This is not a eulogy. I had Tony La Russa’s Topps baseball card as early as 1987. The first time I ever wondered what it was like to be him was after Game 1 88, sitting at Journeyman’s Pizza in Doniphan MO. One of the adults said “There was nothing La Russa could do. He had his pitcher.” I wondered what it felt like to manage a juggernaut to the World Series and then have that happen.
The next season the A’s sort of became my second-favorite team, mostly cause I front-ran, and besides it’s totally acceptable to have two favorite teams when you’re ten years old. Canseco was my favorite player, which I suck for. I didn’t think much about managerial stuff; I didn’t follow the game as holistically then. I tried to read Men At Work but retired from the fray early on; I didn’t have the stuff for it.
My adult thoughts about TLR are well-archived. I’ve only done this blog for two seasons and there’s still enough anti-Tony vitriol to build a scrap-iron effigy of him. Extrapolate back from there and he was a confusing, tormented IRL evil genius who I more than wished, more than once, there was a God to destroy.
2010 was when it sort of all came together against La Russa; a talented team never found its rudder and he really did make some of his most bizarre decisions that season; batting Aaron Miles leadoff in a crucial late-August game against the Reds is innocuous retroactively but after it I swore I’d never support his return as manager. Last offseason the Brendan Ryan fiasco further alienated me and a bunch of others—the classic TLR reverse-ageism of it spontaneously led to a Draft Joe Maddon movement on the blogs, which only intensified when Rasmus got drummed out of town. Of course, the Cardinals wouldn’t be champions w/o that trade.
I think all of us actually savored having a manager like Tony who everyone hated. The lode-sized competitive streak, the double-standards, the refusal to not back his own guys, the catty comments, all of it created a higher solidarity factor. There’s that thing Bill Watterson said about creating Calvin: he wouldn’t want him in his house but he couldn’t live without him? Or something. That’s TLR to Cardinals fans: sometimes we found him personally really distasteful but we knew he could save us. No other manager besides La Russa has ever been that good at making his own players and fans feel like he was PT-109-era Jack Kennedy, that he’d tow each one of us to safety by a belt in his teeth if necessary.
I wish he’d written a Ronald Reagan letter to the fans about riding into the sunset of his life. Other than that, this is the most perfect retirement ever. Thanks, Tony, for the two titles and the two million headaches and the Al Swearengen vibes; it will only kind of be the same w/o you.
