Three Nights in August

by Buzz Bissinger

  In this particular moment in Game 2, with a runner on first and one out in the bottom of the third, La Russa is weighing the matchup between Hart and Wood as a reason to consider the hit-and-run. It's not a great matchup for Hart, given Wood's nasty curve. So if he can hit-and-run Robinson to second, it will give Pujols a better opportunity to drive in the run, which, in La Russa's mind, makes it worth any potential sacrifice.

  Because La Russa believes in the hit-and-run, he has his players work on it exhaustively during spring training and throughout the season during batting practice. The goal he sets for them is simple: to hit the ball on the ground as hard as you can. He does not advocate guiding the ball toward a certain location, because trying to do that only takes away from how hard a hitter can sting it. If the ball is middle in on the plate, you try to pull it. If the ball is middle away, you take it to the opposite field. La Russa also believes that by practicing the hit-and-run, you can dramatically increase the number of hits you get out of it: from five out of fifty to possibly fifteen.

  It is a winning play if the result is a hit. But even at 15 out of 50, it's still not a great percentage. The other problem is that the more successful you are with it, the more opposing managers look for it and try to defend against it, the Darwinian evolution of baseball working much like it did when steals were getting out of hand.

  Opposing managers will pay obsessive attention to the kind of lead a runner is taking off first base, trying to glean whether it's a true base-stealing lead or the slightly less precocious hit-and-run lead. In a base-stealing lead, the runner must explode toward second at some point in the pitcher's delivery, commit himself to swiping the bag, which is why most managers, faced with the choice between a runner's getting picked off first or getting thrown out at second, will take the pick-off because at a minimum, it implies aggressiveness. In a hit-and-run lead, the runner must not risk the possibility of a pick-off, so there is no similar explosion: Once he takes his lead, he's just a little bit more stable.

  Opposing managers will also scrutinize the divinations coming from the third-base coach and see whether their own code breakers on the bench can decrypt them. If they think they have sniffed right on the hit-and-run, they may call for a pitch out, which for the offense can result in a hitter's swinging through a lousy pitch and the runner's getting thrown out at second, a terrible result and yet not even the worst one, precisely why Richards hated it so much.

  A manager contemplating the hit-and-run continually struggles to evade detection. So many eyes are watching him all the time, his only recourse is to bury himself in the corner of the dugout as deeply as possible. For La Russa, one of the subtle benefits of day games is the opportunity they give him to wear sunglasses, and La Russa likes wearing sunglasses because they make it impossible for an opposing manager to read his eyes. But most games are played at night.* And in some dugouts—Wrigley, for example—it's impossible to hide effectively, because the layout ensures that a manager remains in view. So managers often resort to other measures. The highly respected Tom Kelly, when he was managing the Twins in the early 1990s, purposely picked lousy hit-and-run counts—0–1, for example, when the batter was already at a deficit—to work the play and preserve the element of surprise. The gamble worked for a while, until other managers got wise to Kelly's hit-and-run pattern and began to pitch out. La Russa himself will put a hit-and- run on from the bench without even telling all the parties involved. The way it works, the number two batter due up in the inning is told before the inning starts that he is going to hit-and-run on the first pitch if the hitter ahead of him gets to first. But the initial batter isn't told anything unless he makes it to first. Then the first-base coach tips him off in the kind of casual chitchat that occurs throughout the game, and the spontaneity of the information prevents him from making his lead too obvious. In these situations, of course, there are no signs, because the last thing you want to do is alert an opposing manager with signs, particularly if it's a runner you don't normally hit-and-run with.

  Such a strategy has worked effectively, as it did against the Pirates earlier in the season. But the overriding problem with the hit-and-run is that it can blow up beyond all belief by making a complete fool out of the normally reliable line drive. Earlier this month, when the Cardinals were playing Atlanta, La Russa put on a hit-and-run with runners on first and second, no outs, and pitcher Woody Williams hitting. The likely play here was a bunt to advance the runners with the score tied 1–1 in the fifth. Williams did indeed show bunt on the first two pitches. But he is also a superb hitting pitcher, one of the best in the game, and with the count 1 and 1, La Russa pulled the trigger.

  Williams swung away with the runners going. He hit a line drive to the left of the second-base bag. Shortstop Rafael Furcal leaped to catch it. First out. Second baseman Marcus Giles yelled to Furcal to give him the ball so he could step on the bag and double up Matheny at second. But Furcal had a certain moist look in his eye. He told Giles he could handle it all by himself. He stepped on the bag to double up the catcher Matheny. Second out. He tagged out Orlando Palmeiro as he vainly tried to get back to first. Third out. An unassisted triple play. Only the twelfth in major-league history. Thanks, hit-and-run. Go screw yourself.

  It was the second triple play the Cardinals had hit into during the season on the basis of La Russa's hit-and-run fetish, the first against Colorado. It said something about La Russa's love of the play. It also showed how little he had moved from what coach Charley Lau—impressed by La Russa's balls if not necessarily his brains—had said about him twenty-five years earlier when La Russa had first begun to manage.

  The memories make using the hit-and-run here fraught with implications. As soon as Hart settles in at the plate, La Russa starts flashing signs to the third-base coach, Oquendo. He knows that Baker and the other Cubs coaches are vivisecting Oquendo, asking themselves what's up with all those scratches and sweeps and ear squeezes. La Russa wants Baker to ask what's up, just as Baker wants La Russa to think that maybe he's thinking, C'mon, Tony, I wasn't born in a barn. I know your style, so I know all you're trying to do is fool me into thinking that something is up, a diagonal back and forth from one dugout to the other, tracer bullets of dekes and feints and sucker punches.

  Hart swings through a slider. Nothing's on: 0 and 1, a tough hit-and-run count. If Baker wants to go with a pitchout, 0 and 1 is a good time to do it, as there is little harm done even if he guesses wrong, the count moved only to 1 and 1. The 0-and-1 count also favors Wood. He can afford something nasty here off the plate that will be difficult to hit, which in turn only makes a successful hit-and-run that much more difficult to achieve.

  Hart takes an up fastball. Nothing's on. The count goes to 1 and 1 as La Russa continues to flash signs to Oquendo. Simultaneously, Robinson takes an antsy lead off first base, not enough to show flat-out steal, but enough to suggest the flirtation of something. It's back to Baker, because maybe he should pitch out here. Or maybe that's exactly what La Russa wants him to do—think something is on so he does pitch out and drives the count back toward the hitter's favor to 2 and 1.

  Baker does nothing. La Russa makes his move.

  Robinson goes on the pitch. Wood throws a fastball that sails high, very high. It's a difficult pitch to hit: It defies all natural order to even touch it. Hart takes a kind of punchy tomahawk swing at it, a wondrous reflex action, and he gets it into the hole between first and second for a single. Robinson easily advances to third; this time, the hit-and-run has paid off handsomely. Suddenly, in the bottom of the third, it's gotten interesting, the ersatz top of the lineup working singles off Wood on two great pieces of hitting, with the heart of the order due up.

  Pujols walks on four straight pitches, La Russa wincing only slightly when he takes an up curve ball on 1-0, because it's a hittable pitch and one that maybe he should have swung at. But now the bases are loaded and Edmonds is up, still with only one out.

  No one can carry a team like Edmonds can when he'
s on his stroke. Since coming over to the Cardinals from Anaheim in 2000, he's averaged more than thirty home runs and a hundred RBIs a season. But he has been bothered by shoulder soreness lately, and possibly no hitter gets pounded inside as much as Edmonds, causing him to flinch and bail out even when pitches come nowhere close to the inside.

  La Russa is familiar with the theory, promoted to gospel by Moneyball, that the most important hitting statistic today is on-base percentage. He doesn't dispute the value of players who can work walks in any situation and have a diamond merchant's eye for the strike zone. But he also sees it as akin to the latest fashion fad—oversaturated, everybody doing it, everybody wearing it, until you find out the hard way that stretch Banlon isn't quite as cool as originally perceived. And he tries to teach his players that the better decision is to play the scoreboard.

  If you're leading off an inning, it makes sense to push the count into your favor, to be "really fine" in searching out that good strike. You might take a ball right over the plate, even if you think you can hit it hard, in the hope of drawing a walk. But if you're coming up with the bases loaded and one out, as Edmonds is now, the table obviously is set. You don't want patience here. You want aggression, which is what he pounded into Robinson after that game against the Phillies. You need to expand the zone in which you're willing to swing. Don't wait around like some haute couture stylist to get something perfect—be ready to go on that first good strike.

  Edmonds has a nice advantage here. With three Cardinals aboard, Wood can't be too fine about what he brings. Which means that in the continual back and forth between hitter and pitcher, Edmonds now has the power. Wood throws a slider middle down on the plate. It's there for Edmonds, right in his "happy zone," as La Russa later puts it.

  Edmonds takes it, looking for 0 and 1, clear that he was hoping for something else and had no intention of swinging. Wood comes in with a slider on the outside corner. Edmonds takes it, looking again for 0 and 2.

  Now the power returns to Wood; he can pick Edmonds to death with nothing more than temptation. Forget a good strike in the zone, because Wood has no use for them. He threw one, the first one, and one is enough, and he finishes Edmonds off a pitch later with a chest-high fastball. It brings up Rolen, with two outs and the bases, of course, still loaded.

  Wood comes in with a slider low, almost at Rolen's ankles. He swings and misses and La Russa can almost hear the chorus of critics asking themselves why he chased at a pitch like that. But La Russa prefers his aggressiveness here, would rather see it than not, convinced that this aggression will produce more runs over the course of the season. The only problem is that Rolen strikes out four pitches later to end the inning. The Cards have just squandered one of the stronger scoring opportunities baseball ever offers.

  La Russa knows that they should have put a run on the board here, maybe even a crooked number with the bases juiced and one out and your four and five hitters up. He mourns the wasted chance, and he worries about the emotional momentum that has just swung over to Wood's favor. Escaping a jam like that will give him a dangerous spillover of confidence, make him fall more deeply in love than ever with the quality of his stuff, think he can do anything and maybe actually do it. If the Cardinals had gotten a couple of runs here, Wood's emotions might have gotten to him. He might have gotten pissed off, overthrowing so much that he'd morph from Effectively Wild Wood to plain old Wild Wood. Instead, he just tucked the killer knot of the order into bed in the bottom of the third without a peep of protest.

  9. Whodunit

  I

  SAMMY SOSA leads off the top of the fourth by grounding out to second on a breaking ball from Williams. Moises Alou strikes out on a breaking ball from Williams. Eric Karros flies out to center on a breaking ball from Williams. It's a fourteen-pitch inning. He is moving deeper and deeper into that zone of pure performance, each inning better than the previous. Unlike many pitchers, his stuff gets, as La Russa says, "more oiled" as he progresses further into a game. Because he is a pitchmaker rather than a thrower, he has to feel out his pitches, make sure that the cutter has bite and that the curve isn't too fat. So he often does in the first inning what Darryl Kile did: checks out his equipment like an auto racer to see what is working and what may need a little bit more fine-tuning. After the first two or three innings, the location and command of his pitches only improve, and he tends to sail ever more smoothly on to the seventh or eighth.

  It's beautiful to watch a pitcher who can work a ball like this, somehow make the plate seem spacious and roomy and easy to target when it measures less than 20 inches across. In his foxhole, behind the camouflage of his get-away-from-me grimace, La Russa entertains an effusive thought: He's nailing it. And against Kerry Wood, he has to nail it if the Cardinals are to hang on long enough to force Dusty Baker to resort to his bullpen. There is no margin for carelessness or frustration or mental lapse. Williams has done yeoman work in speeding up right-handed hitters' bats with the fastball inside so that they're way out in front when he comes in with his curve. His best side of the plate is the first-base side, the away side for righties, but tonight he's also been effective pitching inside to them. Which means that he's working both sides of the plate, so vital to the success of any pitcher. He's showing the kind of stuff that took him to a 12-and-3 record before the All-Star break.

  He fell into a rut after the break and lost some confidence; tonight marks his sixth straight attempt to push his win total to fifteen for the season. La Russa and Duncan noticed that after the All-Star break, Williams had changed his style, trying to pitch everybody as if they were Babe Ruth. Instead of going after hitters to get strike 1, he tried to be too fine with his pitches, even with nobody on when a get-me-over fastball or curve would have the least consequences. The culprit, they suspected, was fatigue. Because of the crisis in the bullpen the first half of the season, Williams went deep into virtually every game he pitched. La Russa and Duncan needed him, and he responded beautifully, but the use wore on him. His arm inevitably got tired, which led to a lack of confidence in the sheer quality of his stuff, which then led to a greater urge than usual to pinpoint the ball in the perfect location. Which ironically only created even more fatigue because he might throw as many as twenty pitches in an inning in which he got a zero. Aware of the cycle, La Russa and Duncan have made a deliberate effort in Williams's recent starts to not overuse him. They have let him regain his strength, and it's showing tonight in the style that made him an All-Star, the proper symbiotic balance of aggression and pitch mixture.

  Wood's parry to Williams in the bottom of the fourth confirms La Russa's premonition that getting out of the bases-loaded jam the inning before, neutering Jim Edmonds and Scott Rolen with strikeouts, has only added to his hubris. On the mound, he stares down batters with eyes that seem almost dead, no spark or sparkle at all: flat, cold executioner's eyes. Tino Martinez takes a curve ball looking for a strikeout. Edgar Renteria strikes out on a high fastball. Mike Matheny strikes out on a slider that follows a 97-mph fastball. He threw first-pitch strikes to all three hitters, not to mention that he now has five strikeouts in a row. After four innings, the line score of Game 2, slotted into the center of the dark green scoreboard of Busch with its barebones essentials, reads like chapters in an unfolding thriller:

  1 2 3 4 R H E

  CUBS 0 0 0 0 0 2 0

  CARDINALS 0 0 0 0 0 3 0

  The continuing contrast in style between Wood and Williams only accentuates the drama. Wood with that big kick and follow-through. Wood with those dead-fish eyes. Wood with that scraggle-haired Fu Manchu. Wood stepping off the mound after a strikeout and encircling it in a little warrior stomp. Wood picking up the rosin bag and heaving it down like it's a black barbell at a weightlifting competition. Williams with a demure kick. Williams with the trim beard. Williams taking the ball after a strikeout and going right back to work. Williams picking up the rosin bag and putting it down like it is, after all, a rosin bag.

  Williams builds a qui
ck 0–2 count on Aramis Ramirez with a fastball and a sinker to begin the top of the fifth. He throws three straight balls, trying to get him to chase something high. But he comes back with a fastball low and away on the full count to strike him out. Alex Gonzalez grounds out to Williams in a three-pitch at-bat. Up comes Damian Miller in the eight-hole with two outs—Miller, who is 7 for 14 against Williams before tonight and has had more success against him than any other Cub.

  It's the precise scenario that La Russa fretted over at his desk before the game, the possibility of Miller's getting on with two outs, failing to score before the third out is made but affecting the lineup so that the Cubs start off the following inning at the top. If Williams gets Miller out here, the pitcher, Wood, leads off the following inning, a major difference in terms of momentum.

  Williams goes to 1 and 1 on Miller with two sinkers. Then he comes with a slider. From the foxhole, La Russa can see that the location is perfect, just perfect. It's down and away to the right-handed Miller, a sweet chase pitch. You can't throw a better slider in that situation. It's not humanly possible. Miller takes an embarrassed half-swing and manages to flare it into the outfield for a yappy little double: further proof that baseball is the cruelest game, that the best execution can still produce an unfair outcome.

  Batting in the ninth spot, Wood pushes Williams to 2 and 2 before he grounds out to short to end the inning. It means a zero for the top of the fifth, a relatively easy zero, but that little fear La Russa nurtured has come to pass. The Cubs will start off the sixth with Kenny Lofton, the top of their order. But with Williams pitching the way he is, La Russa's fear might border on paranoia. Lofton has a meaningless hit tonight. So does Martinez in the two-hole. After them, the three-, four-, and five-hole hitters are a combined 0 for 6 against Williams, with two strikeouts. Sosa and Alou haven't even gotten it out of the infield. And Williams is getting better as the game continues, his impassivity belying the competitiveness that ticks inside him like an old-fashioned alarm clock; nothing can muzzle its insistent beat. On the dark green scoreboard, another chapter has been slotted into the whodunit: