La Russa watches teams he once led
Baseball is a world filled with devotees and lifers, and in the history of the sport few can match Tony La Russa’s dedication or time.
Even today — in his 56th season in pro ball, his fourth with the Diamondbacks and first in an advisory role — he spends time at the ballpark watching, thinking, analyzing.
One of his former clubs, the Cardinals, is in town, and there are more than a handful of players and team personnel who remember him from his final stint in the dugout, which ended with a World Series win in 2011. The ties run deep, and each time St. Louis and Arizona face off, it marks a battle of clubs that bear the
most direct, recent fingerprints of a baseball man who, as a manager for 33 years, presided over 2,728 wins.
La Russa deflects credit for the recent success of either club. He hasn’t been involved with the Cardinals in years. And he no longer makes decisions for the Diamondbacks. Still, throughout the decades, his influence has spread across the sport in innumerable ways. La Russa was early to embrace statistical and video analysis, and he was a roster mastermind.
This series marked the first meeting between Arizona and St. Louis this season. Arizona won the first game with a thrilling late-inning comeback Tuesday, their trademark this season. Game two on Wednesday night featured a duel between longtime Cardinals ace Adam Wainwright and Diamondbacks young gunner Zack Godley. Wainwright spent seven seasons under La Russa in St. Louis. Godley was acquired by Arizona in 2014, during La Russa’s time as chief baseball officer.
Stats
At this point, La Russa stories are part of baseball lore, especially the way he compiled and used stats.
La Russa said his methods were merely about slowing the game down.
He learned to study and research in law school and carried that with him to the field. He was hired young – only 34 when he took over the Chicago White Sox in 1979. He had to face all-timers such as Sparky Anderson, Earl Weaver and Gene Mauch. Overpreparation became his method. And he would go over scenario after scenario in the dugout so that he could make good decisions in crucial moments.
He took notes on each game – “how it was won, how it was lost” – a habit he learned from Dick Williams, who guided the Oakland A’s to back-to-back World Series titles in the 1970s. Eventually, these reminders of specific details and situations grew to include the charts of his longtime partner, pitching coach Dave Duncan.
After a while, La Russa and Duncan’s clubs would “shade” their defenses – “we didn’t shift,” he said – and come up with pitching strategies based on these penciland-paper breakdowns.
Advanced statistical analysis has since become common, and famous from the book and movie “Moneyball.”
Under first-year General Manager Mike Hazen, the Diamondbacks have surged in part because of how they employ digitized, updated and expanded metrics.
Video
Video analysis also was in its infancy when La Russa and Duncan helped popularize the practice.
Duncan, who serves as Diamondbacks special assistant to the general manager and pitching consultant, became interested in breaking down tape “like football and basketball coaches,” La Russa said.
He and Duncan, when they were with the Oakland A’s, started working with Chad Blair – “we called him the ‘secret weapon,’” La Russa said, recalling a nickname documented by author Buzz Bissinger in the bestselling “Three Nights in August” – and expanded their use of video until it became an essential part of their strategy.
Blair went with La Russa and Duncan to the Cardinals. He works for the club today under manager Mike Matheny, who played for La Russa for five years. Matheny took the Cardinals to the playoffs in each of his first four seasons, starting the year after La Russa’s retirement. He credits Duncan with helping him learn what to look for on tape and said it remains an important tool.
Today, in the visiting clubhouse underneath Chase Field, several computers and monitors sit at a large table where players and coaches can watch and rewind and search for advantages, another common practice that La Russa helped expand.
Lineups
La Russa also gained a reputation as a tinkerer who would buck conventional wisdom to try things his own way. He famously put catcher Carlton Fisk near the top of his batting order.
“In 1983,” Bissinger wrote, “La Russa started putting Fisk at No. 2 even though he was a prodigious home-run hitter. … Later, when La Russa managed the American League in the 1989 All-Star game, he took his theory of danger a step further when he put Bo Jackson in the one-hole.”
Today, stat gurus are debating the benefits of putting non-traditional players higher in the order. Conventional wisdom says speedy, little guys hit first, scrappy guys hit next, and power guys follow.
But it sometimes makes more sense to do away with convention, as Diamondbacks manager Torey Lovullo knows.
It’s the result of uncanny coincidence, rather than direct influence. But Lovullo – while crediting Joe Maddon as an inspiration – landed on a strategy that would remind those who know the old stories of La Russa: He’s put guys like Chris Herrmann and Chris Iannetta at the top of the order on a team that so far has one of the best records in baseball.