackson hit the second pitch of the game 450 feet for a home run.
The second specific point in the game when the pitcher is vulnerable is whenever he gets two quick outs in an inning and then lets up. “We always think about a ‘closer’ as someone who finishes a game,” says Lefebvre. “A good starting pitcher closes nine times—once an inning.” The third time a pitcher is vulnerable is in the fifth inning. “That’s decision time,” says Lefebvre. “He knows that if he can get through the fifth he can get a decision because he has a bull pen to save him. You see guys start to aim the ball, their velocity goes down, their breaking ball is not as sharp, they get out of that groove.”
The fourth and fifth vulnerabilities of pitchers concern unpreparedness, physical and mental. A pitcher who is not in good condition is susceptible to a sudden loss of mastery—a decline in the velocity of his pitches and an inability to control their location. And a pitcher is vulnerable who has not looked at the kind of charts that Duncan keeps. “A guy comes out of the bull pen and sees a batter standing up there and he doesn’t know who he is and then throws him a fastball and he hits it nine miles,” Lefebvre says. “The pitcher goes into the dugout and says, ‘By the way, what does that guy hit?’ and the pitching coach tells him, ‘The pitch you just threw.’”
The sixth point of vulnerability is, Lefebvre says (somewhat murkily), “when adversity goes against you.” Adversity has a way of doing that. He explains what he means: “Bases loaded. Count is 2-and-2. Boom! He throws his best pitch. Umpire says ‘ball.’ Or the pitcher makes the hitter hit a double-play ball and an infielder boots it. The pitcher loses his concentration. We talk about these things in meetings. We say, ‘stay close to this guy because if something goes wrong, he falls apart.’ There are several guys in this league—I mean stars—who have their routines. As soon as you break their routines, they get uncomfortable. So we try to figure ways to do that. For example, we get a runner on first base and get very edgy and aggressive.”
Of course there are other pitchers you go out of your way not to annoy. Several times during the research for this volume Lefebvre expressed a keen interest in not saying anything that might make Roger Clemens angry. In their pursuit of an edge, teams can overreach. La Russa is a lot like Clemens—short fuse, large charge—and he knows not to make matters worse by making a competitor like Clemens cross. Even smart managers can do foolish things, and that is one.
Managers can do memorable things. On the day in 1944 when the Cubs’ Bill Nicholson hit four home runs in a doubleheader against the Giants, Mel Ott, the Giants’ manager, ordered Nicholson walked intentionally—with the bases loaded and two outs. Paul Richards (White Sox, 1951–54, 1976; Baltimore, 1955–61) occasionally ordered the pitcher intentionally walked with two outs so the leadoff man would not begin the next inning. But most of the things that managers do that matter do not involve anything particularly noticeable, let alone exotic. For example, writer Leonard Koppett, author of A Thinking Man’s Guide to Baseball, remembers a routine game in 1965 when, with the score tied with two outs in the bottom of the ninth, the Yankees had a runner on first and the Yankee batter had a 3–1 count. The pitcher had to get the next pitch over the plate, yet Yankee manager Johnny Keane ordered the batter—to his consternation—to take the pitch. It was, not surprisingly, a strike, producing a full count. However, a full count was exactly what Keane wanted. On a full count with two outs, the runner on first would be running with the pitch, so he would be sure to score on a double. And that is exactly what happened. Had the same hit occurred on a 3–1 count, the runner would not have scored. Besides, the pitcher still wanted to get the 3–2 pitch in the strike zone because a walk would have moved the runner into position to score the winning run on a single.
Obviously managers matter. What is not obvious is how much. It is sometimes said that because players’ talents are so thoroughly revealed and rewarded over the course of the long season, managers do not win games other than by assembling the team. But that is a non sequitur. Talent is the ability to do some things, not all things. So the right player must be in the right place in the right situation. That is very much the result of good managing.
La Russa played professional baseball until he was 32. He says he should have quit when he was 24 because he kept getting worse. He is exaggerating, but not a lot. He was a mediocre player. A lot of excellent managers were marginal players. Which is to say, they made playing careers out of the margin that mind could give them. There have, of course, been great players who were successful managers, even player-managers. Lou Boudreau was one, Joe Cronin another. In 1926 Rogers Hornsby, Ty Cobb, Tris Speaker, Eddie Collins and George Sisler, all future Hall of Famers, were player-managers. But in modern times, mediocre playing careers have been the preludes to some of the most distinguished managerial careers.
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p; Earl Weaver, who won 1,480 games and had a .583 winning percentage through 17 seasons, never made it to the major leagues as a player. Sparky Anderson, the only manager to win 800 games in each league (863 with the Reds and 895 with the Tigers through the 1989 season), was a .218 hitter in his only year in the major leagues (1959, with the Phillies).
Whitey (“Baseball has been good to me since I quit trying to play it”) Herzog, the Cardinals’ manager, is now regarded as the National League’s Spinoza. In his playing career he drifted through four teams in eight years, compiling a batting average of .257. Gene Mauch managed 3,941 games (the fourth-highest total in major league history) after playing for six teams in nine years and batting .239.
La Russa was born and raised in Tampa. What the Chesapeake Bay is to crabs, Tampa is to baseball talent: a rich breeding ground, known for both quantity and quality. Wade Boggs and Dwight Gooden are just two who were boys in Tampa and now are prospering in the major leagues. La Russa’s mother, though born in Tampa, was of Spanish descent, and his father spoke Spanish. La Russa spoke Spanish before he spoke English. Being bilingual is a considerable advantage for a manager in an era when nearly 20 percent of all the players under contract in professional baseball are from Latin America. Managing was far from La Russa’s mind when, the night he graduated from high school in 1962, he signed with the Athletics. The team was then in Kansas City and was the toy of Charlie Finley. La Russa got $50,000 for a signing bonus. He was 17 and the world was his oyster. The next year he was in the major leagues for 34 games, 44 at bats, 11 hits. He did not know it at the time, but when the season ended he had already appeared in a quarter of all the major league games of his playing career.
Back in Tampa after the 1963 season, he arrived late for a slow-pitch softball game with some friends from high school. Youth is impetuous; even La Russa was then. At that softball game he went straight to shortstop without warming up. It was filthy luck that in the first inning a ball was hit in the hole. He fielded it, fired to first and tore a tendon in his arm near the shoulder. He played with a sore arm for 15 more years. Along the way he collected two shoulder separations, a knee injury and chips in his elbow (probably from throwing awkwardly with a sore arm). In 16 years as a professional player, he had a total of 176 at bats in 132 major league games for the Athletics, Braves and Cubs. His career batting average was .199. He never hit a home run.
His best season convinced him that his best was not going to be good enough. In 1972 he hit .308 for the Braves’ Triple-A Richmond club, but he was not called up to the parent team. Convinced that his playing career had a low ceiling, he turned toward another career. After five off-seasons at Florida State University Law School he had a degree. He was admitted to the bar in 1979. However, by then he was headed for managing.
It is said that the study of law sharpens the mind by narrowing it. But, then, the study of anything narrows the mind in the sense of concentrating attention and excluding much from the field of focus Besides, a sharp mind, like a straight razor, becomes sharper by being stopped. Tony La Russa is the sixth major league manager to possess a law degree. The five other lawyer-managers are Branch Rickey, Miller Huggins, Hughie Jennings, Monte Ward, and Muddy Ruel.
La Russa was 34 when, with 54 games remaining in the 1979 season, he became manager of the White Sox. There have been younger managers. Roger Peckinpaugh became the Yankees’ manager at 23, and in 1942 the Indians’ shortstop, Lou Boudreau, then 24, became the youngest manager to start a season. But by 1989 La Russa was managing in his eleventh season, three more than the 8 Peckinpaugh managed and just 5 behind Boudreau’s 16. If La Russa stays in a major league dugout—and he can if he wants to—until he is 65, he will have managed 31 seasons, more than Walter Alston (23), more than Leo Durocher and Joe McCarthy (24), more than Casey Stengel and Bill McKechnie (25), Gene Mauch (26) and Bucky Harris (29): in fact, more than any other manager except John McGraw (33) and Connie Mack (53).
The rearing elephant sewn on the sleeve of the Oakland Athletics’ uniforms has a pedigree involving two of baseball’s larger-than-life managers. John McGraw was manager of the Baltimore Orioles in 1901, the American League’s first year. McGraw, whose dislikes were many and fierce, disliked the league’s president, Ban Johnson, and objected to the admission to the league of the Philadelphia Athletics, a franchise owned and managed by Cornelius McGili-cuddy—Connie Mack. McGraw derided the Athletics as the “white elephants” and Mack, to taunt McGraw, adopted the white elephant as his team’s symbol. The Athletics promptly won the pennant in 1902, the year McGraw jumped to the New York Giants. The elephant logo came and went several times during the fluctuating fortunes of the Athletics’ franchise. It returned in 1988 for the first time since the Athletics’ 13-year sojourn in Kansas City. And in 1989 the two franchises of McGraw and Mack, having followed the course of empire westward, were back at each other, in the World Series.
Connie Mack was born the year after Fort Sumter was fired upon and died the year before Sputnik was launched. He holds one of baseball’s most secure records: most seasons as a manager. Mack also holds an unenviable record: most consecutive seasons managing in the same league without a championship (19). Between Mack and La Russa no one managed the Athletics for more than three consecutive years. Longevity isn’t as long as it once was.
Today, and in the future, long managerial careers may not occur as easily as they once did. Until relatively recently there was a side of baseball that was not very meritocratic. Baseball served as a haven for some managers and coaches who were not particularly good. This haven existed because baseball people were kind to their pals.
To the familiar classifications of social systems, now add a new category to cover the peculiar governance of baseball. To aristocracy, plutocracy and democracy add baseball’s contribution to government: “palocracy,” government by old pals. Baseball has traditionally been run by men whose lives have been intersecting and entwined for decades. They have known one another from the rocky playing fields and spartan offices of the low minor leagues all the way up to the manicured playing fields and well-appointed suites of the major leagues. You do not talk long with a baseball person before you hear the phrase “baseball person.” Often it is accompanied by a negative: So-and-so is “not a baseball person.” No adjective is required, thank you very much. A baseball person is a good baseball person. A palocracy can make for kinder, gentler governance, but it also can make the world safe for mediocrity. (The prince of managerial mediocrity was Wilbert Robinson. Uncle Robbie of the Dodgers managed for 19 years and produced this record: 1,397 wins, 1,395 losses. It is a shame one of those wins was not a loss.)
Closed systems, such as tenured university faculties or diplomatic corps or military services, are vulnerable to systemic mediocrity. People who have gone to the same schools, climbed the same career ladders, absorbed the same values and assumptions and expectations, become intellectually insular and professionally self-protective. They forgive one another their mistakes, and mediocrity becomes cozy.
As baseball becomes more meritocratic in every aspect it does not need to become bland and (in a gray-flannel sense) managerial. Colorfulness is not incompatible with quality. The most vivid image of a manager in modern times is that of Casey Stengel, who said things like, “What about the shortstop Rizzuto who got nothing but daughters but throws out the left-handed batters in the double play?” Dumb, right? Stengel was dumb like a fox. Few managers are intellectuals but all managers talk a lot. Managing, like politics, is mostly talk, and some smart managers say strange things. Detroit’s Sparky Anderson says that Jose Canseco has the body of a “Greek goddess,” but you know what Sparky means. Some of the brightest managers—Leo Durocher for one, Earl Weaver for another—had tempers that sometimes made them seem less intelligent than they were. (Weaver was once ejected from a game during the exchange of lineup cards.) Youth is hot and when La Russa became manager at age 34 he had a temper that was too easily detonated. But the best balm is a steady di
et of winning. He had only three losing seasons in his first 11 seasons (1979–89) as a major league manager.
La Russa was just 41 when he had the fundamental experience of managing: He was fired. The White Sox fired him in 1986. The Chicago experience “toughened me up pretty well.” He certainly is tough enough now. Once when Jose Canseco was a rookie and did not hustle on a play, he returned to the dugout to find La Russa furious. La Russa told him, “Do that again, I’ll knock you on your ass.”
La Russa never became one of the hard-core unemployed. On July 1, 1986, less than a month after being fired, he was hired by Oakland. The Athletics were in last place, 21 games below .500, which is not easy to be before the All-Star break. The rest of the year they were 45–34. In 1987 they played only .500 ball but in the American League West that was good enough for third place. The 1988 Athletics were the first American League West team to lead the league in wins since the 1983 White Sox, who were managed by La Russa. In 1987 and 1988 the Athletics were 105–63 against the American League East—a thumping 57–27 in 1988.
Situations are shaped in innumerable ways by managers, by what they do to prepare for a game and what they do during the game. La Russa says, with a fine sense of semantic tidiness, that what are called baseball “instincts” really involve much more than instinctual behavior. These “instincts” are actually the result of “an accumulation of baseball information. They are uses of that information as the basis of decision-making as game situations develop- Your instincts may say ‘pitch out now’ and later you may say, ‘Why did I do that?’ When you trust your gut you are trusting a lot of stuff that is there from the past.” “A manager’s job,” said Earl Weaver, “is to select the best players for what he wants done. They’re not all great players, but they can all do something.” The style of managing must be suited to the kind of team you have. But a team does not fall unbidden from the sky. It is built. And to some extent—limited by the nature of the talent rising from the farm system and the talent available from trades—you build a team suited to the style of managing you prefer.
Men at Work Page 6
