ONE REASON WHY SURGE SEEMED LIKE THE RIGHT WORD TO ME for our mid-April to June 9 strong start is that I grew up in Florida, home to orange groves and hurricanes. I’m not going to compare what happened to us in the weeks after the surge to the tornado that tore through Joplin, Missouri, that week. No disrespect in using this metaphor, but storms of all kinds were definitely on our minds as we headed back home after concluding one of the longest road trips of the year.
What I can say is that an ocean’s surge, its rising tide, comes before a period of difficulty really begins. During the surge, the skies are clear and the sun shines, but somewhere in the distance, maybe still not discernible on anyone’s radar, the weather forces have something stirring in the air or churning under the sea.
The “storm after the surge” analogy makes sense because it’s rooted in the realities of the baseball season. Rarely does a team win by leading its division wire to wire. My best personal example was in 1988, when the Oakland A’s got off to a franchise record early-season winning streak and sprinted to a 104-win season. We stayed relentlessly hot, with only one hiccup, when we lost nine of eleven, in June. Our lone period of struggle coincided with both our top two catchers getting hurt. Still, one season like that in thirty-plus years is just the exception that proves the rule that almost always your season will have its ups and downs. Part of the edge your team seeks is the ability to handle both the good and the bad effectively.
Coaches in every sport talk about overcoming obstacles—that’s the classic feel-good story that we all love. Look around the sports world and tell me: how many people really want to see a team, loaded with all the best talent, winning from wire to wire during a season and having very little go wrong for them? Maybe because most of us think of ourselves as the “little guy” or the underdog, we root for teams and individuals with whom we can relate.
As much as I admire the Yankees organization and what they achieved over the years, I can understand why many people outside of New York pull against them. Look at the Red Sox. They went eighty-six years without a World Series title, and they were lovable losers, a team people’s hearts went out to, the whole Bill Buckner ball-between-the-legs fiasco and all. (What a lot of people forget is that the Red Sox had a chance the next game to redeem themselves and didn’t. Bill Buckner did not lose that series for them.) Now that they’ve won two titles, now that they have a reputation for amassing high-priced talent, they’ve lost some of their charm. In fact, I just heard that on a sports website fans listed them as one of the most reviled franchises in sports.
If fans around the country have a soft spot for teams that struggle, we had a full bandwagon of non-Cardinal fans on our side for a while. From June 10 through June 26, 2011, we lost our first seven in a row, went 3-12 over that span, and saw our record go from plus-twelve to plus-three. You can’t be in this game if you can’t handle losing. If you go out and bust your ass and put in a solid effort and the other guy beats you, you should be able to sleep well that night and move onto the next day understanding that you got beat plain and simple. That’s how I felt on the night of June 10, when we went into Milwaukee and got throttled 8–0.
Maybe it’s just because the two words rhyme, but June and swoon have always seemed to go together. I’m not a big believer in the inevitability of a team going through a rough patch in that month, but I am a believer in evaluating your team within the context of a season divided into thirds. In April and May, the scene is fresh and optimistic. Teams are eager to get into the season’s routine. In August and September, especially if you’re in contention, the end is in sight. Teams are excited to play the schedule out and try to earn a playoff spot.
The middle third is a different story. June and July, I think, are the toughest to play. The season is no longer new, and nearly 100 games remain. The weather gets hotter, and the schedule is more demanding, with fewer off days and more night games on travel days. In my opinion, it’s this period that requires a team to dig the deepest to scratch out wins.
Losing the next night, 5–3, to the Brewers’ newly acquired former Cy Young winner, Zack Greinke, was another case of nothing to be ashamed about. Okay, we didn’t win the series, but we also stress to the guys the importance of ending a series on a high note if possible—win the last one, get on the bus to the airport, get on the flight, get on another bus to the hotel—feel good about yourselves following a win. Nobody wants to be swept, especially by a division opponent, since your loss and their win has a doubling effect in the standings. We didn’t do it. We lost the last game of the set with the Brewers 4–3. They had a good offense in 2010, the upgrades to their rotation with Greinke and Shaun Marcum and their bullpen (especially with John Axford) made us aware that they were a solid club.
It was not a particularly fun flight to D.C. that evening. All things considered, I’d rather be in first place, and that loss on getaway day had put the Brewers ahead of us. Hoping the players were getting the rest they might have needed, I took the off day to think about what I’d been seeing in that Brewers series. Miller Park is a tough place to play, and the Brewers were playing well and had a solid club, one that most experts had picked to finish ahead of us after Wainwright went down. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed like the guys were putting in the same time and effort they had been doing since the start of the year.
The next day was another tough loss—we came out fresh, added on, set the tempo, and were up by five runs with four innings left, only to end up losing the game in the bullpen. It was our fourth in a row, officially our longest losing streak of the season, and my staff and I could tell that everyone was feeling it. We also lost Allen Craig to the disabled list.
We were going to have to continue to battle through these games to survive.
Over the next two games we started each night at zero, thinking this would be the end of our slide, only to find ourselves in one hapless situation or another—whether it was Kyle McClellan’s start just off the fifteen-day disabled list, when the Nationals ended up scoring ten runs in all, or the night that Salas, who at that point had twelve saves and three wins without a loss, gave up a home run in the tenth. When you’re winning, the game seems to flow and fall into place so that it feels like it’s hard to lose. When you’re in a losing stretch, it’s like swimming against the tide, and it’s hard to put together the good things you need to win.
We flew back to St. Louis in near-silence. We were now only plus-six and still just a game behind Milwaukee, but we were only a game up on Cincinnati and two ahead of the Pirates. The good news was that we were headed home to play the Royals in our park. The fans had been clamoring for interleague play, and with our regional rivals coming in, all signs were pointing toward the guys really not needing to be reminded of the importance of maintaining or lifting their intensity level. Our history with the Royals dated back to the 1985 Interstate 70 World Series. “Win the series” stayed in place as the mantra.
And then we lost again.
Seven in a row.
I heard a few grumbles from the faithful after that one. Fans were hoping that Albert could do what he did on both June 4 and 5 during the surge, when he’d beat the Cubs with dramatic, extra-inning, walk-off home runs on consecutive days, something only one other Cardinal had done, the amazing Stan Musial.
Win the series, boys, I told them, but I was also thinking, Just win. The players’ mysterious and complicated victory handshakes had gone dormant. We needed to do something about that.
We won the next two games of the series by identical scores of 5–4. Important as those wins were for us, the bigger headline coming out of those two games was the fact that we lost Albert to injury in the final game against the Royals. Albert, in reaching for a wide throw from second base in the top of the sixth, was run into by the batter, Wilson Betemit. Albert went down in a heap, and our hearts went up into our throats. As bad as it turned out to be—a slight fracture of a bone in his forearm—it could have been much worse, according to Barry Weinberg, our trainer. Instead of being out six weeks, as projected, Barry said that if Albert had broken a bone in his wrist, one of the most complicated joints in the body, not only would he have been out much longer but his return to form would have been hampered.
There was little that could brighten us after Albert went off the field, but in the bottom of the ninth Skip Schumaker did his best to try. After Descalso got thrown out trying to stretch a single into a double, Schumaker came up and, after taking the first pitch for a ball, drove one high into right-center for a walk-off homer. At this point, I wasn’t sure of the nature of Albert’s injury, but I knew it likely wasn’t good. Albert had been 3-for-3 with his seventeenth home run mixed in among those hits that Sunday afternoon. He was hitting more Albert-like all the time, and he had those seventeen dingers and fifty RBIs, but his average was misleading. After his slow start early in the season, he was in the midst of a typically impressive prolonged stretch of productive hitting. Watching Schu’s ball climb and then drop over the fence matched my mood that night—rising expectations and elation and then the return to the reality that one of the game’s greatest players was likely to be out for a considerable period of time.
It was a classic good day/bad day at the ballpark.
You have to make all the statements after the game. Injuries are a part of the deal. “We’ll have to step up and fill the void.” You say those things and you believe them, while simultaneously saying to yourself, Why the heck now and what the hell does this mean for us? I let my guard down a bit the next day at a charity golf tournament for our canine and feline rescue foundation ARF when I said, within earshot of the press, “I’m going to go find a place to cry.” I was being honest, if overly dramatic, by saying that. Even Mo, our general manager, couldn’t put much of a positive spin on it: “You can’t replace a player of his magnitude.”
That’s true.
What Mo said next is also true: “We still have to find a way to win games, and that’s what we’ll do.”
After the golf tournament, Mo and I had a candid conversation about the effect of Albert’s loss on our team, especially in this trying situation. Our biggest concern was that even if the injury buzzard left us alone, our team would still run out of gas and spirit. We both agreed that to this point our team had been valiant, and we would keep working with them. Then prepare for the worst and hope for the best.
I mentioned the 1992 A’s to Mo. We played a few critical games against Toronto and Minnesota in late July. Our starting outfielders—Rickey Henderson, Dave Henderson, and Jose Canseco were injured. To replace them, we used Randy Ready, Eric Fox, Willie Wilson, and Jerry Browne. Despite the changes, we went 6-1 in those games. Though Toronto would later beat us in the ALCS (and Atlanta in the World Series), sweeping the Twins on that trip moved us into first place, which we refused to relinquish in the second half.
How did we do it? Baseball rewards effort and execution. It’s meant to be played “hard” and “right.” If you do, you can compete and win your share.
Mo was impressed and suggested that would be a good story to refresh our team. I agreed, but I decided to save it for just before the last two weeks of the first half—our last four series versus Baltimore, Tampa Bay, Cincinnati, and Arizona. In retrospect, maybe I should have shared it right away, because we lost five of the last six games before that meeting.
AS THE END OF JUNE APPROACHED, WE WENT TO BALTIMORE FOR OUR final series of the month. We were 3-12 in our last fifteen, and we were all feeling how tough the previous couple of weeks had been. In addition to the loss of Albert, Eduardo Sanchez, who had been on a streak of nine straight scoreless outings, went on the fifteen-day DL with a mild shoulder strain. He wouldn’t return until September 27.
With the start of July looming, we knew we were staring down the barrel of two big points of the season—the All-Star break and the trading deadline—so we started to make adjustments that we knew we had to make. At the end of June, we released Ryan Franklin and Miguel Batista. I hated to see Ryan and Miguel go. Ryan had meant so much to the club’s personality in 2010 and was a great presence in the clubhouse and a wonderful person. He was also a thirty-eight-year-old player who had enjoyed a taste of success late in his career, and I could only hope that he walked out of the clubhouse with the taste of that vintage in his mouth and not the bitterness of 2011.
Personalization sometimes includes the general manager. Mo and I both spoke to Ryan individually. We told him to go home for a while, get away from the game for a bit, spend time with his family. Later in the summer, if he wanted to start throwing again, we’d be willing to look at him again. I was pulling so much for him, that I told him that since he had a good knuckleball and had gotten some outs with it, he should consider throwing it more often. I wanted him to know that he’d earned the right to end his career with no regrets.
Hard as those decisions were, we knew we had to prepare ourselves for the All-Star break and the psychological shift that would come with it. For years we’d emphasized the importance of finishing the first half strong. Marking the halfway point, the All-Star break is like that proverbial cartoon oasis in the desert toward which some clubs are crawling as they grind out the first half. Crawling is good. Why? Because you’re taking your time step by step to get there. Worse are the teams that go running toward the halfway point, stumble, and end up regretting the games they skipped in their rush. I’d seen that kind of thing happen time and time again.
We had the four series left—thirteen games—and we needed to reward intensity level with a healthy dose of winning. We had an unscheduled meeting to relate the 1992 A’s story and its message that we could play through anything. I then tried to add some of the “how” to our approach for the last thirteen games. I came back to the idea of manageable bits. I’ve heard people who run marathons talk about the fact that not all 26.2 miles of the race will “fit” in a runner’s brain. They say that if you try to cram it all in there, you end up overstuffing your brain and not allowing it to function properly. So some runners think of a marathon as a series of four ten-kilometer races (a marathon being forty-two kilometers long).
So we couldn’t go to the guys and say: “We want to go X out of thirteen.” That would have been looking too far ahead and focusing on results. We still needed to focus on winning the series. If we did that, the math would tell us what the record was. We had to focus on the process of winning, not the result of winning. Focus on the series as the what and then look at individual players and their contributions as the why and the how.
To prepare for this final sprint we went to each player or pitcher personally to remind him of what his keys to success were. For example, David Freese and Allen Craig both have an RBI mentality. Our coaches would review their success keys as a way to refocus them in their last stretch of first-half games and as a way to renew our confidence in them. We did the same, usually informally, with players throughout the rest of the roster. We would also continue giving clear feedback like this about the process of success. It’s a lot different than saying to a guy, “Hey, over the next two series I want you to drive in six runs.” Focusing on a predetermined result like six runs doesn’t take into account the many things that can come into play to negatively or positively affect a player’s ability to reach that goal. In some ways, a predetermined goal with a set number, such as six runs, is arbitrary and distracting. We don’t want distractions. We want focused effort on the process, i.e., how to do it.
In addition, the informal process of setting expectations and giving feedback was how we could evaluate whether or not individual guys as well as the team on the whole were buying into the program. This was important all the time, but we felt it would be absolutely vital during those final games before the All-Star break, because we felt that those last four series would be a litmus test to see where we were.
The question of intensity as we made the crawl to the All-Star break was crucial because another question was looming in our minds, this one about the trading deadline at the end of July: Were we going to be buyers or were we going to be sellers? Were we going to acquire talent in the hopes of competing or unload it because we felt our season had more or less run its course?
As much as we preached focusing on the game and the series at hand, this buyer or seller decision controlled the early part of the season’s second half. Changing the makeup of the squad, potentially messing with the chemistry of what we saw as a very gritty and determined team, was not something that we could take lightly. As we traveled to Baltimore for a three-game series, I was curious to see how this club was going to respond. We’d just gone 3-12. After Baltimore, were we going to be 3-15 or 6-12 or what? And after that? And after that?
We didn’t need to see a specific outcome; we needed to see guys buying into what we were selling in the same way they had to this point. The next stretch of games had the potential to change the course of the season for good or bad—the only question was which it would be.