Tony La Russa Conveys Managerial Wisdom

Former St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony La Russa held a three-hour interview and retrospective discussion titled “A Champ’s Perspective” with Bob Costas as co-host Friday night at the Peabody Opera House in downtown St. Louis. Accounts from the discussion are provided by MLB.com’s Matthew Leach. We’ll go over some of the more interesting Q & A items from the event.

Directly from a video clip located in the article, La Russa is asked by Costas about how the team was handling the 10.5 game deficit in the wild card standings in late August. La Russa mentioned a conversation with Chris Carpenter during a Sunday loss to the Dodgers, the last game of a three game sweep. Carpenter inquired with La Russa about whether his manager was going to conduct a meeting. Carpenter felt it was important to have a players only meeting after the game.

La Russa suggested they have the meeting in the early morning before the next game instead as it held more weight if the meeting was not part of a typical “cover your butt” players meeting held after a game designed to let media and fans know the players “cared”. Carpenter took the suggestion to heart and held the meeting at 3:00 AM when there would not be any media members around.

La Russa told Carpenter that he should let the team know they needed to regain the urgency of winning. He wanted them to know that they couldn’t win on their guts and resiliency alone any longer. They should treat each game as if it was there last, or just like a Game 7 of the World Series. This ironically became a good practice for the Cardinals as just about every game from then on was exactly like a Game 7. Eventually they would play and win a true Game 7 in the World Series.

La Russa mentioned that his hopes at the time were that the Cardinals be able to maintain second place and end the season on a positive note in order to “regain respect”. The idea of reaching the postseason or World Series for that matter was not realistic in his mind.

He was asked by Costas about how he handled the rest of the season knowing he was set to “quit”. La Russa amusingly and quickly retorted “retired”. Costas rephrased and La Russa went on to say that he didn’t do anything differently. He felt that he was always “100% into the competition” regardless of his decision to retire.

La Russa spoke of the fly ball off the bat of David Freese which ended up being the game-tying triple in Game 6 of the World Series. He said he felt that the Rangers may have been playing on the assumption that they had already won and that the Cardinals would not fight to get back into the game.

It is interesting to see how an experienced manager thinks. La Russa managed for three different teams over 35 seasons and 5,097 regular season games. Seldom, if ever did he look frazzled in the dugout, but it is telling that he felt the pressure just like any of us would during a high tension situation we may experience in our professions.

La Russa obviously put immense pressure on himself to perform, but seemingly learned at some point that placing that pressure on his players was not beneficial. He was also smart enough to realize that there would come a point in time where he would at least have to have the discussion about his players’ performance. While it seemed that time had come, he allowed the words to instead come from one of the veterans in the dugout.

La Russa probably felt is was better to come from Carpenter. It is true that some players rally behind their manager and I am sure they would have been receptive to a La Russa meeting. But dialogue coming from the staff leader holds more weight. The fact that La Russa was thinking of holding the meeting despite knowing he would be retired in just over a month shows his commitment to himself and the team.

La Russa showed patience right up until the last minute of Game 6 of the World Series too. We all want to think that players will fight at all times to win. But in reality, it takes a group of special players to play until the final out and another to actually perform under that pressure. If the team’s manager is one who portrays calm during these instances it goes a long way. It is also true that the manager’s perception of the team, that they were resilient fighters, carries a lot of weight.

Without a combination of the two, the Cardinals would have been hard pressed to make the postseason and could have been left for dead. Nelson Cruz may have felt that was the case during that series changing moment in the top of the ninth in Game 6. The Cardinals were alive and kicking until the actual final out. This is a testament to their heart and the man who believed in them.

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