In Renteria's place at shortstop is Miguel Cairo, a consequence of consequences, as Cairo, a valuable utility infielder, has little experience at short. Which is why the ball determinedly seeks him out on the very first play of the game. It bounces directly to Cairo, and he scoops it into his glove. But his throw to Tino Martinez at first is off target, lacking assurance. It comes to Martinez on a hop far more devious than the one that settled into Cairo's glove. Although he's thirty-three, Lofton still has a sweet set of wheels. He's hustling, really hustling, his hustle suggesting what it usually suggests in players who have had rocky mood-swing careers regardless of prodigious talent and impressive numbers: It's the free-agency year, and good behavior has far more rewards than American Express. Martinez tries to keep his right foot pinned to the corner of the bag as he fields the hop. But he can't.
Lofton is safe at first. Instead of one away in the top of the first, there is only potential chaos in the top of the first.
Lofton is nowhere close to the golden season he had with the Indians in 1996, when he led the league with seventy-five stolen bases, but he is still a threat to steal second. He's already stolen nine bases since he came over to the Cubs in mid-July, and the mere suggestion of it sets all sorts of plot subtexts in motion. He's jittery at first, not a huge lead. One arm is folded, and the other hangs between his knees. He's being coquettish, a professional flirt, what he may not do as important as what he may do: Will he or won't he?
The plot turns on the speed of Stephenson's delivery to the plate. Joe Pettini, the bench coach, is timing it with a stopwatch, and the results are pretty good. It's taking 1.3 seconds from the start of Stephenson's wind-up to Chris Widger's getting the ball in his catcher's mitt. It's the Maginot Line of base stealing, 1.3 seconds or less making it difficult for a gifted runner to steal with any smugness.
He's going to have to factor in at least six other complexities: the arm strength of the catcher, the quality of the pitcher's move to first whether it's a snap throw or long-armed, the hardness or softness of the base path, whether the pitcher is altering the timing of his delivery from one pitch to the next, whether the hitter is right-handed or left-handed—since a left-handed hitter shields the catcher's line of sight to second—and the pitcher's repertoire—since a forkballer or sinkerballer forces the catcher to drop his mitt low for the pitch and therefore have a more difficult throw.*
If video is the greatest revolution in baseball over the past twenty years, the running game is its greatest crushed revolution. In the 1960s and 1970s, Wills and Lou Brock each stole more than a hundred bases in a season. Into the 1980s, when La Russa was cutting his teeth as a manager, Rickey Henderson stole a hundred or more bases in three different seasons. All over both leagues, good base stealers were running wild, out of control, taking second base like their birthright. Except against teams managed by Gene Mauch. Legendary for his strategy, acclaimed by his peers as the shrewdest tactician to grace the dugout in modern times, Mauch had gotten tired of the base-stealing revolution; he became determined to quell it once and for all.
La Russa saw that Mauch's pitchers weren't going to the plate in what was the standard threshold then: 1.4 or 1.5 seconds. They were going even more quickly—1.2 or 1.1 seconds—in an effort to make stealing second a far more risky venture. La Russa also noticed that Mauch had gone a clever step further. Good base stealers try to pick up a pitcher's pattern in his delivery—the so-called mind switch—the moment when his attention shifts from the base runner on first to the batter at the plate. Base runners are taught to look for it, and the great base stealers, such as Henderson, had developed a feel for it that let them get a good jump and steal regardless of how quick the delivery.
So Mauch worked with his pitchers to break their patterns. One way was to simply hold on to the ball or make a throw over to first or step off the rubber. All this made it more difficult for a base runner to pick up the mind switch, and eventually, Mauch countered the base-stealing revolution. La Russa copied Mauch's tactics. So did other managers, and by the 1990s, the stolen base had lost much of its impact as an offensive weapon.
Lofton obviously knows that Stephenson isn't going to display an easily recognizable pattern. Also, Lofton is a "peeker," and "peekers" do what the name implies. They are voyeurs—alleyway window watchers—peeking from first at the catcher as he puts down his signs and trying to figure out the one for the curve ball, a better pitch to steal on than the fastball because it takes longer to get to the plate. Which means that from the dugout, La Russa is instructing Widger to put on all sorts of decoy signs to make sure that the one for the curve ball is sufficiently buried.
Lofton continues to flirt off of first. He's still jittery: Will he or won't he? But he isn't going anywhere. Stephenson is maintaining the essential benchmark of delivering to the plate in 1.3 seconds. As a further impediment, Stephenson is also throwing fastballs to the number two hitter Ramon Martinez instead of slower off-speed stuff, the last a nasty jam that he hits harmlessly to Kerry Robinson in right field for the first out.
It brings up Sosa, who, much like Stephenson, has been suffering from a bipolar disorder this season. When the Cards faced him in May, it was pretty clear to Duncan and Mason, watching the DVD on him, that he was going through something. He was flinching on curve balls as if he were afraid he might get hit, and he began to develop a sizable hole in his swing on pitches down and away.
To La Russa, the explanation was embedded in human nature. In May, Sosa had gotten beaned by a pitch, his batting helmet splintering like a dropped glass of water. It was clear that he had gotten tentative after that, with good reason. Few things in sports are more terrifying than a pitch hurtling at a hitter's head with no time for reflexes, the incident only reinforcing to La Russa the urgency of the commissioner's office to stop ignoring the increasing problem and do something about it, such as an automatic three-week suspension for the pitcher involved.
Sosa had become intimidated, as every hitter in the history of the game has become intimidated, after such a frightening moment. He suffered a lapse of courage, and the question was how long it would last, since La Russa has seen such varied reactions: It could be an at-bat, a game, a series, a season, even, in some cases, an entire career.
When Sosa drives the ball into center and right center, it means that he's getting to balls away. But after he got hit, he became reluctant to dive over the plate to get to them. One of his hitting strengths is good plate coverage, but he was almost turning from the ball, as Duncan and Mason had discovered. Over the past several weeks, however, the old Sosa has re-emerged. It's the one who "sticks his nose in there," as La Russa puts it, staying on the ball wherever it is thrown, once again showing the courage that all great hitters possess. The result has been thirteen home runs in July and another seven in August to give him thirty for the season leading up to the three-game series. He's also made an adjustment: He's moved his stance closer to the plate because once the word was out that Sammy wasn't the same Sammy anymore—couldn't get to it anymore unless it was down the pipe where anybody could hit it—he had been fed a steady diet of pitches away.
He gets three fastballs from Stephenson. All of them are high. The count goes to 3 and 0. But that's okay, because Sosa has a chase hole up, and there's also no point giving him something in his wheelhouse that he can turn on. Widger sets up outside on the 3–0 count. Sammy, still being Sammy, has the green light to swing. He hits the pitch with power, but he gets under it a little bit, and the result is a high fly to Robinson in right for the second out.
Lofton is still at first when Moises Alou comes up in the cleanup spot with two outs. Lofton has been effectively hog-tied there, enabling Stephenson to focus on Alou and try to avoid the first-pitch pitfalls that have made him so dangerous. Stephenson comes in with a fastball. Alou goes for it in his unbridled aggressiveness. He gets a swing on it, a pretty good swing—a damn good one, actually. He fouls it straight back, meaning that he missed driving it by a matter of o
nly inches. Stephenson throws another fastball, this one better located on the inside. Alou gets a swing on it, a pretty good swing—a damn good one, actually. He hits it sharply to third. Rolen backhands it, his reflex action so sublimely quick, it seems like a natural extension of him—the way the rest of us pick up a fork to eat—and makes one of his lightning-bolt throws to first to end the top of the first.
It's a twelve-pitch inning for Stephenson. Every pitch he has thrown has been a fastball, which could be a recipe for implosion if he keeps it up and doesn't mix his pitches. And maybe it means that not a word of what La Russa and Duncan have preached to him all season has sufficiently spread through his 6'5" frame. But Stephenson, like many pitchers, tends to rely almost exclusively on the fastball the first time through the lineup. And La Russa has no problem with that, particularly if it means that he's using the fastball as a setup for something else, lulling the Cubs batters into complacency, getting them to chirp up and down the gossipy line of the dugout that all he's throwing out there is fastballs, only to shut them up with off-speed.
In every game that La Russa manages, he conducts a running conversation with himself, a Waiting for Godot dialogue to keep the pressure on and make sure that he doesn't miss anything, mining for gold even though it's the top of the first, because sometimes, it's those little nuggets that can win a game. Lofton didn't go anywhere, which is good. Sosa's ego on 3 and 0 caused him to try to drive an outside fastball, which is good. Stephenson threw first-pitch strikes to three of the four batters he faced, which is very good. And he likes what he is seeing from Stephenson, the fearlessness and big balls folding into a pitcher tonight, glimpses of that 16 and 9 season in 2000 returning.
Between halves of the inning, La Russa retires to the dugout bench. He sits by himself. He's still nervous, because he's always nervous and his patented glower is not some pose. The stakes are high in every game, since one game can prove the difference between the playoffs in October or golf in October. The best managers—the ones La Russa has modeled himself after—ground their way through every at-bat, unlike some others he knew who believed that their job really didn't begin until the last three innings, when moves became more readily apparent. La Russa's inability to smile also goes to the very nature of the game: capricious, mean, sneaking up on you with accumulated vengeance if you let down even for a moment. "Unless you pay it respect, it's gonna spank you, and the fact is that even when you do pay it respect, it's gonna spank you, just not as often or as hard," he says. The feeling he wants after every game, whether it's a 1–0 win or a 10–0 loss, is that everything he had was left in the dugout—he had nothing else to give. It's his nature, what comes with the territory when you spend so much of your life alone in a dark and subterranean place. But whatever fear he feels, whatever anxieties envelop him, there's a supreme confidence to the decisions he makes, probably because there's no way he could have survived for almost a quarter century if he weren't.
It was different at the beginning. When he started his managing career with the White Sox in the middle of the 1979 season, the prevailing sentiment was that he had been hired by owner Bill Veeck because he came cheap; his only experience was a little more than a year of managing in the minors with Knoxville and Des Moines. He was thirty-four years old and scared for his life. Self-doubt rattled through him—Do I really know what I'm doing? —and he became a whipping boy for the radio broadcast duo of Harry Caray and Jimmy Piersall, who offered the almost daily critique that he managed with his head squarely up his ass. In the insular world of baseball, where newness was anathema and crustiness a work of art, La Russa was a typical Veeckian choice, playing so far against type that he could have been sold as a novelty at the concession stand. His general manger, Rollie Hemond, tried to warn La Russa that few in the game were rooting for him.
"You have five things going against you," Hemond told him. "You're young. You're handsome. You're smart. You're getting your law degree. You have a nice family—
"I don't think you're going to last very long."
Given that La Russa was also bilingual in English and Spanish, as well as a strict vegetarian in a church of meat eaters, there may well have been seven strikes against him. La Russa also from the outset showed a streak of defiance, stubbornness in the face of a second guess. Early on in his career against the Yankees, he tried a hit-and-run in the top of the ninth with a man on first and no outs and the White Sox losing by a run. Goose Gossage was in his prime then. He threw 95-mile-an-hour fire, fire that exploded high, making it impossible, in La Russa's estimation, for a hitter to successfully bunt the runner over to second. Few things in baseball are more difficult than trying to bunt with heat like that rising up on you. So he went with a hit-and-run. The runner on first tipped off the play with his lead: The Yankees pitched out and nailed him, killing any chance to tie the game. Predictably, Caray and Piersall went nuts in the broadcast booth. Within the same series he had the exact same situation and did the exact same thing: a hit-and-run that also failed when the batter popped out. Caray and Piersall went nuts again, prompting Charley Lau, then the hitting instructor for the Yankees, to remark, "I don't know if you have enough brains to be a manager, but you have the balls."
La Russa finished that first season of managing in 1979 by guiding the White Sox to a .500 record, twenty-seven wins and twenty-seven losses. It was a nice performance given that the team was in disarray, still feeling the effects of the single worst promotion in baseball in the considerable history of them, the so-called Disco Demolition night. Intended as a gentle condemnation of disco in which fans were encouraged to bring disco records for destruction in between games of a doubleheader, it turned instead into a full-scale riot. Thousands of White Sox fans poured onto the field and began to tear it up. Genuine revulsion of disco no doubt had something to do with how the fans reacted. But after twenty years of watching the Sox without a pennant in the grime and gloom of old Comiskey Park, where the sightlines in certain places were worse than in the Cook County jail, this was their liberation. Sharp-edged vinyl discs were lasered across the field, perhaps intended only to insult disco but injuring many fans in the process. The collected waft of marijuana became a nuclear cloud over the South Side. The White Sox were forced to forfeit the second game, and soon La Russa was put in to finish out the rest of the season.
When it was over, Hemond made a point of taking La Russa to the World Series: the Pirates versus the Orioles. It was the first World Series that La Russa had ever attended, and he suddenly found himself in the company of all these men, all these baseball men, who knew more about the game that he could ever hope to know. They all rode in a bus together from the hotel to the game. They took the same bus back to the hotel afterward and congregated for a party. There were managers—Gene Mauch and Sparky Anderson and Whitey Herzog—and gun-slinger scouts—Hugh Alexander of the Phillies and Bobby Mattick of the Blue Jays. On the bus back from every game, they were already taking a blowtorch to how Earl Weaver had managed the Orioles and Chuck Tanner had managed the Pirates—Weaver gave Flanagan too early a hook when he took him out after six down only by a run; Tanner put his ass on the line when he brought in Blyleven in relief for four —evisceration, condemnation, and, of course, what they would have done instead. Nobody, nothing escaped their attention. They were brutal in their critiques. They were passionate, so unbelievably passionate, the game their animus, and the sound of it to La Russa, with his fifty-four games of major-league managerial experience, was gorgeous. "I mean, it was beautiful baseball," he remembered, that favorite phrase again. He was in awe, but he was also slightly terrified. If they were doing this to Weaver and Tanner, two legends who between them had won 1,871 regular-season games, what would they do to him if he ever made it to the postseason—hardly a legend—and even worse, a vegetarian, a vegetarian with a law degree? He honestly wasn't sure he could stand up to the scrutiny.
But as critical as the grand masters were, many of them were also benevolent. Managers such as Ander
son and Tanner and Dick Williams and Billy Martin and John McNamara adopted an almost paternalistic stance toward La Russa—as did Earl Weaver, after a probationary year to see if the neophyte had any real clue. On the field before a game, when La Russa started in with his incessant riff of strategic questions, they took the time to answer. Along with the steady patience of new White Sox owner, Jerry Reinsdorf, who stood by La Russa as the team continued to chug and churn in the early 1980s, he somehow survived.
In 1983, he did arrive in the Promised Land—he took the White Sox to the playoffs for the first time in his career, against the Orioles. No matter how kind the grand masters were, he also knew everything he did would still be subject to their not-so-tender postgame party mercies. He emerged with an undesirable conclusion, a loss of three games to one to Baltimore. In the last game, he made a typically controversial balls-to-the-wall decision by taking his starter, Britt Burns, into the tenth, when he finally faded, and the Orioles broke through a drought of nine scoreless innings for three runs and the victory.
But even in the aftermath of his loss, La Russa found something valuable within himself. He realized that he had passed a test, withstood the scrutiny of those he cared about the most, by traveling deeply into the psychic tunnel of the dugout, so locked on the game that he had been oblivious to everything else—the fans in the stands, the millions watching on TV, even the very baseball men he knew were riding back to the postgame party to machete his every move. Burns? How could you stay with Burns in the tenth? What's he thinking there? It's a damn good thing this guy got his law degree, because he's gonna need it. He wasn't brilliant or close to brilliant—he didn't have every answer no matter how much he tried to act outwardly as though he did—but he had achieved the crucial art of hearing only his own voice. He learned that the variables of the game can overcome you, overwhelm you, if you don't figure out a way to slow it down. He developed a catch phrase for himself, a way of mental discipline:
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