2 Tony La Russa innovations that caught on and 1 he'd like to forget

Tony La Russa was a madman. That's likely what teams in the 1980s thought of the upstart manager of the Chicago White Sox and Oakland Athletics who eschewed traditional baseball wisdom at the time and marched to the beat of his own drum. La Russa's radical managerial decisions would lead to three World Series titles, including two with the St. Louis Cardinals, and he would win the Manager of the Year Award four times.

The brilliant baseball mind began his career as most major league managers do, playing professionally for several seasons, including parts of six seasons where he received cups of coffee at the big league level. La Russa was not a successful player in the majors, holding a career .199 batting average in 176 at-bats and failing to swat a single home run.

A year after retiring as a player, La Russa began managing the Iowa Oaks, the Triple-A affiliate of the White Sox. A year later, in 1979, La Russa received the call to manage the White Sox about two-thirds of the way through the season. At 34, he was the youngest manager in the major leagues, and he steered the 46-60 White Sox to a 27-27 record for the remainder of the season.

La Russa was well acquainted with Dave Duncan, who had played with La Russa on the Athletics in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In 1986, while Duncan was serving as a coach with the White Sox, he and La Russa were both fired after the team had gotten off to 26-38 start. The Athletics hired La Russa two weeks later, and he brought Duncan on to serve as Oakland's pitching coach, which started a partnership that would last 28 years.

La Russa managed the Athletics to American League pennants in 1988 and 1990, and they won it all under him in 1989. Afterward, the team began to slip, and La Russa resigned his position after 1995. That was when the Cardinals came calling.

The Cardinals and La Russa were a match made in heaven, as he was able to employ his strategic mind to the more cerebral nature of National League ball. Sixteen years and two championships later, La Russa announced his retirement. He briefly returned to manage the Chicago White Sox in 2021 and 2022.

La Russa popularized these two strategies but swung and missed with the third.