Since 1983, the first time one of his teams reached the playoffs, Tony La Russa has watched the sane world of regular season baseball crumble before his studious eyes in October. That year, an obscure Oriole outfielder named Tito Landrum hit a home run in old Comiskey Park to swing the American League Championship Series away from La Russa's White Sox. His hot team was sent home and Baltimore won its last world title. Ever since, La Russa has seemed luckless at best and perplexed at worst in his many trips to the playoffs. The crucial plays by lesser-known players, the hunch moves by managers that turned out brilliantly, have so often gone against him.
Is that about to change? Is the manager who is famous for taking powerful teams into October, then going home sooner than expected, about to find himself on the other end of the sport's good fortune?
After Friday night's 9-6 Cardinals victory to tie the NLCS at one game apiece, it's hard to feel otherwise. The St. Louis heroes were little-known Scott Spiezio, with a two-run, game-tying triple in the seventh as well as an insurance-run RBI double in the ninth, and So Taguchi, who clubbed a go-ahead solo homer off the Mets' best reliever, Billy Wagner, in the ninth.
However, the man who put Spiezio and Taguchi in place to do those improbable deeds was, in both cases, La Russa. The skipper benched slumping star Scott Rolen in favor of the journeyman Spiezio at third base, an extremely controversial and difficult decision that left Rolen briefly miffed. Then he inserted Taguchi for late-inning defense. So one move worked exactly as La Russa planned while the other succeeded in ways he never plotted. Finally, it's autumn and Tony's hot.
Maybe the reason is simple: After a managerial lifetime as an overdog, La Russa finally has an underdog club with a chance to be the people's choice.
"This may be the best comeback by any club I've been around in the playoffs," said a beaming La Russa, whose team trailed 3-0, 4-2 and 6-4 and also got a two-run homer from Jim Edmonds as well as a walk, single and double by Albert Pujols, who scored three runs and broke out of a three-game hitless slump. "I'm going to put this lineup card in my pocket so I can replay it in my mind on the flight home. This would be a great one to reflect back on, but we've got another game tomorrow."
But now Game 3 will, from La Russa's perspective, be pivotal rather than desperate. "Down 0-2 would have been tough, even going home," La Russa said. Instead, he could chuckle at the almost ridiculous notion of how his all-rookie, utterly unknown bullpen trio of Josh Kinney, Tyler Johnson and Adam Wainwright got the last six outs despite 56,349 adversaries.
"When you have a manager who has confidence in every single player on the team, it boosts the morale of everybody," Spiezio said. To complete La Russa's managerial perfect game, he lifted Spiezio in the bottom of the ninth to get Rolen's golden glove in the game and, naturally, the other Scott made a diving gem.
In recent years, baseball has seen many improbable postseason runs by unlikely but inspired teams. Over the next few days, will La Russa suddenly discover that he now has such a team? For the first time in a career which has brought him 2,297 regular season wins, more than any managers except Connie Mack and John McGraw, La Russa has entered this postseason with a genuinely scruffy team, one that should not be hounded by the least imaginable pressure.
His Cards won only 83 games, eighth best in baseball, and almost performed the worst final-fortnight collapse in baseball history, threatening to out-disgrace the '64 Pholdin' Phillies. However, his Birds escaped that misfortune on the final weekend of the season. "In a way, fighting with Houston for our [playoff] lives was a playoff atmosphere," Spiezio said.
Now, with second lives, they've beaten the Padres in the division series and stunned the Mets, who thought they were halfway to the World Series. "We kind of let that one slip away," Mets Manager Willie Randolph said. "We can get it back tomorrow. We've had bigger challenges than this."
Is this the beginning of a moment of payback, a squaring up of the scales of injustice for La Russa, who has taken 105-, 104- and 103-game winners to the World Series and lost them all -- while winning one game in total?
If it is, if in a week it is the underdog Cards who are in the Series, not the Mets, who were so close to a two-game lead, built on a pair of home runs by Carlos Delgado against Cards ace Chris Carpenter, then the slaps on the back, not the familiar kicks in the pants, will go to La Russa.
Make no mistake, La Russa hates the playoffs. Maybe the manager can't define exactly what's so horrible about October baseball, such a perversion of the game he loves, but he knows it when he sees it. The whole format is screwy, built on dumb luck and unfairness, who's hot and who's injured. There are too many off days and twilight starting times. Why, the postseason barely resembles the righteous regular season when the truth of who's good and who's not always comes out in the long run. The whole premise of deciding champions on the basis of five- and seven-game series is a deviant kind of autumn baseball. Unfortunately, his teams often sense how Tony the Purist feels. Sometimes they play like it.
This is La Russa's 12th visit to the playoffs. On nine of those visits, he bossed teams that averaged 99.8 wins in the regular season. Yet Tony has won only one world title. Because La Russa is a natural leader and one of the best (regular season) managers ever, his teams mirror his personality. So, many surmise, they hate the playoffs, too. How's that working out so far?
"Actually it is kind of a tournament," LaRussa said this week of the postseason format. "It is what it is. What difference does it make? I'd rather have it that you win the National League [pennant] and go [straight] to the World Series without the playoffs. That's just not the way it is so I don't even bother to think about it."
Of course he doesn't really banish those dark thoughts from his mind. No, not hyper-intense Tony. Now, finally, there may be a switch in an old plot. La Russa runs the underdog, the team that survived an utter collapse. Few things in playoff baseball are more dangerous than a Ghoul Team that has already risen from its grave. Look at the Tigers, left for doomed after their final weekend flop in the AL Central. Once a team has been left for dead, then finds a way to come back to life, it feels charmed.
La Russa never has had such a team under his command. Does he now? Did he, with Spiezio's and Taguchi's great help, start a change of momentum Friday night? If the Red Sox and White Sox can reverse their October curses, why not Tony La Russa?
