Frontpage Features

BY EVAN COMBS

In our fairy tale dreams of how sports play out, we hit the game winning home run, win the World Series, are named MVP, walk down the backlit tunnel as the orchestra swells and call it a career. That’s why it’s got to feel great for Tony La Russa to ride off into the sunset as a hero after winning his third World Series championship. (And also why we are secretly jealous of him).

We always complain about guys in sports that stay around too long and don’t know when to hang it up, lest they “ruin their legacy” (see: Rice, Jordan, Mays, etc), but there’s never an actual expiration date that an athlete or coach can look to that says, “After 2011, you’re pretty much going to be embarrassing yourself, and you’ll regret looking at pictures of yourself in that hideous last uniform.” And almost never does a sports career meet that inflection point of eroding skills, waning passion for the game and a possibility of winning a championship in the way that it did for Tony LaRussa.

In August, the Cardinals were dead in the water, more than 10 games out of the National League wildcard spot and looking towards an off-season where their best player would be fighting with the front office for a nearly three-tenths of a billion dollar contract. The story goes that at this time, La Russa alerted management that this would be his last as a manager.

His last season wasn’t going the way he may have scripted it, but his career was undeniably first-ballot Hall of Fame worthy. With over 2700 wins and 2 World Series championships to his name, Major League Baseball could get an early jump on etching his plaque and debating which hat would be on his head in Cooperstown. The baseball gods had other ideas, though. One Atlanta Braves collapse later, the Cardinals are in the playoffs taking down the Phillies and the Brewers for the National League pennant. All of a sudden, they’re playing for a World Series Championship as a baseball fairy tale awaited its final chapter.

La Russa’s overmanaging is the stuff of legend. But during the World Series, people wondered aloud whether Tony still had it as a manager after he royally botched a pitching change at the end of Game 5 and compounded the botchiness by botching his excuse, saying, “I think the bullpen coach misheard Lynn when I said Motte.” During the trophy ceremony, La Russa even seemed to forget the name of the team that he had just beaten. Whether these were signals that he couldn’t manage anymore is anyone’s guess. In the end, he won and that’s what we’ll remember about La Russa’s last season.

We may never know exactly why La Russa chose to walk away from the game (until his ghostwritten autobiography comes out). But whatever La Russa’s reasons for calling it a career, Congratulations to him on being able to walk away after reaching the mountaintop. Cue the orchestra and the backlight.