THERE’S NOTHING QUITE LIKE GOING TO YOUR FIRST WORLD Series—this is true whether that first trip is as a manager or simply as a fan. My first trip was spent watching from the stands.
In 1979, the year I had managed all of fifty-four games as an in-season replacement and had won exactly half of them, Roland Hemond asked me to attend the Series with him. Roland had a policy of sportsmanship that we had to make an appearance at the World Series to congratulate the league champions. By that point, Bill Veeck felt that I’d shown enough to be hired for the next season. Going to the World Series was both a reward and a kind of graduate school seminar on baseball.
Thinking back on that first trip, it was ironic that in 2011 our bullpen had just tied a record held by the ’79 Pittsburgh Pirates, since they had played the Orioles in that World Series. Obviously, we weren’t the only baseball people at the games. Major League Baseball hosted executives, scouts, and managers from all the teams, put us up in the same hotel, and provided us with transportation to and from the games. That was nice, but it was also in some senses horrifying for a newbie like me. I sat there among baseball men with hundreds of years of experience between them and listened as the game and the managerial decisions of two legends, Chuck Tanner of the Pirates and Earl Weaver of the Orioles, were discussed. Actually, it wasn’t like a grad school seminar—it was more like a cross between analyzing a law school mock trial and observing an operation while sitting above an operating room theater in medical school.
These guys debated, cross-examined, laid out their exhibits from A to Z, and called in expert witnesses (mostly themselves) in looking at every nuance of the choices the two clubs’ leaders were making. They also incised, resected, and grafted while performing a play-ectomy on every pitch. I sat there mute, wondering, Holy crap—could I ever survive this kind of scrutiny? It was only after I finally made it to my first postseason in ’83 and we lost to the Orioles in the ALCS that I got my answer. That year we lost in four games, though our elimination game became a classic: we went 0–0 through nine innings, only to lose in the tenth. Despite the disappointment, I learned several things in that series, but perhaps most important, I realized that concentrating totally on what the job requires is the only way any manager can ever handle the pressure of his peers’ intense evaluation.
I knew that, as a young manager, I lacked expertise and experience. I had been a position player, and despite how closely I observed games and asked questions about pitchers and pitching, my knowledge of that area was still a deficit for me. The only thing that would make up for that was more experience, more observing, and more questioning. The same is true with a pitcher-turned-manager—that kind of manager is going to be less comfortable making offensive decisions. Fortunately, you don’t have to have extensive experience in all phases of the game. That’s why you have other coaches on your staff.
As much as all of them contributed, I knew from the earliest days of my career that I was the one who had to make the decisions—all of them and all of the time. That’s what I was paid to do, and if my ass and my job were going to be on the line based on those decisions, then I wasn’t going to turn them over to anyone else. That’s just the reality of being a manager in the big leagues. That’s the ideal “take charge” attitude that fits your responsibility as a major league manager. If at first you’re not ready, then learn as fast as you can.
Besides expertise and experience, another thing you need in order to make decisions and manage is the courage of your conviction. To be honest, I don’t know where I got that from. In 1980, when I was thirty-five years old and had still less than a season’s worth of experience under my belt, the Baltimore Orioles came into town fresh off that crushing loss in the ’79 Series. Earl Weaver, who was twelve years into his initial fourteen-year run as the Orioles’ skipper, after eleven and a half seasons managing in the minors, was well known for his baseball acumen and his temper. Before the first game of the series, the Orioles were scheduled to take their batting practice at 5:15 P.M. Roger Bossard, Chicago’s legend of a groundskeeper, came to me before that and said that we should bag batting practice. The field was too wet from the rain that had been moving through. We informed the Orioles through the proper channels, and I thought that was that—no BP for either team. At about 5:20, one of our coaches told me that Earl Weaver had confronted a member of the grounds crew, saying that since the rain had stopped, he wanted the tarp off the field and the batting cage rolled out. Earl made it clear that it had to be done.
What could they do in the face of that except do what Weaver demanded and then inform me? I stomped out of my office, feeling like my head was going to explode. I charged out onto the field, where the Orioles were already hitting, and yelled at their batting practice pitcher to stop. When he didn’t, I ran out to the protective screen in front of the pitcher waving my arms. There I was, standing between the hitter and the pitcher, going off on them while their BP pitcher gave it right back to me. Now I was really pissed. I told them if we couldn’t take batting practice, then neither could they. No batting practice meant no batting practice.
I told the grounds crew to roll the cage back out behind the center-field fence. I stood right where I had been, my fists thrust into my back pockets, my temples throbbing, and my jaw clenched. As the Orioles walked off the field, some thought I was nuts, and a few guys said something to the effect that Earl was going to have my ass for this one. I didn’t care.
What they’d done was push several of my buttons. First, they violated my sense of fairness. If we couldn’t hit before the game, they shouldn’t hit before the game. They’d also taken a shot at our status—we’re the Orioles, and you’re the White Sox. Forget that shit. More than anything else, though, I knew this: I was responsible for everything that went on as it related to the playing of the game on that day. They tried to take advantage of the members of our family, the grounds crew, and that wasn’t going to fly even if they were Orioles. Sitting here today, thinking about my reaction that day, I can see that they were right. I was nuts. But I understand why I acted as I did.
Over the years I was involved in a bunch of situations like this one—some of them this confrontational, others less so. They had several common denominators: taking the responsibility I was entrusted with seriously; reducing the issue as best I could to what was right versus what was wrong; and mostly, knowing there was always a score at the end of the game and we were trying to have more runs than the other side.
WE’D DONE MORE THAN OKAY SINCE THEN, AND WITH THE OPENING game of the World Series set to begin two days after we’d eliminated the Brewers, we had some work to do. While we hadn’t had to do extra preparation work for the Phillies and Brewers, because we’d played them so much during the season and not long before the playoffs began, there was a big difference in preparing for the Texas Rangers in the World Series, because we hadn’t played them in years. Two days wasn’t a lot of time for either club to prepare, but the thrill of being in the Series offset any fatigue we might have experienced.
Since the Rangers were not a familiar opponent, we really went after any video of their hitters and pitchers we could look at. For several years, we had been relying on Chad Blair’s video analysis for our regular-season opponents. We had another important advantage—Dunc’s pitching and defense charts. All the information that Dunc supplied from his meticulously kept charts and sophisticated categories fit well with the current look we were taking from the videos.
Although we refrained from contacting any American League friends—to avoid any conflicts of interest—we did have advance scouting reports. Mo had assigned Matt Slater to set up a number of scouting pairs for the various playoff teams and contenders. Mike Juhl and Bill Gayton handled the Rangers for us.
Dunc took charge of formulating our plan to face the Ranger hitters. He identified the most dangerous area to stay out of with each hitter and other vulnerabilities. On game days, we would share this information with the starter in person, then give the relievers an oral report in a separate meeting. We’d all heard so much about Elvis Andrus, Michael Young, Ian Kinsler, Josh Hamilton, Adrian Beltre, and Mike Napoli, but it was Nelson Cruz who’d had a breakout performance against the Tigers in the ALCS. He’d gone 1-for-15 in the first round, but then hit .364 with six home runs, driving in thirteen. He was hot coming in obviously, so we had a look to see his at-bats against the Tigers. David Murphy, another lesser-known Ranger, had gotten seven hits in seventeen at-bats. These Rangers were a potent offensive club.
Up and down the lineup, they really took healthy swings. If our pitchers kept their deliveries on the edges of the plate, changed speeds with those pitches, and mixed location, up and especially down and in and out, the Rangers’ hitters would react like any other good hitters. It would be tough for them to center balls if our pitcher messed with their balance and timing. That would be important against a club that had hit just slightly over .300 with runners in scoring position against Detroit.
We also had the advantage of having watched the Rangers and Detroit play on television. Their games often played on our days off or at different game times from ours. Even though the last game of that series was very one-sided—Texas won 15–5—we felt we got an unintentional assist from the Tigers in being able to watch them pitch against Texas. Detroit pitched a lot of that series very effectively against a very dangerous lineup.
Our hitters had access to the scouts’ written report on the Rangers’ pitching staff to complement the meetings led by Mark McGwire and Mike Aldrete. During the regular season, the hitters could study all their own at-bats against a particular team’s starters or relievers. We didn’t do that with the Rangers because we didn’t have guys with a whole lot of at-bats against any of their pitchers. Before each game, the hitters got a more detailed review of the Rangers’ staff.
Generally, their starters—C. J. Wilson, Colby Lewis, Matt Harrison, and Derek Holland—had live arms but had combined for an 0-2 record in the ALCS. Their bullpen had a good right-hand and left-hand mix. Their two right-handers (Scott Feldman and Mark Lowe) and two left-handers (Darren Oliver and Mike Gonzalez) fit well with their three late-inning specialists—Mike Adams, Alexi Ogando, and Neftali Feliz, the closer. Like our previous playoff series, their bullpen got a fair amount of work and did well. The starters went 28.2 innings, while the bullpen went 26.1 innings. Matt Harrison was the only starter who got out of the Tigers series with an ERA below 4.0. Just as we looked for vulnerabilities and tendencies in their hitters, we did the same with the pitchers, and so we looked closely at those numbers.
Although the numbers said that this was likely to be a high-scoring series, they didn’t—and couldn’t—take into account a couple of things. First, lack of familiarity works in the pitcher’s favor. Second, this was the World Series, and how guys would perform with so much on the line wasn’t something that any metric could predict. That was the human equation—and it was what made the games worth playing.
Today you can get a lot of information from different statistical services. This is helpful in all phases, including the running game. But you have to be careful with raw numbers: the total number of stolen bases, for instance, doesn’t accurately account for how the bases were stolen. Sometimes a team might have put on the hit-and-run, and other times it might have been a straight steal. Those differences won’t show up on the stats.
More than anything else, the intelligence you tried to gather on the running game was the situation and counts when they were likely to put a runner in motion. Kinsler and Andrus, the two hitters at the top of their order, were more likely to straight steal. The Rangers didn’t hit-and-run much, not with Josh Hamilton and the rest of their bashers to follow.
We felt we had a good to very good defense against the running game. We had Molina’s great throwing arm, and we had a bunch of pitchers who had good moves to first base and were capable of improving their release times to the plate. We felt it would be important to neutralize their running game, because stolen bases were not featured in our offense. An added deterrent was that three of their four starters were left-handed, and they generally do a better job of holding runners close. However, our run-manufacturing game stressed hit-and-runs and good baserunning. We were above-average in these areas in 2011. Their catcher, Mike Napoli, was a plus offensively with thirty home runs, but didn’t possess as strong an arm as Yadi’s.
Another edge we had was home-field advantage—thanks to Prince Fielder of Milwaukee, who homered in the All-Star Game to give the National League the victory. If necessary, Games 6 and 7 would be at our place. We had our rotation set through the first four games while remaining flexible and able to adjust as the Series continued. Carp would open Game 1, followed by Garcia, Lohse, and Jackson.
Our immediate concern, obviously, was the opening game of the Series. Despite our success in bouncing back from game 1 losses, we didn’t want to put ourselves in that hole. Even if we didn’t know recent history—the winner of Game 1 had gone on to win the World Series seven of the last eight times, twelve of the previous fourteen, and nineteen of the last twenty-three—we wanted to establish ourselves early in the game and early in the Series, especially at home.
The magic number for official team meetings is six—three during the season and one before each playoff series. You only get to six if you reach the World Series. Interestingly, since our first meeting before opening day, this meeting before the World Series was only our second meeting at home.
As we usually did, we held the off-day meeting in the clubhouse dining room. I liked the idea of being in a smaller setting where we were surrounded by team photos of winning celebrations—graphic proof that the real fun of competing was winning. Surrounded by photos of Ozzie Smith hitting a playoff-game-winning home run against the Dodgers (the picture was so vivid I could almost hear echoes of Jack Buck’s call, “Go crazy, folks. Go crazy. The Cardinals have won on a home run by the Wizard!”); David Eckstein about to be mobbed by his teammates after a 2005 grand slam; the guys in the clubhouse after the 2006 World Series win; Bob Gibson delivering a pitch in gaining his seventh straight Series win. Seeing those images made you want to add even more to that stirring Cardinal tradition.
As was the case before the NLDS and the NLCS, our staff felt that asking this club to push harder, dig deeper, and care more was the wrong message. We all agreed that this team remained focused on playing as hard and as well as they could and possessed a confidence that was hard to beat. The meeting would be brief and would include only a handful of points.
Since I had been taught to speak carefully, I had always taken time to think through and prepare my comments. I’d tried to keep them in the ten-minute range. Once I’d made my remarks, we’d move on, and I wouldn’t give it too much more thought going forward. But sometimes I would remember the effect my words had. Sometimes those words did what I’d hoped, and sometimes they didn’t. One case of each sprang to mind.
In any season, game, or in life, I’d rather start bad and end better than vice versa; unfortunately, in the 1990 postseason with the A’s, the good speech came before the ALCS against the Red Sox. I set a proper tone by referencing what the Red Sox had been saying about us, that they had more competitive heart than we did. That was an easy chip to place on our shoulders because we had gone through a lot to win 103 games.
The bad speech came before we played the Reds in the World Series after sweeping the Red Sox for our third straight AL pennant. On the day before Game 1, I spoke before our workout and did not feel a response from the players. We walked onto the field as defending World Champions who were more interested in “digging ourselves.” Lou Piniella’s Reds were much hungrier than we were. Later, after much soul-searching, I realized that I hadn’t lit a fire under the guys—we played with little passion. I totally mugged the message that would have made us more competitive. I should have challenged them. We had a chance to make history by repeating as World Champions. History would have trumpeted their egos. I had the example to follow with Vince Lombardi challenging his Green Bay Packers to win their historic third straight championship.
I could have thrown down the gauntlet; instead Lou’s “Nasty Boys” bullpen and the rest of their talented squad swept us.
Our 1988 and 1990 World Series losses haunt me more from a manager’s perspective than from any other. That ’88 squad resisted, during the week off between winning the pennant and starting the World Series, our attempts to keep their intensity level up in the mid-week workouts. I didn’t push them and we wound up losing our timing edge—pitches that would have been hammered were being fouled off. We lost the championship. We weren’t about to lose that edge again in ’89 by making that same mistake. Our pre-Series workouts included some intense intra-squad games prior to taking on the Giants. For the last one, Eck was scheduled to pitch the very last inning, and in it he drilled Canseco. That brought an end to the workout, but the mystery of Eck’s intent still goes on.
It’s always good to feel better as you approach the end. I can’t remember feeling better about a postgame meeting than after the 2006 NLCS Game 6 loss to the Mets with Carp starting. With our Game 5 win in St. Louis, we set ourselves up to win the NL behind Carp and avoid Game 7. The atmosphere in the clubhouse was funereal. I had to say something. It just clicked as I walked into the clubhouse. Rather than brood on the Game 6 loss, I started describing the exciting experience of playing a sudden-death Game 7 for the National League championship and a World Series ticket. We had all dreamed about playing in, starring in, and winning that game. That was an opportunity to treasure forever. That would only be possible if each of us did all we could to prepare and then compete with no regrets afterward. I asked several veterans who’d previously won a Game 7 to speak—Rolen, Pujols, Scott Spiezio, and Eckstein. I closed with this advice: Do whatever you need to do to get ready. If that means stay out all night in the City That Never Sleeps, then go for it.
Given all that history, what an ironic end to my career list of official meetings that the 2011 speech before Game 1 went, maybe, five minutes. I repeated the tickets and media cautions. Then I added one piece: I asked all first-time World Series participants to stand. We had a bunch. My advice to them and to everyone else was that each of us could 100 percent compete at our highest level and still pause for a moment from time to time to take in the incredible World Series scene. I encouraged them to consciously take a mental break to understand why the Fall Classic is like playing on Fantasy Island forever. Then we could go back to the first game of their lives—and the last game of my life—as Game 7 players.
Game 1 was played under fairly ideal conditions for mid-October. A twenty-mile-an-hour wind that swirled around the park made it important for the position players to keep checking the flags. After the ceremonial first pitches were thrown out by Bob Gibson, Bruce Sutter, and Adam Wainwright—the pitchers who recorded the final out in the Cardinals’ four most recent World Series wins—it was time to have at it.