The Chris Moeller Archives

One hundred and seventy years (or so) after the game's creation, it's still highly debatable how important the field manager actually is to the success of a baseball team. Young viewers, and a few old ones as well, may wonder why it is that the baseball manager dresses like his players when the same thing does not happen in football, basketball, hockey, or soccer. Well, it's because for the first six decades or so of action, the manager was simply one of the players, a team captain, as it were. He wrote out the lineup, but he also grabbed a glove, most often to play first base, like my dad in couples co-ed softball during the 1980s. That's why they're called "managers," not "coaches." They're not teacher and students. They're more like fellow lodge members.

For the most part baseball managers don't draw up plays, but they do some shuffling of the game pieces about the field. It's the only one of the team sports mentioned above in which a player substitution must last for the remainder of the game. Still, it's the players that play. The offense in baseball isn't run from a playbook with 400-some plays. The defense doesn't have a "scheme." Either the batter hits the ball or he doesn't. Either the pitcher throws strikes or his career dies as he's trying. This is also why baseball is the great sport of democratic society.

What Tony LaRussa has been, more than anything else, over his three decades in the game, is the truest believer that what a baseball manager does matters. He's like the film director that walks his actors through every one of their screen movements and line readings. This is not inherently a criticism, mind you. Actors-- and players-- often crave guidance. This approach often eliminates needless confusion and gross inefficiency. It provides needed intensity and focus. It's also frequently maddening.

LaRussa teams have often been needlessly tight and ineffective in big games, in my estimation, particularly when they're the statistically favored club. I've frequently argued, to anyone who'll listen, that a team with competitive, single-minded leaders like Albert Pujols, Chris Carpenter, and Yadier Molina doesn't require anybody to motivate them. It just becomes unneeded pressure. Professional players can be trusted to act professionally-- to even lead themselves, I would argue. It's not peculiar that LaRussa pals around in his free time with basketball and football coaches like Bobby Knight and Bill Parcells. His leadership style lends itself traditionally to those other sports in which innovative play-calling and the raising of the performers' adrenaline are vital attributes.

I have no science to support this claim, but I suspect that the fans that are most easily aggravated by LaRussa are those that tolerate the least micromanaging by others over their own lives, and those that tend to roll their eyes at the attempts of others to motivate them. Here, I'm describing myself. After 14 years in the professional world, I'm at my lowest ebb ever for tolerating the "constructive criticism" of the supervisory class. I want to be shown the trust that I know what I'm doing.

LaRussa's players are in adoration of him as he exits. None of the 2011 champion Cardinals, and they are champion personalities indeed, have a bad word to say about him, but then it's worth pointing out that the many who have were shown the door long ago. The team that remains is epic, which is why it's hard to criticize anything about the man today, but with all the praise being heaped upon the manager this week, you won't hear anybody say this: "He's such a great manager, anybody could play for him." LaRussa did not get the most out of every player that ever played for him. A few very important players rebelled over the years, and sometimes in very public and negative fashion.

Still, it's hard not to like sometimes a guy with such a droll sense of humor, and a guy who genuinely loves animals so much. He said as recently as yesterday that one of the reasons he came to the Cardinals in 1995 was because he thought they had the most beautiful uniforms in sports and also he looked forward to seeing the Budweiser Clydesdales on the field with regularity. That's downright adorable. Yesterday, one of the Clydesdales at Grant's Farm in St. Louis was renamed "Tony LaRussa," and during the Championship parade, LaRussa rode atop the beer wagon.

It's impossible to argue that the Cardinals' great success over LaRussa's 16 years is not his doing to a large extent. I'll go to my grave contending that he tinkers too much and involves himself too much in the action, but his clubs, as a collective group, have always matched his demanding personality and his drive. If the club he managed this year, that refused to give up against all odds, becomes his enduring legacy, he will be well served by history.

He leaves at the very top. He made his retirement announcement this morning less than 72 hours after winning his third World Championship, and I can't help but believe that the timing of his departure speaks more about his legendary competitiveness than anything else that came before it. He leaves needing fewer than 40 wins to move into 2nd place all-time in managerial wins, which deadens charges of narcissism. Bitter competitors in Milwaukee and Cincinnati are denied another chance to beat him. His second title with the Cardinals breaks a tie with the Ozzie/Whitey 1980s regime he succeeded, and it dims the memory of his first decade of near-misses when many fans refused to accept his style of play and his personality in contrast with their earlier heroes. It's fitting, and not coincidental in the slightest, that perhaps the most coldly calculating and over-prepared manager in baseball history has chosen to leave at the very worst possible time for his detractors to criticize him. That's how competitive this guy is.