He made the decisions he made because of a belief that the whole was always more important than the parts. He likened the team to twenty-five puzzle pieces in which everyone threw his piece in. He kept telling them that, and they nodded when he did, having learned early in their entitled lives that the best way to avoid a lecture was to nod. He told them he loved them, cared about them, needed them. And then he did what he had to do: pinch-hit for them, remove them from that rise of dirt, swap them out for someone with a more reliable glove. And then the next day, he had to tell them all over again how much he loved and needed them.
So it was odd, very odd, perhaps the oddest job in America. As odd as an editor editing his upcoming crop of books on a Central Park bench with all his authors gathered around him fuming over every red line and crossout. As odd as a CEO closing a plant by telling each employee that he had found some workers in India who do it smarter and better and cheaper: In other words, you're all being permanently pinch-hit for, but don't get me wrong, I still think you're all great!
Day in and day out, he persevered in the face of the fact that when you're a manager, you never have a 100 percent happy day. There was always something taking away from it, inevitably a burnt ego, somebody who felt scorned or didn't get the start he deserved or the at-bat. He still did the things he had to do, and even when he did them right—knew he had done them right—they still went to hell because the game was eternally mischievous, or "cruel," as he liked to put it, simply cruel. Whether Matt Morris would be able to land on his injured ankle when he pitched: That kept him up at night. The seeming indifference of J.D. Drew, his talent only adding to his indifference: That kept him up at night. Kerry Robinson's refusal to follow instructions or stick to fundamentals: That kept him up at night. Trying to figure out what to say to Woody Williams after a particularly heartbreaking loss when he had pitched his brains out: That not only kept La Russa up at night but also had him walking the empty streets of Chicago at 2 A.M. in search of the right words.
Sometimes, he stayed awake to work things out: find an answer in the seeming absence of any, pick a situation apart and put it back together and pick it apart and put it back together again. Beneath his taciturn exterior was an optimist, someone convinced that if you thought about something hard enough, grinded through it enough, examined every possible alternative enough, it could be fixed. That is what happened with the elbow.
The elbow was all he saw at night for a while: not simply anybody's elbow but the elbow of the great Pujols, the best hitter in baseball, even if the only people who knew it for sure at the beginning of 2003 lived in St. Louis. In his first two seasons in the majors, Albert Pujols had hit over .300, driven in more than a hundred runs, and hit more than thirty home runs. And although it was early in 2003, only his third season, he was hitting the ball even better than he had the first two: on his way, if he kept it up, to hitting more than thirty home runs once again and driving in more than a hundred runs once again and leading the league in average. It was wonderful for Pujols, obviously, another rapid step up the ladder to pre-eminence. But it was also wonderful for the Cardinals: more than wonderful, as their pitching was already in the toilet, with both the starters and the relievers combining to run up the highest ERA in the league. The team couldn't succeed without Pujols's hitting.
And then he injured his elbow on a throw from his position in left field and wouldn't be able to throw with any force for three weeks. In the American League, this wouldn't have been a terrible problem. He couldn't field, maybe, but he still could have his regular place in the batting order; he'd simply be the designated hitter. But in the National League, in which the dimensions of managing afford far less latitude than in its junior counterpart and therefore far more complication, it meant that Pujols could only pinch-hit until his elbow healed.
This could not have happened at a worse moment. The Cardinals had lost two out of three to Arizona in St. Louis, and Arizona was a down club, hitting poorly, waiting to be plucked. Now the Cardinals were going off on a brutal six-game swing to Atlanta and Florida. Yes, it was only April. But La Russa had learned long ago that April is a great time to push, when most other teams are simply trying to settle in, still trying to figure out whether the puzzle pieces actually amount to anything beyond pieces. He had learned that from Sparky Anderson, and the best proof of that had been the Tigers in 1984 under Anderson's skipperdom, when they had started the season 35-5 on their way to winning a World Series.
So much for this year's April push. But La Russa was worried by the road trip in particular because his team rarely played well in Atlanta. Part of it was psychological, maybe: his nemesis Bobby Cox simply a craggy, crafty old fox who regularly beat him. Part of it was also style: The Braves worked the outside of the plate better than any other team in baseball—made a meal out of it as a matter of policy and instructed pitchers who came over, such as Russ Ortiz from San Francisco, to hit that outside corner for a first-pitch strike, the most important pitch in any at-bat—and then get nasty the rest of the at-bat with a mixture on and off the edges of the plate. He was also worried about the Marlins. He knew that they were stoked with pitching, because he had seen them probably half a dozen times in spring training. The Cardinals would be facing their three right-handed stallions still in the brim of their twenties.
The Cards lost the first game in Atlanta. Then they lost the second when Jeff Fassero, on in relief, just lollipopped one up there, put it right on the plate when the one thing, once again, he should have done was put it off the plate. He made the kind of mistake you maybe expected from a rookie but not from a twelve-year veteran, as if he were bored by relieving. And it was unfair to simply single out Fassero, as all the relievers had been ineffective, making fatal mistakes.
After the game, as the team bus made its way to the hotel, La Russa suddenly told the driver to stop. To the players, the game was just another game, a tiny forgotten sliver in the longest season in professional sports. They were in the back of the bus, talking, chirping, making plans for what to do with the night ahead. But La Russa was miserable; losing made him miserable, and being in the suffocating bus made him more miserable. So he got off and walked over to Morton's Steak House just off of Peach Street in downtown Atlanta. It was an odd choice for a strict vegetarian who refuses to eat anything that, as he puts it, once had a face on it. But Morton's was warm and clubby, and given that La Russa lived in a hotel not only when the team played away but also when it played at home, the restaurant was probably as close as he got to the feel of an intimate dining room during the season.
He requested a table for one; after a loss, he liked eating alone. There was no worse social interaction in the complicated history of social interaction than trying to make conversation with Tony La Russa after a defeat, idle chitchat bouncing off a face that with each innocuous and annoying word spoken, looked more and more like a glacier with a migraine. And he wasn't entirely alone, anyway. He at least had his book with him because he always brought a book, potboiler plot, with him when he ate by himself: in this case, James Paterson's The Jester, an appropriate title, given what had happened in the ninth to give the Braves the 4-2 win.
He tried to concentrate on The Jester as he ate. He flipped through the pages as he simultaneously poked around his salad and his baked potato, but it was of no use. He had worked his way through the tattered bullpen because he had had no choice but to work his way through the tattered bullpen. But as soon as that disturbing vision left, another took its place. Now he fixated on tomorrow's lineup with the lefty Mike Hampton going for Atlanta. When he thought about the lineup, there loomed the elbow of the great Pujols.
Almost as soon as La Russa started managing in the major leagues in 1979, he discovered that most hitters, like mules in their ruts, hate to be meddled with. They hate trying a new stance or a new swing, even if it may lead to improvement, believing that they must be doing something right to have gotten to where they have gotten. As a result, when someone starts tell
ing them to do this and do that—someone who may have had trouble hitting .200 in the major leagues—they tend not to have a particularly open mind. They operate on the superstition that if they do anything differently—anything, from stepping on a chalk line as they approach the batter's box to the mechanics of the swing itself—the delicate assembly line they have concocted will collapse. It's a mindset opposed to that of pitchers, La Russa has also found over the years. Pitchers will experiment with a new pitch daily—throw with their toes, spray it out their butt, flick it off their tongue—if they think it might gain them something.
Because most hitters don't like any change in their routine, lineups are, from a manager's perspective, as much rooted in Freudian analysis as they are in the traditional elements of wanting someone who makes good contact to hit lead-off and putting your power hitters in the middle, and so on and so forth. A manager has to take into account every hitter's whim, superstition, ego, and reality, difficult enough on a good night but on this particular night in the dark wood Jacuzzi of Morton's, further hampered by the glaring absence of Pujols.
Pujols normally batted third, so that was an immediate hole needing to be filled. But it wasn't that simple: Filling Pujols's slot meant changing other hitters' routines, a situation La Russa describes as the "consequences of consequences." Scott Rolen moved to the third spot from his customary fifth position. But Rolen liked hitting fifth. He had been flourishing there, so sweetly sandwiched between Jim Edmonds and Tino Martinez. Fifth is where he wanted to be. Fifth is where he should be. La Russa had already moved him to third in the middle of the Arizona series, and his bat had gone silent. So then he had moved Rolen back to fifth and put Edgar Renteria in the third spot. But that led only to another consequence of consequence; deep down, Renteria liked hitting seventh because he drove in a bunch of runs in that slot. The lineup was in tatters without the great Pujols: the karmic gestalt of it completely disrupted, a Freudian analysis cut abruptly short, feng shui in crisis. But life is unfair, and La Russa had no choice but to remove an index card from his breast pocket and scratch out a lineup for tomorrow's game. He knew he would give the first baseman Martinez a rest, as it was a day game, and Martinez was an eleven-year veteran who could use the time off after playing the night before. It gave him another hole to fill, and he picked Eddie Perez off the bench to play first. It wasn't a bad choice at all, as Perez, a free swinger, had some pop in the bat.
Then he started thinking about Perez a little bit: The best way to use Perez—to get the most out of him—was to be judicious. He could take it deep, which is why he was such a nice player to use off the bench in the late innings and even to start in small doses. But if, in the baseball vernacular, he got too "exposed"—if he was playing so much that pitchers started routinely exploiting the holes in his swing—his effectiveness could be curtailed. So he had to be careful with how much he used Perez.
On the bottom of the little index card he was using to scrawl out his lineup was Pujols's name, alongside the other bench players who might be called on to pinch-hit. With the injured elbow, that's all that Pujols was now: a bench player, a possible pinch hitter good for one at-bat. The more he stared at Pujols's name, the more it looked like a waste there at the bottom of the card, on the bench. And then he started thinking about first base, and it hit him: What about putting Pujols at first base?
When La Russa had been a player in the 1960s and 1970s, virtually all his career was spent in the minors. He had learned a lot there, perhaps most of all that it was called the minors for a reason. He knew early on, particularly after he hurt his shoulder, that he was never going to have much of a big-league career. He continued to plug away, trying to compensate for lack of talent with drive and hustle, although he knew that these fine and admirable qualities were a poor substitute for it. He also studied: sat on that bench in the dugout, watching managers make moves, wondering why they had made them, and asking afterward why they had made them and refusing to go away until they had given a sufficiently exhaustive answer. He learned from one of his managers, Loren Babe, that in some situations, you have no choice but to sacrifice defense altogether to get the offense you need. Babe gave a player in this category—offensive asset, defensive drawback—three at-bats, getting him out of there by the sixth so as not to risk some defensive late-in-game lapse that could not be overcome. That's what led La Russa to the unlikely notion of Pujols at first base.
But Pujols wasn't simply a defensive liability. Because of his elbow, he couldn't throw anything beyond a soft toss. It made the idea of playing him at first seem, like many ideas, nice and intriguing and totally impractical, fractured La Russa logic. But he continued to chew on it. He refused to let go of it, convinced that something was still there, something that could still work. What if La Russa played Pujols at first and ordered him not to throw, no matter how great the temptation?
He walked from Morton's to the Ritz-Carlton Hotel with a new spring in his step. He got into bed, lay on a skyscraper of pillows, and, naturally, stayed awake. But instead of seeing lollipops over the plate, he now saw an elbow with angel's wings. After he woke up the next morning, he continued to think about it. He thought about it some more on the way from the hotel to the visitor's clubhouse at Turner Field, and when he got to the clubhouse, he found Barry Weinberg, the trainer, to tell him of his scheme.
Weinberg dutifully processed La Russa's scenario and offered a clear and specific reaction—You can't do it!—for the obvious reason that if Pujols in the heat of the moment did make a real throw, it could be a career-threatening injury. La Russa listened to Weinberg's reaction. He always listened to Weinberg's reaction because they had been together for nearly twenty years. He was quite fond of Weinberg and sometimes had dinner with him after the team won. He clearly respected Weinberg. And then he called Pujols into the little office.
Pujols was circumspect when he came in, a body language of politeness at odds not only with his 6'4", 225-pound frame but also with the superstar status that with each day was only further entombing him. He was already a great player—maybe the greatest young player the game had seen since Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams—but he didn't express it with an equal measure of physical arrogance. When La Russa spoke to him about something, he listened because that's what a player was supposed to do.
La Russa started the conversation by asking Pujols who was the best major-league manager he had ever played for. Pujols dutifully answered, "Tony," which was true as well as tactful, as La Russa was the only major-league manager Pujols had ever played for.
"We get along good, don't we?" asked La Russa.
"Yes," replied Pujols.
"Well, you know what, you can get me fired by throwing the ball. If you throw the ball, I'll quit."
Pujols nodded that he understood.
"All we have to do is have you lay out for three weeks and you come out 100 percent. So you have to trust me on this strategy, because it gives us a better chance to win."
So Pujols started at first. And it took all of one inning, actually less than that, for the danger of La Russa's scheme to become apparent. In the bottom of the first, Rafael Furcal got on for Atlanta. It brought up Marcus Giles, who tried to sacrifice Furcal to second with a bunt toward Pujols. Furcal made it to second, and he could have easily made it to third had he known that Pujols was under orders not to throw the ball. There were no more major episodes at first base after that, but the Cardinals ended up losing to the Braves 4-3 anyway, when the bullpen imploded again and gave up two runs in the bottom of the ninth.
The team dragged into the Westin Diplomat in Miami at about 3 A.M. after the American Airlines charter flight from Atlanta. The players, exhausted, went to bed. But La Russa couldn't sleep. With the three-game sweep by the Braves, the road trip from hell was half done, and the devil seemed in no mood to relent, not with A.J. Burnett and Josh Beckett and Brad Penny pitching for the Marlins: guys who effortlessly threw 94 mph and 95 mph. In his sleeplessness, he began to further examine
the Pujols experiment.
Florida was a different team from Atlanta. The Marlins led the league in stolen bases, with Juan Pierre and Luis Castillo, guys who drove you nuts on the basepaths. And with the word trickling out that Pujols couldn't throw—as a baseball dugout was a greater cauldron of gossip than a Flatbush nail salon—La Russa knew there were even more liabilities. A pitcher, for example, couldn't even make a pick-off move to first, because a runner, aware that Pujols couldn't throw properly, would simply take off to second as if it were a free base. So starting Pujols at first was out, particularly as Martinez was coming back into the lineup anyway to face the Marlin trio of right-handers. But then La Russa considered the outfield dimensions in Florida. Left field there was relatively small, with most of the room in center and right. He conjured and pondered—a little bit of this, a little bit of that—until he had another potion.
The next morning, he couldn't wait to try out his newest remedy on somebody. As was his pregame habit, he picked up pitching coach Dave Duncan, bullpen coach Marty Mason, and third-base coach Jose Oquendo in the hotel lobby and they all rode together to the stadium. By now, La Russa was bursting with excitement; on the way there, he told them about his plan to play Pujols in left field and set out the rules he'd devised to make it work:
1. If there's a base hit to left field, Renteria runs out from the shortstop position so Pujols can simply flip the ball to him, which presumably will prevent a runner from trying to stretch a single into a double with the ball in Renteria's glove.
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