There are a couple of elements that make discussing Tony La Russa’s performance in 2021 inherently difficult. He has a plaque in Cooperstown, and he wears his Hall of Fame ring in the dugout. His body of work spans thousands of games, making the dissection of any one seem trivial.
There’s also the matter that he’s 76 years old and spent the previous nine years outside a dugout, which makes it too easy to use his age for concern-trolling or wisecracking, obscuring the times it may actually be at least partially relevant.
The thought I keep coming back to is the one that popped up when the White Sox hired La Russa, in that their soft-baked managerial decision-making generally works as well as it deserves to. Of course you shouldn’t succeed when the manager is actively undermining the front office. Of course you shouldn’t succeed when you insist upon a manager with no experience or previously expressed desire. Of course you can do better than a bench coach elevated to the main gig without interviewing outside candidates, although Rick Renteria possessed credentials that made him worth a shot, and he ultimately served the mission.
La Russa at least represented a new spin on the White Sox’s steadfast refusal to conduct themselves like a healthy organization in this regard, because while he was 76 years old, nine years removed from his last job, forced upon the front office by an owner resolving a 30-year-old regret, even with an unresolved second DUI charge on his record at the time, he also has the game’s most impressive résumé, and he was able to put together a credible coaching staff mixing a handful of incumbents with some intriguing new names. This wasn’t Robin Ventura assembling a crack team of holdovers and guys who had the same agent.
But it doesn’t take much for the concerns to resurface. Last week, La Russa’s Animal Rescue Foundation was shaken to the family level by toxic-culture allegations. This week, he goes and looks like Robin Ventura in the dugout, keeping his starting pitcher in the game several batters too long without a good reason afterward. There were multiple reasons why this hiring could bust the day it happened, and La Russa is courting both the personal and professional aspects at the moment.
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Watching a gassed Lucas Giolito face four unnecessary batters on Tuesday night took me back to June 28, 2015, when Ventura let Jeff Samardzija blow a 4-0 lead to a better Tigers team in the eighth inning. It had all the same hallmarks: extended at-bats near the 100-pitch mark, diminishing life and command, louder contact, and yet Ventura didn’t pull him until Detroit had the opportunity to post five runs.
After the game, Ventura defended the decision:
“He still had something left in the tank,” White Sox manager Robin Ventura said. “Victor being a switch-hitter, you are taking your chances either way, whether you get up (Zach) Duke at that point or Put or Jake (Petricka). He still had enough in the tank to go get them and it didn’t work out.”
Samardzija didn’t have much left, but at least in this case, you could at least say that Samardzija insisted otherwise:
“I felt good,” Samardzija said. “Absolutely. I feel fine. I can pitch, man. I felt good out there. It’s just about making the pitches.”
Six years later, Giolito wasn’t as willing to erect a false front:
Giolito was unhappy with his performance, but his postgame explanation of how the seventh went awry after six innings of normalcy was unambiguous.
“I didn’t have much left in the tank,” Giolito said, before pivoting back to the more familiar self-flagellation of a top athlete. “The seventh was my inning. I have to get the job done. I didn’t. It doesn’t matter how I’m feeling.”
Some may see the candor as evidence of softness, but a lot has changed in six years, because the threats of fatigue are better understood. In fact, the White Sox hired a guy who specializes in the field. You’d like players to have at least some idea of how much they can offer at a given point, even if you also want them to have the confidence to overcome a shortage. Failing that, you need to have a manager that can make the decision for him.
And here’s where La Russa face-planted. James Fegan transcribed the full answer, and while the first 13 words reflect poorly on him …
“Is that what he said? Well, then, that’s my fault for not recognizing…”
… the next 18 are worse.
… because I looked at it, he walked the leadoff guy, which wasn’t good, and he gets two outs (note: he got one out), at that point, I was confident he would get the third out.”
Maybe La Russa misspoke when he said Giolito got two outs, but he managed as though Giolito got two outs. It looked a lot like the way La Russa handled Matt Foster back on April 7, because Foster actually recorded two outs, which was the main reason why La Russa let Foster wage three more unsuccessful battles to cap off an ugly evening before he went to the bullpen.
La Russa fell on his sword then …
“That’s the clearest example of why I’m upset with myself,” La Russa said. “He faced too many hitters. That’s lousy managing. Pushed him too far. Stupid, lousy, no excuse.”
… but the self-critique rings hollow when he makes the a worse version of the same mistake three weeks later. At least Foster was a reasonable first man in after a well-timed hook on Dallas Keuchel, and La Russa had the outs right. Giolito was left to fend for himself despite getting the game to the late innings by himself with a rested bullpen behind him, perhaps because La Russa fed wrong information into his own thought process.
There’s also the matter that La Russa didn’t stop with not stopping Giolito. He also let Billy Hamilton and Leury García bat for themselves as the tying run down three in the eighth inning, even with Zack Collins and Andrew Vaughn on the bench, and Luis González there to preserve defensive integrity afterward. Nothing about it makes sense, and even La Russa’s previous decisions contradict the logic. Hamilton entered the game as a defensive replacement for Jake Lamb because the Sox had a one-run lead. If the Sox should find themselves down three later, shouldn’t Hamilton then require an offensive replacement?
That’s not the way La Russa saw it. He said he was looking for a single, as if Hamilton and García were better bets for keeping the line moving.
* * * * * * * * *
Tuesday night’s game was La Russa’s 5,115th as a manager, but only the 22nd as the manager of a White Sox team this century. Everybody in his position, whether an icon or a total greenhorn, has some awkward moments in April as he makes playing time for the entire roster, tests skill sets and judges the likelihood of regression in either direction. To that end, part of the reason La Russa stayed with Giolito is because the bullpen has failed La Russa plenty this season, even when La Russa couldn’t have timed his pitching changes any better.
The raging against La Russa’s decisions on Tuesday was exacerbated by bigger issues. The offense couldn’t capitalize on five Detroit errors, going 0-for-13 with runners in scoring position because it continued its season-long issue of pounding too many low pitches into the ground. Adam Eaton added to the discomfort, reenacting the Stations of the Cross by falling down three times. None of these factors absolve La Russa, but they do make his part look and feel worse.
The problem pertinent to La Russa is that a game like this feeds the specific behind-the-times fears his idiosyncratic hiring generates. Every manager makes mistakes, but a guy like La Russa is not supposed to let a game overwhelm him the way it did Ventura, and he’s certainly not supposed to get the outs wrong. Then again, maybe it’s unfair to expect Tony La Russa to be Tony La Russa after nine years away, especially nine years where so much of the approach to the game shifted, especially if he has a different set of off-the-field problems that indicate he’s not keeping up. (He’s quoted in a San Francisco Chronicle article saying, “You can’t accomplish what we’ve accomplished when you’re toxic,” which is even more wrongheaded than relying on Hamilton and García.)
I don’t want to be thinking about that, but I also don’t want to be ignoring it, because Jerry Reinsdorf incurred this risk of hiring a Hall of Famer Baseball Person for everybody when he assumed the label stopped after three words. This is the part that neither the fans nor the front office signed up for, but just like a surprisingly leaky bullpen and a slew of outfield injuries, we also have to adjust to the hand we’re dealt.
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April 28, 2021 at 11:09PM
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Tony La Russa's bad night a mere part of a rocky start - Sox Machine
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