I had been working on a big long blog post during the entirety of the playoffs and had planned on posting it after the World Series. However, the retiring of Tony LaRussa kind of made my finishing remarks on that flit right out of my mind and instead here I am writing a post about him and his retirement. Honestly, his retirement should not come as any surprise really. He has been waffling on the edge of retirement since the 2006 championship. I think each year it just seemed like a year that he didn't want to end on since then. 2007 was a year with a subpar team and a non-playoff finish. 2008 was a frustrating year where they finished outside the playoffs and he spent the last part of the year pressing for improvement to the bullpen, Mo held part and Tony saw lots of cheap relievers trade teams, any one of which literally might have got them in the playoffs. 2009 was a year Mo made big moves, yet they flopped in the first round of the playoffs while being a favorite. 2010 was a disappointing year, finishing five back from the Reds, while Tony spent all year trying to jumpstart an anemic offense and piece together a rotation that was really only 2.5 pitchers deep. But 2011, that is a different story altogether. 2011 was a year any manager in baseball history could retire after and be proud. Truthfully it appears TLR has been telling management this could be it since August, but frankly, I don't know how much that means. He is apparently been doing the same thing each August for the last few years. It just so happens that this time he meant it. It, however, should have been obvious that this might have been the year for him to call it quits from the way he managed the games. I had commented several times through the last month of the season and on into the post-season that TLR was managing a bit different than he normally does. He, as I like to use this as a metaphor quite often, was managing ball games like his hair was on fire. More aptly, he was managing every game like it was his last. This all makes sense now, he was managing every game like it was the last season he was ever going to manage.
While I am sitting here it occurs to me that the things I am going to write seem more like I am writing an obituary than anything else. I guess that is somewhat true, its the end of a Hall of Fame career, and a Hall of Fame career that has changed the very fabric of how baseball is played more than any other manager since John McGraw, and perhaps ever. This is not hyperbole, this is just simple baseball fact, just most don't realize it. TLR has always been different from other baseball people. He has a degree in Industrial Engineering. He also has a law degree from Florida State University and in fact he took and passed the BAR in the state of Florida. Which leads to a great quote from Dick Williams. When hearing that TLR had passed the BAR he responded, "unlike Larussa, I would never pass a bar." TLR is also a vegetarian, and spends most of his free time working with he charity, ARF. (Animal Rescue Foundation) He is just not like most old school baseball men. Can you imagine many ball players touting their vegetarian nature? Prince Fielder notwithstanding anyway, I have my doubts about the validity of that. The point of all this is that Larussa is a thinker, and has always been a thinker. He thinks about baseball the way academics obsess over their respective fields. That is not to say he is always right, he wasn't, but he was always, always thinking.
What most people don't realize about Larussa is how much he changed that game, and not for the better in some peoples estimation. Before Larussa, there was really no such thing as a one inning "closer." He took an older somewhat washed up starter named Dennis Eckersley and proclaimed that he would pitch only one inning at a time and only the 9th inning when his team had the lead. This was pretty crazy thinking at the time. There were closers or "stoppers" at the time, but they were used very differently. They were often used to close out all close games, and even a lot of games that weren't close. They were also used for two innings pretty often. The idea of setting aside a reliever purely for this specific purpose was pretty extreme. Of course, Eck went on to win a Cy Young and MVP award and now pretty much every team in baseball uses a closer in that fashion. Perhaps a bit ironically, St. Louis did not use a closer in this manner for the bulk of 2011. Larussa went on to expand on this concept. He began keeping a lefty specialist in his bullpen. A left hander that only pitched to the opposing teams best left handers late in the game. He used this to great effect with guys such as Rick Honeycutt and Tony Fossas. He then started using guys that tended to pitch only to righthanders. He is, for better or worse, the man who started the trend for games to last 3 and a half hours nightly. He began playing the matchups in an obsessive desire to always get the right pitcher facing the right hitter and he didn't care if he got the last six outs while using six different pitchers. Once again, for better or worse, this habits, although not to his extreme generally, permeated the way baseball operated in the late innings.
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