Chapter Seven

Tough Decisions

IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO CALCULATE THE NUMBER OF DECISIONS I’VE had to make as a manager of more than 5,000 games that either directly or indirectly affected the outcome of a baseball game.

During the 2011 season, I was faced with another decision, one that I’d encountered for the last several years in my career as a big league manager: did I want to do this anymore? In 2010 I’d gotten closer to ending my managerial career, but in the end I’d decided to come back for 2011, and I was grateful for the fact that the choice had been mine.

I’ve been blessed with a great family—my parents, my sister, her husband, and Elaine’s and my extended families included, and with all the baseball people who form that family of friends, colleagues, and employers. The plus to that is, beginning with my parents, I was taught one thing: do your job to the best of your ability and take responsibility for your actions. In my baseball life, I was “raised” by some wonderful men who taught me how to play the game right and later how to go about managing a team.

Loren Babe was one of my earliest mentors. Loren was our AAA manager at Denver in 1975 and Des Moines in 1976. Toward the end of my career, I became a player-coach for him. Loren encouraged me to ask any and all questions that came to mind. He was very shrewd and provided me with pointers and strategies that were much deeper than I had imagined. As a player, you think you understand what the game is about and what role the manager plays, but it isn’t until you actually start managing that you come to see what that role fully entails. From time to time Loren allowed me to manage a few minutes just to try it out and see how it fit.

In 1976 I was player-coach for Loren with the White Sox in Des Moines. Loren was sick, and I had to manage the game and play third base. That game, I went 6-for-6 at the plate, tying a league record, but we lost in the tenth inning when Andre Dawson hit a walk-off home run over the light tower in left field. Still, the game was a huge awakening for me. I usually didn’t get six hits in a week, and that should have been my highlight for the evening. Instead, after the game I realized I was more fired up about managing the game than I was about the six hits.

Paul Richards was another early mentor to me. He was a legendary figure in his seventies when I first met him, and in 1978 and 1979 he was the White Sox farm director, with a résumé that included many of the top major league jobs as well as being a top-flight catcher. He was well known for being creative. He’d mentored all the young managers, and he took special interest in my baseball education. To my last managing days I was still applying Paul’s lessons. One of his best was that your game decisions should be based on “Trust your gut, don’t cover your butt!”

All those people stressed the important message that my integrity as a person and as a leader was crucial. Who I was as a person would be reflected in the players I put out in the field and in how they performed. I took that responsibility very seriously. I also understood that there was something reciprocal about the relationship I had with the teams and organizations that trusted me as a manager. In trying to give each organization my best efforts, I received support many times over from the White Sox, A’s, and Cardinals. The last sixteen years in St. Louis had a special meaning for me because of the historic nature of that franchise. The St. Louis Cardinals is an organization with a long tradition of success. In fact, my decision to accept the offer to manage there in the first place was influenced by the idea that I was being given an opportunity to become part of an organization in which a lot of other people had invested their hearts and souls to make something they could be proud of.

All that being said, I didn’t take the decision to retire lightly. I also had to consider so many other factors besides my own interests. Since at least 2005 or so, I would show up at spring training every year when we brought our uniform staff together, from the major league team down through the various levels of A-ball, and I’d feel guilty. We had some wonderful coaches and managers in the organization who deserved a shot at being a part of the major league club. Stability in an organization is something that has tremendous benefits, but it can also hamper the growth and development of the next wave. I felt like I was clogging up the coaching pipeline. I wondered if maybe a new voice was needed in the clubhouse. I always speculated that maybe I’d said the same things too many times and a fresh perspective was needed to really get guys’ attention. I’d talked to coaches in a lot of other sports—Bill Parcells of the NFL, Don Nelson of the NBA, Bob Knight, and many others. We’d all pick one another’s brains about this profession we share, and it was always helpful to get their insights.

Many felt that five to seven years was about the longest you could go as a professional coach. You may not lose the team’s respect after that, but they may just tire of hearing your voice.

I can say this: the shingles episode played a role in my decision only in that it was such a distraction and had me so exhausted that I knew I couldn’t really think much about retirement while I was still dealing with it. I would be irresponsible if I made a professional decision about my future and its potential impact on the organization—and to an extent, the players—in the middle of that medical situation.

As a result, just as we did in assessing the club and its needs in the run-up to the trading deadline, I seriously began the same process of assessing myself and my own career after the All-Star break. I knew I’d been feeling different from before, but only then did I start to seriously analyze it. As I said, I was glad that I’d earned the right to make this choice instead of having the decision made for me. That isn’t always the case.

I WAS, AND ALWAYS WILL BE, GRATEFUL TO THE WHITE SOX ORGANIZATION and in particular Bill Veeck, the owner in 1979; Roland Hemond, the general manager; and Jerry Reinsdorf, who bought the club in 1981, for giving me a chance to manage when I’d had only limited experience. Looking back on it, I can see that they probably had more trust in me than I did in myself. Or maybe as Harry Caray claimed: They were too cheap to hire a real manager.

That first spring as manager of the White Sox, the task of organizing spring training fell to me for the first time. I’d gotten the job temporarily back in August 1979, but at the end of the season Bill Veeck and Roland Hemond told me the club was mine the following year. Shortly thereafter, Paul Richards, who at that point was with the organization as an adviser, called and asked me about my plans for the following spring.

Seeing as how the season had just ended, I hadn’t spent too much time thinking about it, but I was definitely leaning toward letting our third-base coach, Bobby Winkles, lead the camp. He had been responsible for running the spring training program and had done an outstanding job. Fundamentally, he was really sound, with solid experience. The way I figured, if you have somebody who does something well, you let him do it.

Paul heard me out, but then he made these points:

1.    It was easy to admit that on a scale of 1 to 10, I was pretty far down the scale in terms of respect and credibility with the players. I had only fifty-four games of experience as a big league manager, and I’d been a lousy ballplayer, hitting only .199 for my career. I needed every possible opportunity to show them that the right guy was managing the club.

2.    If I came in with the attitude that spring training is important, put Bobby Winkles in charge of the camp, and it was run well with a good program, then Bobby Winkles would get the credit in the players’ eyes. Similarly, if I put Bobby in charge and it was a poor camp and the club wasn’t ready to play, I’d be held responsible, even though I hadn’t been in charge of the program. It was a lose-lose for me as far as the team was concerned. I needed to earn points with the players, and I was missing an opportunity. Paul was clear, “You’ve got to do it.”

So that was what I did—and I organized the camp every year since. What made sense in my first year made sense in my last. By running the camp myself that first year, I earned some much-needed credibility with the team.

Because I was neither a great player nor an experienced manager who could draw on years and years of time-tested strategies and a data bank of situations to use in making decisions, I knew the team questioned the basis for my authority. So did I.

During my early years, the best managers were so successful that they were known by their first names—Sparky, Billy, Earl, Gene, Chuck, and Whitey. I was confident that they were doing more for their teams than I was for the White Sox. So I prepared more, tried to learn more, and grinded out every pitch hoping to narrow the gap. Every time I faced a first—first postseason game (Baltimore, 1983), first league championship game with Oakland (Boston, 1988), first World Series game (Los Angeles, 1988), and first All-Star Game (Anaheim, 1989)—the same confidence problems would crop up. What I lacked in confidence I made up for with aggressiveness, and I always tried to learn from my mistakes so the next time I would be better.

There were some people in Chicago who didn’t question whether I was right for the job—they were sure I wasn’t. They made those beliefs known in let’s just say socially and legally inappropriate ways. In 1982, we started off hot, going 8-0. I don’t know if that ignited the fever in some people’s minds, but in late July the team was hovering around .500 and the fans were clamoring for me to be fired.

Rumors were flying, and I walked into one of my favorite restaurants in Chicago, a place where I ate regularly, and saw a WELCOME, BILLY! sign hanging up. I’d already heard a rumor that the baseball genius and tortured soul Billy Martin was in town. The word on the street was that he was there to meet with Jerry Reinsdorf and Eddie Einhorn, the owners of the club. That same day, I went to the ballpark and talked with Roland Hemond, the general manager. Roland was one of my staunchest defenders. When I saw him, I told him that if they wanted to get rid of me, that was fine. I just didn’t want him sticking his neck out for me and getting fired as a result.

I asked him to make that pledge to me, and, reluctantly, he did. I asked him to tell Jerry one thing: I wanted to have the weekend at least. I couldn’t do more than hope that they’d agree to let me at least do that. I figured we had a shot at winning those games. Little did I realize, but that choice of words was prophetic. Roland told me before the game that I just needed to manage the club. There was nothing imminent, he said, so go out there and do your job. Hardly the kind of reinforcement you want, but okay, I would do that.

Before the game, David Shaffer, the head of security for the White Sox, came up to me and told me, “Hey, it happens every now and again, but this one sounded different. A guy called in to the switchboard and said that if you’re in the dugout tonight, he’s going to shoot you.”

They had decided not to take chances. He held out a bulletproof vest and said, “You have to wear this.” The thing wouldn’t fit underneath my uniform, so I had to wear it over my jersey. The last thing I wanted to do was have anyone see me with that thing on. The only other uniform item I had that could cover it was my quilted jacket, the one I’d worn early in the season when the snow was flying. This was June, and it was hot enough without those added layers, but what are you going to do?

With that jacket on, I wasn’t exactly inconspicuous, so I had to tell our coaches what was going on. Of course, this being baseball, we made it into a joke. When I went to sit on the bench next to them, they got up and moved away. So I’d get up and move toward them, saying, “Hey, come here. I’ve got to talk to you.”

“No, no. You’re on your own.”

Obviously nothing happened with the death threat, but we won three out of four that weekend against the Red Sox and went on a hot streak, winning fifteen of eighteen. The cries for my head stopped.

I tell that story because of all the different elements of it, but mostly because despite all that nonsense, I was fired up just to be managing major league games. Even with those literal and figurative threats hanging over me, we were able to laugh a bit and win some ball games.

A couple of postscripts to that story. If you’re a big baseball fan, you probably know that baseball players are a superstitious bunch. Because we won three out of four when I had to wear that jacket, I kept wearing it. You couldn’t have torn that thing off me. I can tell you exactly when it finally came off. On August 16 we won in Texas. Imagine a hot Texas night in high summer with me sitting there with a heavy jacket on, sweating bullets. By that time, my sweat had eaten holes in the armpits, and the thing was as nasty-looking and foul-smelling as an end-of-the-year game hat. After the game, about two in the morning, I got a phone call from my mother-in-law telling me that my wife, Elaine, was about to give birth to our second child, Devon.

I hustled back to Chicago, but missed her birth by just a few hours. She was, and is, a beautiful girl. Elaine delivered Devon naturally, at our apartment with Dr. Bill White assisting. Bianca was thrilled to have a little sister. That night, when the game came on television, we all sat there watching it. The legendary Charley Lau took over managing duties. The team was behind, and on the broadcast they showed a shot of the dugout, and Ken Silvestri, the interim pitching coach, was sitting there wearing my lucky jacket. We were a tight group, and they really wanted to win one to celebrate Devon’s birth, and even though we tied it late, in extra innings, the club fell. So did the jacket.

I did survive that year, only because Bobby Winkles and Charley Lau both spoke up for me, telling the owners that I hadn’t lost the club, that there were other reasons we were losing. The next year, ’83, we won ninety-nine games and the Western division championship. Imagine, in those days winning a best-of-five series was all it took to earn a World Series shot. We didn’t—the Orioles did. Still, these were the first tangible accomplishments I could point to that said, both to others and to myself, that hey, maybe I could do this thing.

None of that changed after the White Sox fired me in June 1986. Despite the tenuous nature of being a coach or manager in any sport, the near-constant threat of being let go never really got to me. I was too excited about being involved with the game. That threat was simply part of the job, and after getting fired the first time, I had to discipline myself to just keep getting into the flow of the game. I had learned to work my job and the game. The wins, money, and security would either come from that or they wouldn’t. Probably because I knew I was so close to the edge from day one, I never worried about getting fired. All my worrying was directed at winning the game.

In relating that story, I’m reminded that missing the birth of my daughter was tough, and also that Elaine had to do more than her share of raising the kids. There’s a plus and a minus to that as well. The girls have an amazing relationship with their mother, who was there for them and with them through everything while I was away eight months out of the year. In fact, Elaine did such great work that every year on Father’s Day they give her a card or gift as well. Since she home-schooled them, they should also have been giving her an apple on Teacher Appreciation Day. I’ll have to give them some grief for that.

I understood how important family was, and the kinds of sacrifices players and, more important, their wives, kids, and other family members make. I learned that by committing the errors that result from giving baseball too much of my attention and my family not enough. I couldn’t ever have done what I did for as long as I did without the kind of support I got from Elaine. Our extended families in Virginia, Tennessee, and Florida would have helped, but they were often too far away. Elaine had to do it herself. Baseball takes a toll, and I was beyond fortunate to have a wife who understood me, my passionate commitment to doing things right, and what that meant for all of us. I know it wasn’t easy, and I know the load she had to carry. She never asked me to step down or to rethink a decision that meant we had to move, and her priority was always doing what was best for the girls.

Some of my fondest memories are of the looks that we used to get from airline personnel when we were living in the East Bay and traveling down to Arizona for spring camp. Not only did we have our own piles of luggage to carry around, but we had the crates for all our animals. The La Russa family traveling menagerie in those days probably still brings tears of frustration to porters and baggage handlers. We couldn’t go anywhere without our four-legged friends.

I used to tease Elaine and the girls that I’d come home on an off day during the season and they’d ask me about, say, why I’d pinch-hit with Craig in that situation when a right-hander was on the mound. The dogs and cats would just run up to me, do their little serpentine butt wiggle at my feet, and jump up. I’d sit on the floor, and the pile of them would wash over me like furry surf. I’d say to them, “You know, you never second-guess me, do you?” Their response was always tail wagging and joy to see me.

THE MEDIA EVOLVED OVER THE YEARS TO THE POINT WHERE SECOND-GUESSING and a lot else besides recapping the games took over. I want to make it clear that I understand that media people have to make a living and that, like me and our players, they have to survive in a highly competitive environment. Still, just because I understand all that doesn’t mean that I enjoyed it. It was more like I tolerated it as part of the dues you pay to stay in the game.

One consequence of media proliferation was it seemed as if some members of the media were trying so hard to make a name for themselves that they began to compete with the very players they were interviewing for the attention of the public. Toward the end of my career, these competitive individuals were becoming more the rule than the exception, and as in most competitions, hostilities were a natural result. Being stuck in the middle between the players and the media when this occurred was a taxing and irritating part of my job.

Having to manage the media, though not my full-time job, took up a considerable amount of time and energy and also took some enjoyment out of managing.

And that’s not to say that the players themselves don’t add to a manager’s list of responsibilities and irritations. We play a team sport, and as time has progressed, I’ve seen more and more examples of individual players falling victim to all kinds of distractions in order to “get theirs.” In that sense, they’re not that different from the media types who seek notoriety, and that’s what I mean about the players being in competition with some members of the media. The players’ attention is being pulled away from the game by that. I’ll admit I watch SportsCenter as much as anybody, but I’m not out there on the field doing things that I hope will get me on “Plays of the Day” when I should be doing some small thing to help the club win. Those plays don’t have to be that kind of big deal. Your teammates know what you did, and that should be enough.

David Freese is a terrific ballplayer, a clutch hitter with a good, strong arm. He didn’t have the best range, owing to some nagging injury issues, so for most of 2011, I took him out in late-game situations to put in a better defensive player. This was not an easy decision. It goes against Managing 101, which tells you that you build confidence in a player by what you do for him, not what you do against him. So I personalized things and went to David and told him honestly, “We are concerned about your range while you get back to 100 percent, and we also worry that you won’t be able to play for us all season without getting hurt if we push you. So not only does substituting for you make sure we don’t run you into the ground, but we’re hoping this approach will help you regain your quickness and your good footwork. Because of all that, I’m going to play Descalso late in games.”

David said that he understood, but that he was taking a lot of heat from “other people.” They kept telling him that I was taking him out late in games because I thought he was a poor defender. Those other people might have been friends, family, his agent, but whoever they were, in addition to managing our player, did that mean that I had to manage them? No, not directly, but in a sense yes. I kept this personal. I told David that he was going to have a hard time in this game if he took to heart everything he heard and read. He was going to have to get used to criticism. I asked him if he was tough enough to stand up to his friends or whatever he was reading or seeing.

“Yes, I’m tough enough,” he said.

“Well, then,” I said, “tell your friends, just ask them, who started the game and where did you hit in the lineup? If I don’t have confidence in you, why am I hitting you in the middle of the lineup, and for that matter, why are you even in the starting lineup?”

Keep this in mind. This is a minor example of the larger point about how distractions and that “gotta get mine” attitude come into play regularly. Even though in this example I didn’t have to deal with the player’s agent, with greater and greater frequency coaches do just that. Agents are in their players’ heads, telling them that they need to start instead of relieve, that they have to hit for more power, that they should be playing more—anything and everything to make them focus on themselves and not the team. It’s exhausting having to manage the expectations and demands of agents. At its worst, you have a player you and the coaches have worked hard to develop, and all of a sudden everything becomes about him—not about the team or the game. You feel betrayed when that happens, and that tears you up.

The media also contributes to these attitudes with what I think of as baiting players. For example, I have two guys in the bullpen—let’s call them Bob and Tom. Going into the ninth inning, I decide to use Bob to close out the game. Why? Because Tom has had a lot of work recently, and Bob hasn’t. So I go with Bob to get him an inning in a game situation instead of throwing on the side again. After the game, a reporter tracks down Tom and asks, “Hey, why didn’t La Russa go with you in that last inning? Do you think he’s lost faith in you?” Tom now starts to think about it. He may say something to the reporter, or come to me or one of the other coaches later, or bitch to his pen mates, and now we’ve got a problem that wouldn’t have existed if the seed hadn’t been planted by someone else. That happens all the time, and now the staff is out there putting out fires set by an arsonist. All that detracts from the focus on the game and the preparation for the opponent, not to mention the pleasure you get from the game.

Sounds a bit like high school, doesn’t it? Having to squash baseless rumors and worrying that someone’s nose is out of joint because of something that someone else said behind your back. To be honest, after a while those kinds of things bothered me less and less. Too much time and attention was being paid to them. I’d long since stopped thinking, This isn’t what I’d signed up for, and instead I just kept adding new tasks to my to-do list. But it did take away from the excitement of competing.

Now, I don’t want to paint with too broad a brush here, because looking at the span of my career, I have known plenty of appreciative and respectful players, as well as media members who were responsible and loved the game. Call it the squeaky wheel syndrome, the bad apple or whatever, but human nature being what it is, you tend to remember the really good and the really bad, and the big middle becomes a kind of blank. What I was taught, and followed religiously, was not to grease the squeaky wheel. Instead, our staff gave our best care and attention to those teammates who took care of our team.

Over the years there have been really good players who really understood what we coached when it came to building a sense of team and not putting themselves first. They also never forgot what it was like to be the young guy, the one not making a lot of money and being in unfamiliar cities and trying to get the hang of what it means to be a big leaguer. Every now and then on a road trip, veterans like Kile, Morris, and Carp would announce before the game that they’d made reservations at some nice restaurant. Anybody who wanted to come, the meal was on them. That was a great way for the guys to get together, talk a little baseball, get to know one another better, that kind of thing. It also helped incorporate the new players and the rookies into the fold. The point wasn’t that they were popping for the other guys’ meals, it was that they cared enough to take the time and make the effort to arrange these things.

Early on, I’d seen that team meals could have a strong effect on camaraderie, and at the very real risk of sounding like an old fart longing for the days of his youth, I have to say that, as I thought about my decision to retire, I found myself thinking about those early years I had as a manager and remembering them wistfully. When I first started managing in the White Sox organization, as far back as 1978, I remember something we did when I was a player-coach for the White Sox AAA affiliate, the Denver Bears. This was before the Rockies franchise was awarded, and the folks in Denver really wanted to make a good show of it so that they could get a big league club there.

In 1975 we were scheduled to start the season off with a twelve-game road trip. That’s a tough schedule, and the Denver Bears’ legendary general manager, Jim Burris, was concerned about those two things—making a good show of it with a good start and dealing with that tough early schedule. Not starting off strong would hurt early ticket sales, and that could carry over to the rest of the season and at the gate. At a team dinner before we opened in Evansville, he told us that every time we had a winning road trip, he’d buy us dinner.

As it turned out, we went 10-2 on the trip, won all four series, and dined very happily and very inexpensively on the club’s dime. That worked so well that Jim continued the program for the rest of the year. We got so far ahead on dinners owed that he realized he could never get them all in, so he sprang for a huge team dinner, families and all. That meant Elaine and I got to go together and didn’t have to dip into my $10,000 a year salary.

It was from guys like Jim that I borrowed some of my ideas for team-building and treating families well. When I started officially managing in the White Sox organization in 1978, at Knoxville in the Southern League, I used Jim’s motivator. If we won a road trip, I’d have the bus driver stop someplace, usually an all-you-can-eat equivalent of a Pizza Hut or whatever, and pay for the guys’ meals. When the owner found out, he decided that wasn’t right and said that he would foot the bill.

This was not only a motivator but, as I also learned, a good team-builder. You may not have heard this expression, but some clubs are “twenty-five taxi” teams. That means that when a road game is over, in the big leagues, each guy gets his own cab and goes his own way to his own place. That may not literally be true (well, I’ve heard that some teams actually are like that and guys won’t share cabs with one another), but the point is obvious. So is this one: teams whose players like each other and hang out together are often very successful. You may think that my “dinner’s on me” plan wouldn’t work in the big leagues, but it did. When I got to the White Sox in the last half of ’79, and for my entire tenure there, we occasionally held team get-togethers on the road. We’d organize a group, feed them, and let them talk and rip on one another, insults being the standard means of communication among ballplayers. We had a lot of fun doing it.

Probably the high point of this was 1983, when the White Sox won the division. Two great veterans, Jerry Koosman, who was a starter with the 1969 “Miracle Mets” and was just a stellar individual, and Greg “The Bull” Luzinski, who was part of the 1980 World Champion Phillies, used to rent a suite at whatever hotel we were staying in just so the players would have a place they could get together. After every night game on the road, an open invitation was extended to anyone who wanted to go to the suite, and they’d order bags of burgers or a pizza and hang out and talk baseball and talk crap about one another.

When I moved on to Oakland, the White Sox players would ask the A’s if we had a lot of parties. We had some, but not as many. Times were changing, and when I got to the Cardinals, we didn’t do those kinds of things very much at all, and there were some good reasons for that. Guys were taking better care of their bodies and watching what they ate and drank. On the negative side, we had to be careful about team-“sponsored” events where alcohol was being consumed. Ironically, I think it was because we provided the guys in Chicago, and to a lesser extent those in Oakland, with a place to be and something to do that we didn’t have any big drug or alcohol scandals there like other clubs of that era.

This brings up the distracting influences of a changing society and the drug culture that today’s players have to deal with and that in turn we have to address. In 2007 I was involved in an incident that may make some people question my status as a commentator on these things. Ironically, it was the spring of 2007, and we were still basking in the glow of the 2006 World Championship. That glow was totally snuffed out at about 11:00 P.M. one night when the police in Jupiter, Florida, found me stopped at a red light, napping. Evidently, I’d had too much wine and failed the breath test. The nightmare included being arrested and going through the public process that follows. It was an unforgivable mistake, and any explanation is an excuse. But I admitted my mistake, pled guilty to the DUI, and apologized to everyone who was affected by what I still consider an embarrassing slip in judgment. In my mind, that doesn’t mean that I lost all credibility with players when I talked with them about those issues and about how to protect themselves, the club, and their families. In fact, my mistake probably added to my credibility on the subject. To this day, I’m still trying to earn back trust and respect from some family and friends.

That came into play when in January 2010 I had as serious a conversation as I could possibly have with David Freese. David had also been arrested for a DWI. He told me that it would never happen again. I was concerned about him as a person and as a player. We expected him to be a good teammate. I knew that except for that one mistake, he was an exemplary young man. The basis of our team’s chemistry is trust, and incidents like that one threatened to erode that trust. We wanted him to be a productive player for us, and we didn’t want to see him hurt himself or anyone else, so we were available to do anything we could to help him out. And I tried to explain the consequences. He was grateful for the advice and concern, assuring me that no one in the organization would have a David Freese problem. Sometimes personalizing extends beyond what happens between the baselines.

Wherever I’ve managed or played, family was always important to us. We felt that family was a way to personalize even more with a player. Having things right with a guy’s family can and will give him an edge at the park that helps him to compete. To that end, we did some family things, particularly in spring training, that were outgrowths of what I’d experienced in my early days. Some years we’d have a big family picnic day each season, and after many games we invited the families to come out behind our clubhouse to have some fun. The kids could take cuts at Nerf and Wiffle balls and run around, and it was great fun to see everybody out there.

So, if you’re keeping score at home, the negative side of the ledger as I decided whether it was time to retire included dealing with the media, with the players, and with the negative impact on my family life. But there were some positives. I had the same kind of relationship with the coaches in 2011 that I had in 1982 with the coaching staff who wore my good-luck jacket in my absence. Any display of camaraderie like that means a lot to me, and the prospect of not being able to go to work every day with people I respect and like was a strong reason to stay on as a manager.

I had, contrary to the La Russa mystique, great relationships with the great majority of my players, good relationships with the rest, except for the few who were disgruntled with me or my leadership style. More public attention was given to these few than to the rest.

I also really liked the makeup of the 2011 team and the individuals on it, and we were winning more than we were losing. Oddly, though, this last point worked against a decision to stick around past 2011. I talked about this with a lot of other coaches from other sports as well. We all agreed that we didn’t get quite as much satisfaction out of doing our jobs as we once did. Even if we were winning, even on the verge of a good season with the playoffs in the picture, we didn’t feel that same sense of accomplishment and pride. All the negative elements of the modern professional sports world detracted from the good feelings. Put simply, it wasn’t as much fun as it had been. That might sound strange coming from a person with my reputation for intensity and from someone who was often noted for not smiling. I took seriously the responsibility I had, but I loved the competition, the winning and losing, and the relationships we built.

It’s true that I didn’t smile a whole lot during games. I wanted to maintain a competitive demeanor. I wanted to maintain the same exterior whether things were going good or going bad. One reason for that is I wanted to set an example for our players and also to be a constant they could rely on.

Yes, there were lighthearted moments in the dugout, on the field, in the clubhouse, and at many other places, but for the most part, in the middle of the competition, I wanted to be that concentrated center in the middle of the storm. I had to work at that, because on the inside I was a festival of nervous energy, anticipation, excitement, anger, frustration, elation, and just about every other emotion you can name. I know that the anger and frustration sometimes surfaced more readily than my more positive attributes. Whether I should be criticized for that, I can’t really say. But I will say this about my intense level of concentration: I have zero regrets about how I went about my business, day in and day out. I might have made plenty of mistakes, but none of them came from a lack of interest or from inattention.

Ultimately, none of this was ever about me; it was always about the players and about winning. Call it “old school” or whatever you like, but the level of seriousness I brought to my job was purposeful and long-standing. Another element that went into my decision was that I couldn’t alter who I was essentially as a person to conserve my energy or take shortcuts. If I was going to continue to manage, it would have to be at that same max effort that I’d always put in. I couldn’t slow down. It was either do it or don’t do it.

As I said, I was raised to be a responsible person. Even when I was in elementary school and I was put in charge of the patrol boys—who helped kids cross the street safely—I took my job as captain seriously. If they weren’t on time, if they weren’t polite and responsible, then that reflected poorly on me. I only did well if they did well. Take that kid in the 1950s and transport him into the world of professional sports four and five decades later, put him in charge of million-dollar-a-year earners in a billion-dollar industry, and you can see how the pressure to get others to perform and produce gets ratcheted up—way up. Having to attend to that many people and their interests and idiosyncrasies can wear you down over time. The fun factor gets diminished, regardless of how much you smile—or don’t smile.

In the end, I saw that all these factors had been present for my entire thirty-three years of managing. Not only had I continued to work in spite of them, but I felt privileged to do so. In 2011, getting a team ready in the spring and competing for a 162-game season to see if we were good enough was as exciting and challenging as ever. As I thought about all of these factors, it wasn’t any specific one that made me think it was time to stop. It was just that, sooner or later, all things come to an end.

IMPORTANT AS ALL THESE REASONS WERE, THERE WAS SOMETHING larger influencing me, something related to the intensity of my approach, and in many ways it was indicative of the responsibility I felt to stay focused on the game at all times and on every pitch.

The more I contemplated retirement, the more I found myself thinking about incidents like one that had happened in 1991 when I was managing the A’s. In June of that year, we’d gone into Chicago for a series with the White Sox; it hadn’t been that long since I left the White Sox, and some of the guys on the team had been there when I was their manager. Among them was Bobby Thigpen, a big right-hander with a strong arm. He’d set the record for saves the previous year with fifty-seven, and he could bring it. I liked Bobby and admired how he’d developed into one of the premier closers in the game. On June 1—and I remember that date because of how much this incident affected me—we were down going into the ninth inning and Thigpen was on the mound. He hit Terry Steinbach, our catcher, in the head with a pitch.

I ran out of the dugout with my heart in my throat after witnessing one of the most frightening scenes in all of sports. If you’ve never heard the sound of a baseball hitting a helmet and then seen a player drop to the ground like he was a cow being slaughtered with a bolt stunner, then you can’t imagine what was in my heart at that moment. My overriding concern was for Terry, but once he was placed on a stretcher, fully conscious yet dazed, my anger turned on Thigpen and the White Sox. I’d watched enough videotape to know that Thigpen’s method was to throw inside with the fastball and then paint the outside corner. In our hitters’ meeting, we’d gone over that, and I’d told the guys to spit on that inside pitch and then look for the ball away.

As angry as I was at what happened, I was chewing up my own insides because maybe Terry was looking away and when the ball came inside he couldn’t get out of there in time. Mostly, though, I wasn’t happy that a guy would throw a pitch to that spot knowing that he had such a small window for success, such a small margin for error. I was angry at Thigpen not because of his intent to pitch inside—pitching inside correctly is a prerequisite for getting outs—but because the up-and-in pitch is dangerous, especially with hitters turning into the middle of the pitch instead of away from it. The same inside effect can be accomplished by concentrating the ball at the chest or lower. It’s not like pitchers are snipers with scopes and tripods and all that other equipment who can hit a precise target from hundreds of feet away. They can throw to an area, and when they miss, as Thigpen did, the results can be terrifying.

I was scared for Terry. This was my worst dream realized. With so much adrenaline going through me, I was jawing at the Sox, and they were jawing at us, and after Terry was wheeled away both benches cleared, and this could have easily gotten much uglier than it did.

I was so mad that I picked up Terry’s bat and flung it onto the backstop. It was either do that and release some of my aggression or do I don’t know what. And Dunc, the stand-up guy that he is, led the charge out of the dugout. I knew that Thigpen hadn’t hit Terry intentionally; I knew that he was coming inside and it got away from him. But there are consequences to doing that.

After the game, I was required to speak to the press, just like coaches are today. I had calmed down enough that I wanted to do what I was obligated to do so I could get the session over and get to the hospital to be with Terry. The press came into the visiting manager’s office, a tiny little closet of a space, and they were all crowded in there with me. I was still steaming but keeping it calm on the outside. At first, all the questions were about Terry and how he was doing, and I was still so pissed that I said, “How do you think he’s doing? You saw what happened.”

They kept pressing me, and finally I said, “I don’t want to talk about it. Whatever you want to ask me about the game, aside from that incident, I’ll answer, but I want to get out of here and be with my player.”

Everyone let it drop, but one guy wouldn’t let the thing go. He was older, and he’d always seemed kind of clueless in the past, so I wasn’t sure if he just didn’t get it or he was purposely being an ass.

“One of your guys got hit,” he said. “What are you going to do about it?”

“I’m not going to talk about it,” I reminded him. “My concern is for Terry, and I’m not going to talk about anything like that.”

“That’s not an answer. Your guy is in the hospital. What are you going to do about it?”

I repeated what I’d said before. Game questions—yes. Terry and the incident questions—no. I gave them one more opportunity.

“That’s no answer. Your guy—”

“I’m done,” I said, cutting him off before he could finish. “No more questions of any kind. I’m going to the hospital,” I said, and as I was stepping out the door, he replied, “Answer the question. Be a man.” I tried to ignore it and repeated that I was done and going to the hospital, when he repeated, louder, that I should “be a man.”

I walked up to him, my eyes bulging and my face red, and I gave it to him. “Be a man? Be a man? There’s a man in the hospital right now, and that’s where I should be instead of talking to you.” I shouted a few more things, and Dave Stewart, our pitcher and another stand-up guy, came running in to separate the two of us. And what got shown on the news that night and the next day? A man asking me a question and then me going off on him.

No one showed the lead-up. No one showed me being reasonable and explaining multiple times that I wasn’t going to discuss the incident. That reporter was hunting for the bigger story, and I wasn’t going to give it to him. Instead, people came gunning for me.

Fortunately, Terry was okay, but I never, never forgot that extreme example of one reporter’s terrible behavior and his inability to understand just how much responsibility I felt for what had transpired. I never forgot that sickening feeling as I ran out there to check on my fallen player. Also, I’d learned early on about the media fraternity and how they protected one another.

This story illustrates what was by far the most difficult part of my job, and the number-one factor that influenced my decision to leave managing: I had been taught that of all the things a manager is required to do, the most demanding, and the most exhausting, is to scrutinize every pitch with all the focus and ferocity it takes to judge the possible intent and meaning of pitches that are delivered inside, near, at, or sometimes behind our hitters.

In a way, this task represents everything it means to take on the job of being a manager. It was my duty to protect our players, and with those inside pitches, our hitters’ physical safety was on the line. You can’t say that you personalize things with the players you spend eight months of your year with, work with all of them to become a family, care about and develop close relationships with them, invest your time and energy in helping them to develop as players and people, and then not be as vigilant as possible about protecting them from great harm. If you don’t feel that sense of obligation—or better put, that desire—to protect them, then you’re a fraud and everything else you do is sham, just so much window dressing.

For all those years as a manager, pitch by pitch, I had to intensely concentrate to see if our hitters were being abused. That’s roughly 25,000 pitches per year (figuring 150 to 160 pitches per game for 162 regular-season games) for 30 years. Conservatively, that’s 750,000 regular-season pitches for which my level of concentration had to be a 10 out of 10. I felt this as a personal responsibility, and I also felt it as an obligation to all those who had a stake in us and supported our game.

Just so you understand better what I was doing all the time I was scowling in the dugout, let me tell you what I was looking for when it came to protecting our hitters. If a pitch was inside, I had to determine if that location was intentional. That led to the question of whether or not the opposing pitcher or team was trying to intimidate us. Were they trying to alter our state of mind so that we wouldn’t have good at-bats against them? Or were they trying to penalize us for already having good at-bats against them in this particular game or in previous games? Or were they simply being aggressive, trying to “own” the inside part of the plate as a particular pitching style or approach to getting our hitters out?

All of these possibilities, to varying degrees, are legitimate aspects of baseball. When you sign up to play, you know that getting pitched inside or struck by a thrown ball is a possibility. Just because that’s a possibility, though, doesn’t mean it should happen intentionally or that you should be buzzed inside, have one “flown past the control tower,” or whatever euphemism people use to describe and—knowingly or not—diminish the seriousness of an inside pitch.

When I felt like I needed to protect my players, the decision wasn’t easy but I had to make it. An incident in spring training that year was still troubling me when I was going over my decision points in early July. We had been playing the Washington Nationals in a preseason game, and Carp had hit Laynce Nix with a pitch on the body. Normally there wouldn’t have been anything special about it, but in this case, the year before, Nix had been with the Reds when we’d had the Cueto kicking incident. Dave McKay, our first-base coach, assured Nix that it wasn’t intentional, but their bench was convinced that it was payback for the previous year. So then Livan Hernandez hit Ryan Theriot. To my mind, he threw a pitch intentionally that far inside. I barked at their manager, Jim Riggleman, a great guy who I respect and count as a friend. In fact, when I was a player-coach, Riggleman was a teammate and a good one. He knew my philosophy. We would never throw at someone intentionally just because they had a hot bat. We wouldn’t use that pitch to try to intimidate or distract a hitter.

We would, however, defend ourselves. In thirty-plus years, I never ordered a pitcher to drill someone because he was hitting well against us. In every stinking case it was a response to our player being thrown at.

I went to Miguel Batista and said to him, “Go after Ian Desmond.” Desmond is their shortstop, and in biblical terms an eye for an eye was what I was going to do—shortstop for shortstop.

I hated having to make that call, but it was the right one to make. The difference was that we tell our guys to hit a batter in the back or the butt, the hip area. Nothing high above the shoulders.

Miguel did as instructed.

Angel Hernandez, the first-base umpire tossed Miguel. To his credit, Hernandez told me that he was watching our dugout between innings and saw me talking to Miguel. There was no doubt in his mind what had just happened. Riggleman and Desmond were both pissed off, and much mouthing off between our side and theirs went on.

I agonized over the incident all night. It had involved not only a manager who was a friend but a great ballplayer, Desmond, who I would have loved to have on our club. A few days later, I went up to Jim, and we spoke. Jim was honest with me and said that he didn’t order his pitcher to go up and in on Theriot. The guy did it on his own. I told him that we had to protect our players. That was it.

But it really wasn’t. As I thought about whether or not this would be my last year, I kept going back to that incident. In some ways, how I felt about it mirrored what I was thinking in terms of this 2011 club. I had everything I wanted in terms of great team chemistry. Still, it wasn’t as much fun as it had been. The duty I felt to protect my players had forced my hand, and I’d had to do something against a manager and a player I really liked. That wasn’t any fun.

I distinctly remember thinking, I’ve had just about enough of this crap. It was the combination of the accumulation of crap and the constant vigilance that had me close to the edge.

When I added in all the rest—the media nonsense especially—I thought that if I wasn’t getting the same enjoyment even under the best of circumstances with this team, then it really was time to get out at the end of the year. I decided that no matter what happened with the club, this season was going to be my last. By not telling anyone, though, I left some wiggle room to change my mind.

Please don’t get me wrong. I still loved the game of baseball. Like I told our players many, many times, I wish the game was this simple: Our side. Their side. Nine innings of play. Keep score and see who wins.

But it’s not like that, and with all the things I’ve said here, I don’t want this to get lost: I still love the game. I love the unpredictability of it. There’s magic in that, but in July 2011, I realized there wasn’t enough of it to transform the rest of that lead weight into gold.

I DIDN’T TELL ANYONE OF MY DECISION UNTIL MID-AUGUST, WHEN I first told Elaine, and even then I kept it very quiet. Elaine was surprised, and she would have been more disappointed and upset if she’d thought I was serious. The next time we discussed it, during our September rush, she thought the excitement of the pennant race would have put any thoughts of retirement to rest. When I told her that I was still intent on going through with my plan, she mentioned two things. One, she said it would mean a lot to her and the girls if I passed John McGraw for second on the list of most managerial wins in a career. I could understand their thinking, but I couldn’t give in to it, because that was something personal and not professional. Doing it for them, knowing that I shouldn’t be there, wasn’t something I could do. I hated to disappoint them.

The second thing she said hit me the hardest. She told me that for the last thirty years, she and the girls, whether over the radio, TV, or Internet, at game time would turn on the broadcast, and go about their day while keeping track of our progress. Every day for six months or more, they did that. Our games were so much a part of their lives and had been for so long, that they couldn’t imagine going on without them as the sound track for their lives.

Hearing that was the only time I reconsidered my decision. Elaine really made me realize, good and bad, just how intertwined my two families were.

I didn’t want 2011 being my last year to be a distraction. We still had the better part of a season to go when I made up my mind. I also didn’t tell anyone because I wanted to retain the right to change my mind. There was still plenty of baseball left to be played. I couldn’t have predicted that despite all that I was feeling, the fun was going to make a comeback.