Men at Work

by George F. Will

  Regarding retaliation, La Russa has a doctrine of measured response. “It’s a 2–1 game and your big guy gets bopped in the bottom of the eighth inning. Now you’ve got to go out in the top of the ninth with a one-run lead and you need three outs. Who should make the decision whether you retaliate? It’s got to be the manager. Sometimes you walk up to your player who got hit and say, ‘I really believe this guy took a shot at you. We’ll get somebody in the first inning tomorrow.’” La Russa is a stickler for proportionality in punishment. “You try to match, as best you can. If they take a shot at your big producer, then you take a shot at their big producer. If they’ve just cold-cocked McGwire and their first batter in the inning is their light-hitting second baseman, that’s not the guy. If someone takes a shot at Walter Weiss, then you look for their promising rookie or their second-year player who is a big star.”

  In game three of the 1983 American League Championship Series between La Russa’s White Sox and the Orioles, the Orioles’ pitcher, Mike Flanagan, hit Ron Kittle with a slider. A slider is a good pitch to hit someone with because it is two to three miles per hour slower than a fastball and it is more apt to look like an accident. La Russa knew that Kittle was Flanagan’s biggest problem. So in the next inning someone comparable to Kittle—a young power hitter named Cal Ripken—got hit. “We will never, ever retaliate above the shoulder. So the guy will get stung but he will play again,” La Russa stresses.

  “Once you establish that you’ll protect your players, that is a part of the game you shouldn’t have to worry about. Then the only things left are those natural, unavoidable confrontations between two competitive teams trying to beat each other. If someone throws a fastball outside and Jose hits a home run to right field, they may try to throw a fastball inside to get him out. If they miss they might hit him. You’ll never avoid those. We are a very aggressive, pitching inside-off-the-plate club.”

  Two changes, one in equipment and one in teaching, have complicated the problem of deciding what is and what is not fair in the war between pitchers and batters for control of the inside and outside edges of the strike zone. Batting helmets, which were not made mandatory until 1971, increased batters’ aggressiveness by decreasing fear. And the batting style taught by the late Charlie Lau has made many hitters seem (to pitchers) excessively, provocatively aggressive. Lau, whose most famous work of art is George Brett, was the White Sox batting instructor when La Russa was the White Sox manager.

  The gospel according to Lau is: Shift your weight to your back foot as the pitcher winds up, then stride in toward the plate, shifting your weight to provide the power at the moment of contact. Striding in is dangerous to the hitter—and to the pitcher’s career if he lets it occur without any resistance. It gives the batter too much control of the outside corner.

  “You want to hit?” La Russa asks. “First you have to see the ball, and you have to stay on it. Second, you need a positive move toward the pitcher. You can’t wait to see whether the ball is coming at you. You can’t be on your heels. If you are, you flinch when a guy throws a breaking ball, you take too many pitches because you’re a little leery. If you have a whole club like that, you can’t hit. They won’t step into the ball and take their chances. If you don’t protect yourself, it’s just one of those edges that people will take away. It’s a little bit scary to go up there and face that ball being thrown hard. If you know your club isn’t going to protect you, you’re going to lose a big edge at the plate. Everyone is going to go up there a little timid, a little farther from the plate.

  “Some umpires get a little ticked off when somebody takes a cheap shot, messes with their game. They’ll hold off on a warning until you retaliate. But sometimes the minute your guy gets hit, they’ll put the warning in and tie your hands. Then you tell the umpires between innings—I’ve never lied to them about this—‘I understand the warning. We’ve got six innings to play and we’re not going to take a shot at anybody. But our basic pitching philosophy against this club is that they crowd the plate. I don’t want to lose this game because our pitchers stayed out over the plate. So I’m telling you we’re going to be pitching inside to get guys out. If at any time in this game or this series I want to take a shot, I’ll come and tell you it’s coming.’ Otherwise an umpire puts in a warning, and your pitcher is afraid to throw inside. He might get thrown out of the game. So he moves out over the plate and starts getting creamed.”

  All this theorizing at the breakfast table will become intensely practical on the field in a few hours. The Red Sox pitcher, Mike Smithson, will get hit hard right from the start. He will get exasperated and will throw at the Athletics’ third baseman, Carney Lansford, who has done some of this early damage to Smithson. Lansford will duck the pitch, but the fact that Smithson deliberately threw at him was obvious to everyone, including the person who mattered most, the home plate umpire, Richie Garcia. His response illustrated one of the nuances of governance inside the game.

  Garcia came to umpiring from the Marine Corps, which is good training for a vocation that an umpire once summed up in seven words: “Call ’em fast and walk away tough.” Toughness is not enough, but it is necessary. Once when Babe Pinelli called Babe Ruth out on strikes, Ruth made a populist argument. Ruth reasoned fallaciously (as populists do) from raw numbers to moral weight: “There’s 40,000 people here who know that last one was a ball, tomato head.” Pinelli replied with the measured stateliness of John Marshall: “Maybe so, but mine is the only opinion that counts.” Or, as Garcia tells young umpires (and every parent should tell every child): “Just because they are yelling at you doesn’t mean you are wrong.” Long ago the ethic of umpiring was expressed with great dignity by Bill Guthrie: “Der ain’t no close plays, me lad. Dey is either dis or dat.” That is true, de jure. De fact is, however, that, de facto, things are different.

  When Smithson threw at Lansford, Garcia took off his mask, looked out to the mound and for a moment seemed about to issue a warning. That would have required both teams to behave. Anyone henceforth convicted (by the home plate umpire’s instant and of course unappealable judgment) of throwing at anyone would be ejected. Garcia’s brief pregnant pause ended not with a warning but with a brisk brushing off of home plate with his whisk broom. His message was muted but clear: The Athletics would get to retaliate. They did, in strict accordance with La Russa’s principle of proportionality. In the next inning Lansford’s counterpart, Wade Boggs, the Red Sox third baseman, got thrown at. He was not hit but he had to bail out of the batter’s box. The game continued. The Athletics won.

  They had played 134 games and were in first place by nine. Their manager was, in his fashion, almost content as he looked ahead to a trip to Texas.

  A few days later, La Russa is not pleased. A plate of pasta, his preferred postgame fare, is cooling on the desk in the visiting manager’s office in Arlington, Texas. La Russa is pleased enough with the pasta. The man who runs the visiting team clubhouse at Arlington Stadium has a four-star rating among players. But La Russa is cooling off from a particularly grating loss to the Rangers on September 6, 1988.

  The Athletics came close, but came up short. In the ninth they got the potential tieing runs to third and second with a power hitter at the plate. La Russa worked all the pedals on the organ, even putting a pinch runner in for a pinch runner. To no avail. The Athletics lost, 3–1.

  The near-miss in the ninth inning was the final frustration in an evening that La Russa had gloomily expected to be frustrating. The Rangers were pitching Charlie Hough, who had already beaten the Athletics five consecutive times. Hough, 40, looks like Lyndon Johnson with a secret sorrow. His meandering, maddening knuckleball comes to the plate slower than the throws he makes to first to hold runners close. This night La Russa tried a midget—well, sort of; these things are relative—in place of muscle. He pulled mighty Mark McGwire from the starting lineup because sometimes the torment of trying to hit Hough has sent McGwire into two- or three-game minislumps. And this night La Russa
put Mike Gallego in the lineup at second base. He’s just 5 feet 8. Confronted with that small strike zone, Hough might have to abandon his knuckleball and throw Gallego his fastball, such as it is, which is not much.

  Before the game Lefebvre took Canseco aside for a slight stroke alteration, using a batting tee. Generally Lefebvre had three jobs with Athletics hitters. The first was physical: getting them ready to swing. As anyone knows who has greeted the spring with too much enthusiastic swinging of a bat, swinging uses a lot of muscles in a special symphony. For the untrained, 15 minutes of hitting fungoes can make it hard to get out of bed the next morning. Lefebvre’s second job concerned mechanics: getting the hitters’ hands, hips, heads and other parts working together. The third task concerned the mental part of hitting: deciding how to handle particular pitchers. This, he says, is 90 percent of hitting.

  In 1988 Lefebvre had a batting coach’s dream. It was Jose Canseco having what players call a “career year,” meaning a year as good as the particular player can expect to have. Of the 42 home runs Canseco hit in the regular season, 16 came with 2 strikes on him. He hit 3 more in the League Championship Series and a grand slam in the World Series. Of his 46, 31 either tied a game or gave the Athletics the lead. Lefebvre jokes that coaching a talent like Jose Canseco is simple: “My number-one chore was to see that his bats weren’t cracked. ‘They all right? Okay, then go up and hit.’” But Lefebvre was not doing himself justice. Before the game against Hough, Lefebvre took Canseco to a batting tee in front of the backstop to practice swinging up through the ball a bit more than normal. Hough’s knuckler was going to come bobbing and weaving toward the plate and Lefebvre thought Canseco, who normally swings up slightly, would do best if he increased that a bit, with the bat coming up as the ball fluttered down. For about 15 minutes Lefebvre, facing Canseco, traced a rising arc with his extended arm while Canseco ripped balls off the tee into the net. In the game Canseco would get three hits.

  Fat lot of good they did. Hough bewildered the Athletics for the sixth consecutive time. But he needed help in the ninth inning.

  In the ninth, with the Athletics down by two runs, with two outs and a runner on first, McGwire pinch-hit and singled. Now there were runners on first and third and the plot suddenly thickened. Tony Phillips was put in the game as a pinch runner for McGwire on first. But before the batter after McGwire, Dave Henderson, stepped into the batter’s box, Hough was pulled from the game, replaced by Cecilio Guante. If Hough had stayed in the game, with his deceptive little semi-balk move to first, the Athletics would not have contemplated getting the potential tieing run into scoring position by stealing second. But with Guante in, the running game was given back to La Russa. Luis Polonia is a better base stealer than Tony Phillips so Polonia was sent in as a pinch runner for pinch runner Phillips.

  Any pitcher who has a release time of 1.4 seconds is, La Russa says, “runnable.” Polonia running on a pitcher who is 1.4 to the plate is going to be safe almost every time. Guante, when he is not worried about a stolen base, has a big delivery and a time of 1.6. “So,” La Russa says, “what he does instead of the big delivery is this. Instead of lifting his front leg toward the plate, he simply slides his leg toward the plate. Now he has a time of 1.2.” La Russa knew Guante could do this, but La Russa felt that by putting Polonia on first base he had Guante “between a rock and a hard place.” If Guante stayed with his big delivery, Polonia would get to second. If Guante went to the slide step, Henderson at the plate would be a happy fellow.

  “You try to get more leverage with the pitcher,” La Russa explains. “Dave Henderson is a three-run home run standing at the plate. Does the pitcher want to throw Henderson a short [lacking some velocity] fastball? The slide step costs Guante velocity. It’s a tough time for a pitcher to go to a slide step because you’re going to lose a little of your stuff and the guy at the plate may go for extra bases.” So Polonia helped the Athletics’ offense just by being at first. And he did not have to stay there. He could steal if La Russa could anticipate when Guante would, and when he would not, use the slide step with Henderson at the plate. “It’s a guessing game,” La Russa says. “I know he’s not going to slide step Henderson five pitches. It’s just too risky for him.” Guante did not slide step in his first pitch, but neither did he use his big, slow delivery. He split the difference. The pitch was a ball. “I didn’t think he’d slide step 1–0.” La Russa ordered a steal. He guessed wrong but got away with it. Guante used the slide step but Polonia beat the throw to second. Now the tieing run could score on a single. But the Athletics were down to their last out and with Polonia at second, with no one on first, Guante went back to his big delivery and got back the foot he had lost off his fastball. The tricky stuff was over. Now it was the pitcher against the hitter. The pitcher won. Henderson hit a fly caught by the left fielder. Texas won.

  As the pasta congealed, La Russa took out his briefcase and started poring over paperwork, looking ahead to Kansas City. The Royals are 6–0 against the Athletics. Four games on Kansas City’s artificial turf mean that some players need to be rested. He must decide which ones. Good. He has something to worry about.

  On a cold rainy February day in 1989 in Oakland, where February is concentrated grayness, the Athletics’ offices in the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum are a warm swarm of green and gold and anticipation. A truck is being loaded with bats and balls bound for Phoenix. The manager is thinking of Spring Training, and beyond, to Opening Day, and beyond that deep into April, to a series with the White Sox. Rummaging through his briefcase, La Russa extracts one of the tools of his trade, a three-by-five index card. Over the course of a season he fills hundreds of these with notations in his small, precise print. The card he has just fished from the briefcase lists every playing date in April from Opening Day, April 3, on. Next to each day there is a number—1 or 2 or 3 or 4 or 5—for the starting pitchers and where they rank in the rotation. Opening Day is still 53 days away but La Russa has his starting pitchers selected for every game up to May 1. Because of an open date, his number-one starter, Dave Stewart, would be rested enough to pitch in place of the fifth starter in the third game of a three-game series in Chicago at the end of the second week of April, but La Russa’s charts show that the fifth starter, Mike Moore, eats up the White Sox. Stewart will be saved.

  Now, as the rain falls and his spirits rise, La Russa, semi-formal in blue jeans and a tan sport jacket, begins to talk about “situation baseball,” particularly the double-steal possibilities with runners on first and third. The double steal is difficult to execute. La Russa estimates that anytime you try a trick play against major league talent, the odds are 40–60 or 30–70 against. “But, if you have a guy at the plate who is not a very good RBI man, who doesn’t have a good chance of driving them in, well, go ahead and take a shot.”

  Because baseball skills are so difficult, and because the difference between success and failure is usually so slight, aggressive managing often involves putting one’s batters and runners in harm’s way. Aggressive managing means making moves that will fail if the other team executes its response perfectly. But if the running team is going to force an imperfect response, it must be perfect in executing its own aggressive move. Over the course of a season, the best teams will, more often than not, force failure—which is anything less than perfection—from opponents.

  La Russa talks the way he manages and the way he wants his team to play, controlled but intense. The pace of his conversation is brisk, the words crisp, the sentences clipped at the end so as to leave no loose ends. His is a style, a personality, of carefully moderated but constantly maintained edginess. Those are qualities needed for plays in the first-and-third situation—eight of such plays. There is a straight steal in which the runner at third bluffs a dash toward home as the runner on first tries to steal second. The hope is that the bluff by the runner on third will cause a hesitation on the part of the catcher of a sufficient fraction of a second to make the steal of second successful. And
there are seven other permutations of the first-and-third situation.

  One is the regular double steal. The runner on first breaks for second. If the catcher comes up to throw through to second, then the instant the catcher’s arm starts forward the runner on third breaks for home. The second play is especially suited for first-and-third with two outs. The man on first breaks toward second, then stops. If the catcher throws through to second, the runner on third breaks for home the instant the catcher’s arm starts forward.

  The third play is a delayed double steal. As soon as the pitcher is committed to deliver the ball to the plate, the runner on first takes, La Russa says, “about three hops toward second. Slower runners do this in a way that suggests getting ready to run on a hit, not to steal. The second baseman or shortstop—whoever is supposed to cover second—sees this runner stop and relaxes regarding a steal. But on the third hop, just as the ball gets to the plate and while everyone’s attention is focused there, he takes off for second. He probably will be out if the infielders are paying attention and cover second. But the infielder may be late in breaking for the bag and the catcher may therefore hesitate before throwing. Now, the advantage of doing this with a runner on third is that the infielder is normally late in getting to second to cover a delayed steal. He takes the throw on the run, then he has to adjust himself and throw the ball back to the plate. In 1984, early in the season, we [the White Sox] were playing in Yankee Stadium. We were losing, 1–0, in the seventh or eighth inning. Greg Luzinski [“The Bull,” who was as large and slow as a tank] was on third with two outs and a runner on first. We put on the delayed double steal. The runner on first took off. The catcher hesitated, then fired to second. The moment he threw, Luzinski broke for the plate. Willie Randolph [the Yankees’ second baseman] was playing back to cut off a base hit. He caught the throw on the dead run, made a great off-balance throw, made it a close play at home. Safe.”