By Steve Rhodes
No rival manager has been as entwined with both Chicago baseball teams as Tony La Russa, who started his managing career with the White Sox – and whose firing is famously Jerry Reinsdorf’s biggest regret – and who went on to manage the Cubs’ greatest rival.
Buzz Bissinger’s 3 Nights in August, in fact, is a profile of La Russa as reported through the prism of a three-game series against the Cubs in 2003 – and includes plenty on his White Sox days.
Now that La Russa has retired following his World Series win, it’s a good time to go back and take a look at the Chicago portions of Bissinger’s book, as well as a few other tidbits.
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“When he started his managing career with the White Sox in the middle of the 1979 season, the prevailing sentiment was that he had been hired by owner Bill Veeck because he came cheap; his only experience was a little more than a year of managing in the minors with Knoxville and Des Moines.
“He was thirty-four years old and scared for his life. Self-doubt rattled through him – Do I really know what I’m doing? – and he became a whipping boy for the radio broadcast duo of Harry Caray and Jimmy Piersall, who offered the almost daily critique that he managed with his head squarely up his ass.
“In the insular world of baseball, where newness was anathema and crustiness a work of art, La Russa was a typical Veeckian choice, playing so far against type that he could have been sold as a novelty at the concession stand.
“His new general manager, Rollie Hemond, tried to warn La Russa that few in the game were rooting for him.
“‘You have five things going against you,’ Hemond told him. ‘You’re young. You’re handsome. You’re smart. You’re getting your law degree. You have a nice family – I don’t think you’re going to last very long.’
“Given that LaRussa was also bilingual in English and Spanish, as well as a strict vegetarian in a church of meat eaters, there may have well been seven strikes against him.”
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“La Russa finished that first season of managing in 1979 by guiding the White Sox to a .500 record, twenty-seven wins and twenty-seven losses. It was a nice performance given that the team was in disarray . . .
“[W]ith the steady patience of new White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf, who stood by La Russa as the team continued to chug and churn in the early 1980s, he somehow survived.
“In 1983, he did arrive in the Promised Land – he took the White Sox to the playoffs for the first time in his career, against the Orioles. He emerged with an undesirable conclusion, a loss of three games to one to Baltimore.”
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“Early in his career with the White Sox, he had to wear a flak jacket as the result of a death threat. The threat passed, but La Russa wore the jacket for another month because his team was winning.”
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“For eight months a year, La Russa lives by himself. During spring training, he stays at a condominium near the Cardinals’ complex in Jupiter. When the team moves north for the regular season, he stays in the residential hotel suite while his wife, Elaine, and their two daughters remain 2,000 miles away in Alamo near San Francisco. The support of La Russa’s family has enabled him to focus his life 100 percent on baseball during the season.
“But the number of times he sees them during the season can be counted on two hands – a couple series’ against the Giants and the occasional day off when he steals a plane to Oakland for a twenty-four hour reunion.
“A plaque on the wall in the La Russas’ home sums up their relationship: ‘We interrupt this marriage to bring you the baseball season.'”
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“Their daughter, Bianaca, was born in September 1979, a month after her father had started managing the White Sox. Their second daughter, Devon, was born in August 1982.
“Their births came when La Russa was most vulnerable, or felt he was most vulnerable – still cutting his teeth as the White Sox’ manager.
“Living in Des Moines, where La Russa had the Triple-A job with the White Sox, Elaine begged her husband not to make the move to the parent club in Chicago.
“She was eight months pregnant and the timing was beyond bad. Since their marriage on New Year’s Eve in 1973, they had moved nearly forty times, shuttling between spring training and the baseball season and Tony’s law school studies in the offseason. Most of their possessions were in storage, bed sheets often served as drapes, plants inevitably froze in the car on the way to some strange and faceless apartment filled with the sour odors of transcience. The thought of moving again, when Elaine was about to give birth, filled her with dread.
“A child, Tony. We’re having a child. But they moved anyway.”
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“Elaine played the baseball wife at first, quietly nursing Bianca in the stands soon after she was born. She loved the game – at least at first she loved it – and she loved even more to keep score.
“After the games, White Sox owner Bill Veeck held court at a bar called the Bard’s Room in the upper reaches of Comiskey Park. Her husband’s attendance was mandatory, so Elaine dutifully followed with Bianca, even though they weren’t allowed in the actual bar itself, because women simply were not allowed: an unwanted govenor in the bawdy, off-color atmosphere with which baseball defined itself back then.
“Instead, they sat in an adjacent room, falling asleep arm-in-arm until two or three or four in the morning, whenever Veeck, basically an insomniac, had had enough baseball talk for the night.”
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“Elaine also took her husband’s intense temperament in stride, even when his body language, after a loss, said get the hell away from me. All coaches take losses hard. But Jim Leyland, who coached under La Russa and then went on himself to manage fourteen years for the Pirates and Florida and Colorado [and, since this book was published, his current gig in Detroit], believes that La Russa magnified the impact. ‘Losing hurts all us, but it probably hurt Tony too much,’ said Leyland. And it hurt others as well.
“‘I was paranoid about not doing the job right,’ said La Russa of those early years, paranoid about not being prepared, paranoid about missing some millimeter edge there for the teaking if he could only find it. He found himself consumed by the philosophy of Paul Richards, who had managed in the big leagues for twelve years, was considered a master innovator, and was the director of the farm system for the Chicago White Sox when La Russa took over: It’s your ass. It’s your team. It’s your responsibility. There’s a strategy for every situation. So start making some decisions.
“Early in the 1983 season, Elaine was taking care of their daughters in Sarasota. The White Sox had just broken spring training there, and she planned to bring the children north to Chicago in late May or early June so the family could be together. One night, she called from Florida: She had just been diagnosed with pneumonia and required hospitalization. La Russa responded to the news with a fateful decisions, one that would cement his status as a baseball man but would also define him in another way.
“Based on a strong finish in 1982, the expectations were high for the White Sox in 1983. But the season got off to a wretched start, mired at 16 and 24. Floyd Bannister was having trouble winning anything. La Marr Hoyt had a record of 2 and 6 and Carlton Fisk was a mess at the plate. In the middle of May, the team lost eight of nine games. Toronto swept them; then Baltimore swept them. La Russa found himself fighting for his life, or what he mistook for his life.
“He had a team that was supposed to win, that had spent money on free agents and had good pitching and still wasn’t winning. The only reason he was still around was because of the vision of White Sox owner Reinsdorf, who continued to stand by him.
“So he did what he thought he had to do: He called his sister in Tampa and asked whether she would take care of the kids so he could take care of baseball.
“Only with the benefit of hindsight, twenty years of it, did he realize that the right decision was the one he hadn’t made. ‘How was I stupid enough? I should have left the team and taken care of my wife and kids. I’ve never forgiven myself for that and they’ve never forgotten.’
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“In 1996, when La Russa went to the Cardinals, Elaine elected to stay behind with the children to lead their own lives while he led his. It wasn’t for want of love, because the love in the family was intense, but because it was best for everyone involved, a division of labor that made sense in terms of what was important to each of them: Elaine in charge of parenting Bianca and Devon on the West Coast, her husband in the Midwest with nothing between him and baseball.
“From her origins as a dutiful baseball wife, Elaine realized how crucial it had become for both her and her children to have an identity beyond what her husband and their father did for a living, that he was the only one with his name spread across his shoulders.
“Back in the days when she had gone to the games, she had always noticed the other baseball wives huddled around in their enclave in the stands. Without being dismissive, she came to the conclusion that they were little more than fans with better seats and greater entitlement.
“Where do you go beyond that? she wondered. What do you do? What is your life about?
“She also noticed something else: how many marriages fell apart once the baseball stopped. It wasn’t something she wanted, just as she also knew that if she and the kids simply followed Tony to St. Louis, they would have only ended up resenting him for the disruption he had caused, for the fact that he still would be the man who wasn’t there.”
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“Home run hysteria peaked in 1998 when the Cards’ Mark McGwire and the Cubs’ Sammy Sosa battled to break perhaps the most sacred record in all of baseball, Roger Maris’ sixty-one home runs in a single season. Both players didn’t just break it; they shattered it: McGwire hitting seventy home runs and Sosa sixty-six. La Russa managed McGwire when he broke the record, and McGwire admitted that during the season he had taken a steroid precursor known as ‘Andro,’ short for androstendione.
“Andro was available over the counter at the time, although the NFL and the Olympics had banned it. McGwire made no attempt to hide his use of it. He kpet a bottle on the shelf of his locker in plain view, and La Russa does not believe that McGwire ever used anything other than Andro (he also stopped taking it in 1999 and still hit sixty-five home runs).
“He was big when he came into the league in 1986 and over time became dedicated to working out as often as six days a week in order to prevent further injuries. In the early 1990s, he actually lost weight to take pressure off a chronically sore heel; weight loss runs counter to the bloated look of someone on steroids.”
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Editor’s Note: In January 2010, McGwire admitted to using steroids. “In an interview with ESPN’s Baseball Tonight, La Russa said he didn’t know McGwire had used steroids until the slugger admitted using performance-enhancing drugs in the phone call to the manager earlier Monday,” ESPN reported.
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Comments welcome.
Posted on November 3, 2011