WE’VE PROBABLY ALL HEARD THE JOKING STATEMENT, “THE sooner you fall behind, the more time you have to catch up.” During my life in baseball, I’ve always gotten a kick out of waking up each day in first place and “not relinquishing the lead.” Sal Bando, the team leader on our class AA team, made that statement about our team when we were in the midst of winning the 1966 Southern League Championship. In the last fifteen years, of the 120 big league teams to reach the playoffs, 68 of them had a lead at the halfway point in the season. That means that 57 percent of the time, if you’re in the lead at the halfway point, you won the thing. When you’re trailing, conventional baseball wisdom tells you that you try to gain a game a week on the leader in the standings. We were well past the halfway point when we made the trade. July 27 marked game 104 out of 162, which meant that we had 58 games to go. We were half a game behind Milwaukee in our division. So we were thinking that our chances of catching them remained pretty good. By the end of July, we’d lost more ground and were two and a half games behind the Brewers.
No reason to panic, obviously—we had fifty-four games left, and with eight and a half weeks remaining in the regular season, we had every reason to believe that no one was going to run away with the division.
That was another reason why, hours before the July 31 nonwaiver trade deadline, we sent a minor league prospect to the Dodgers for their veteran shortstop Rafael Furcal. I’ve always admired how the Braves’ organization did things, and from 2000 to 2005, Furcal had been a part of Atlanta’s fourteen consecutive seasons of division winners. He was a slick fielder, and he had lively tools with his arm, bat, and legs. He’d joined the Dodgers as a free agent in 2006 and hadn’t had as much success as he had in Atlanta. That meant, with him being in his twelfth year of major league ball, he was seeing a possible finish line ahead and was hungry for another shot at a title. In fact, he joined veterans Dotel and Rhodes in inspiring the team to get to October.
It’s probably too much to expect any one trade to have a huge impact immediately on a club. It’s rare when a shake-up of personnel sets a team on fire. Of course, we’re always kind of hoping that happens, but in the first eleven games following the trade with Toronto, we were 7-4. Not exactly world beaters, but we did see some nice things. Edwin Jackson won his first start for us, beating the Cubs 9–2 on July 29. A few days later, on August 2, we beat the Brewers in eleven innings, with Kyle McClellan back in the bullpen and earning the win, and Octavio Dotel picking up his first save for us. The newly reordered bullpen shut out the Brewers from the sixth through the eleventh. The game was notable for another reason as well.
In the top of the seventh, the Brewers hit Albert with a high and tight pitch. Given Albert’s earlier injury, the high risk of injury, and all the other things I talked about earlier in regard to intent, we felt we had to send a message to the Brewers. In the bottom half of the inning, we had Jason Motte hit Ryan Braun, the eventual MVP of the league. He did what we taught and hit Braun square in the back, thereby minimizing any chances of injury. Tempers flared, but I did what I had to do then, we went about it the right way, and I stand by that decision today. Unfortunately, we couldn’t follow up that hard-fought victory with another, and we lost to the Brewers the next day to fall three and a half games back.
I was really encouraged by how we went down to Florida and swept the Marlins in four games, but those wins didn’t change the fact that we muddled on for the better part of August. From August 9 to August 19, we went 4-5, losing two out of three at home to the Brewers. Carp earned his first win against them since 2009. He also evened his record to 8-8, impressive when you consider that he was 1-7 on June 17.
For their part, the Brewers were getting hot: they would wind up the month of August with a 21-7 record, plus-fourteen, the best in the majors. To keep pace with them, we’d have to win too, only it didn’t work quite like that. We followed up the lackluster series against the Brewers by dropping another two out of three to a tough Pirates team; heading into Chicago, our opponent in one of the most intense rivalries in sports, and after losing to Pittsburgh, I expected there to be a huge sense of urgency. I didn’t realize that urgency would take on another dimension.
In game 1, we jumped ahead 3–0 in the second and added on in the fourth, before the Cubs beat us in the tenth, 5–4.
Things got much worse after the game. In Chicago you play a lot of day games, so when this game was over, I was able to walk from Wrigley to the lakefront and then to the hotel for a bit of exercise. I walked along reviewing the game in my head, thinking that if we were going to be truly in this thing, then we should have been beating teams like Chicago and Pittsburgh. We’d just lost a series to the Pirates, and now we had lost the first game to the Cubs. What were we going to do? How could we turn this around? I mean, I was just burning up thoughts like these and tossing them into the lake.
I was just past Lincoln Park and the zoo and not quite at the North Avenue beach when my phone rang. I saw that it was Dunc, so I answered it. I could hear something in his voice immediately.
“I have to go home,” he said.
My first thought was, Absolutely—do what you have to do. If Dunc needed to leave, then it had to be something serious. Still, just the thought of a couple of games without him was nerve-racking. I managed to ask, “What’s wrong?”
“Well, Jeanine,” he said, referring to his wife, “has had some issues, and I need to go home and take care of her.” We spoke a little longer, and he told me a bit more about a couple of the symptoms that had made her go to the doctor in the first place. Now the doctor wanted to see Dave and Jeanine together Saturday.
“Look,” he said, “I’m going to tell Mo, and I’m going to tell you, but I really want to keep it quiet till we find out.” We managed to do that, just as Dunc had asked. I credit both the St. Louis media and the club for handling that private matter the way they did.
When we finally got off the phone, I was shaken. I sat on a bench looking across the little indentation that makes up the Gold Coast, thinking about a conversation that Dunc and I had had about the team’s strengths as we flew into Chicago for the weekend series. We were searching for reasons and wondered whether we were taking winning for granted. Ironically, we mentioned that it was analogous to personal and family health and taking that for granted. Now, in the context of winning and losing games, what the hell did any of this mean in comparison to what Dunc and his wife were possibly facing? Any thoughts of the Cubs, the Pirates, and all the rest were out the window. I was hurting for my friend, but comforted by the fact that if anyone was capable of taking care of his wife in a tough spot, it was Dunc.
In our lives in baseball together, Dunc and I go almost as far back as it’s possible to go. I was signed in ’62, and he was signed the next summer. He grew up in Texas, and I’d later learn he grew up hard. We met and were teammates in the A’s ’63 and ’64 Winter Instructional League clubs in Bradenton, Florida, and then the ’65 AA team in Birmingham, Alabama. My first impression of Dunc was this: I was a Boy Scout and he was a veteran soldier. It wasn’t just the difference in our sizes (I was a physically immature six feet tall, and he was six-four and 220 pounds); our demeanors really set us apart. Dunc was as tough and as coolly calm as a rodeo cowboy, and I was young and trying to figure out a lot of new things.
He was also a talented ballplayer, hitting 46 home runs in ’66 in Modesto, where we were both playing. (I was promoted to Mobile for the second half of that season, but we both won championships.) That was a hell of a Modesto team, with Joe Rudi, Rollie Fingers, and some guy who joined the club later in the year by the name of Reggie Jackson. Baseball is a strange game, and despite Dunc being a superior player and a valuable catcher, I was the one who made the ’68 major league team. The franchise had moved to Oakland from Kansas City, and I was there opening day in the Oakland Alameda County Coliseum to watch Governor Ronald Reagan throw out the first pitch. Speaking of firsts, I had a couple myself. In 1963 I was the first shortstop in major league history to start a game at age eighteen. In case you’re into trivia, here’s the answer to a tough question, who are the only three eighteen-year-olds to start a major league game?—two pearls and a turd. The pearls are Robin Yount and Alex Rodriguez. The turd is the one who only had a roster spot because of a bonus rule—yours truly. That first day in Oakland I got sent up as a pinch hitter in the ninth inning with us down 4–1, with the tough Baltimore Orioles lefty Dave McNally on the mound. He’d surrendered a home run to Rick Monday in the seventh to lose his no-hitter and the shutout.
The 100-year-old rules of baseball strategy dictate that when you’re losing in the last inning, the hitter should wait to get a strike. McNally knew that, and he’d been cruising through that game taking advantage of us trying to be patient. I got up there, hoping that Bob Kennedy, our manager, would let me swing away. I figured McNally was going to just try to get one over and jump ahead. Nope. Had to take. Fastball down the middle screaming, “Hit me! Hit me!” I wound up in the hole 0-2 and had to go into defensive mode. In retrospect, that was probably a good thing. I wound up singling off McNally and have gone down forever in Oakland A’s history as the first player to get a pinch-hit in the Coliseum. My much less than mediocre major league career can be summed up by an unearned roster spot, a meaningless pinch hit, and scoring the winning run for the Chicago Cubs on opening day in 1973. That run marked my last major league appearance and reads better than it was. I was only on base as a ninth-inning pinch runner for Ron Santo.
Later in ’68, Dunc got called up from our AAA team in Vancouver. Who was getting sent down to make room for him? La Russa. Catfish Hunter was a great guy, and he was really feeling for me that I was getting sent down to AAA. “Hey, man, you’re an important part of this team. I’m really going to miss you.” Well, as it turned out, though I was being sent down, I’d missed the last flight out. So I was able to watch the game that night. Catfish threw a perfect game. Amazing. Afterward, I said to him, “You really were bummed out about me being sent out, weren’t you?”
After that, I was yo-yoing between AAA and the big club, and the whole time Dunc was in the bigs. During the brief times I was up, I was able to pick up several very important points and strategies relating to leadership and managing from the A’s manager, Dick Williams.
The way he took charge of the A’s and made sure his own problem-solving tone prevailed, not the owner Mr. Finley’s, became a cornerstone of my own problem-solving style over many years. I also learned from Dick the necessity and value of “playing the game right!” Execution matters and lack of it loses. He really pounded this message into his team’s minds. Mike Shannon, a Cardinals legend and a special friend of mine, once uniquely made the point that “baseball is all about execution, and the only ones that disagree are on Death Row.”
Finally, it was Dick’s advice that led me to the practice of filling my lineup cards with game notes. The very important after-game review revealed many winning nuggets because they were all a part of those cards. You took actual game info, added insight, and came away with “stuff” about your team, your opponents, and what had decided the game just played.
In ’72, I was in the minors the entire year while Dunc was with the team, and they won the pennant and were in the World Series against Johnny Bench and the rest of Cincinnati’s Big Red Machine. Oakland took the first two on the road at Riverfront Stadium, but split the first two of the three in Oakland to be within one game of winning another championship. Except they couldn’t close it out at home, and then they lost Game 6 back at Cincinnati. After the Game 6 loss, Dick Williams told Dunc that he was going to start Game 7 behind the plate. Dunc hadn’t caught a game yet to that point in the Series, and Gene Tenace, the A’s regular catcher, was having a hell of a Series. But Dick Williams went with Dunc.
Later on, I asked Dunc, “Man, what was that like? It’s awesome being in the World Series, but you’re sitting there and all of a sudden you’re going to catch Game 7? What did you tell him?”
“I’ll be ready.”
“Weren’t you nervous?”
“No.”
If anybody else had told me that, I’d have called him on his B.S., but Dunc was like that. That was why people referred to him as “the Quiet Assassin.” Being cool under pressure didn’t change when he became a coach either. He was a pitching coach with Cleveland in 1981, and Len Barker had a perfect game going. The catcher and Dunc worked together to call the pitches. When it got to be crunch time, the catcher didn’t want to take on the responsibility. Dunc said, “Give it to me. I’ll take it.” Barker got his perfect game. That’s the kind of guy you want sitting on the bench with you.
But Dunc isn’t all guts. He’s a real student of the game: whether he was playing or coaching, his brains and creativity in handling pitchers were just phenomenal. And as much as I think of Dunc as a guy who could be a Navy SEAL or a Green Beret or whatever, he’s also a cat lover. The thing to remember is that, even though many men believe that being a cat lover means you’re not macho enough, the opposite in fact is true: understanding and admitting our affection for cats is a high form of macho-ness. In any case, Dunc doesn’t care, he just appreciates cats’ qualities and is into them.
He’s a man of high principles as well, so, Dunc being Dunc, he was going to be with Jeanine and help her get through this tough time. I knew not having him around was going to be a real challenge for the rest of us. The pitchers loved and respected the guy as much as I did. The man just exudes confidence, and that’s a great quality to have. Nothing cocky about him, just a “we’ll get this done,” “we’ll get this fixed,” “things will get better” mentality that served his pitchers well. I knew he was bringing that same attitude to Jeanine’s situation, and that was as good and true and necessary a thing as you could ever hope to have.
I was still going to be in touch with him because that’s Dunc: even if he wasn’t right next to me to bounce ideas off, he was still there in the dugout because of all the things he’d taught me over the years. I can’t say for sure what effect Dunc’s absence had on the pitching staff at first. Dunc being Dunc, he didn’t want to make a big deal about his leaving, but the guys did know what he and Jeanine were going through. I wasn’t about to use that as a tool to motivate them. Baseball is baseball and life is life, but if guys were going to take some inspiration, learn some lesson about how to deal with a hard and difficult thing head-on, then they could find no one better to emulate than Dave Duncan.
BY LOSING TWO OF THREE TO THE CUBS, WE FELL EIGHT AND A HALF games back—the largest deficit we’d faced since 2008. With only thirty-six games left and only a little over six weeks remaining in the season, that old adage about picking up a game a week wasn’t going to get us there. When I was managing in Oakland in the late 1980s, when we were in first place and that magic number was at 40, I would track it’s progress at the bottom of my pitching chart. Setting a goal of reducing the magic number by three in every series not only kept the focus on what was next but was fun and motivating. You can imagine what doing the opposite, counting down to the tragic number, feels like.
There’s another marker that we use during a season to gauge our relative position and chances of success: get to ninety wins. We were at 66-60, that same old plus-six we’d been at after the August 20 loss to the Cubs. If we were going to get to ninety wins, we were going to have to win twenty-four out of those remaining thirty-six games, a stretch in which we’d have to win at a .667 clip, or every two out of three.
That was still compatible with a “win the series” approach, but I also felt like that wasn’t going to be good enough to catch the Brewers. Unless they really struggled, they’d easily outpace ninety wins. They were already at seventy-five, so they had to win only fifteen out of thirty-six to get there, while we had to win twenty-four. You can’t count on that kind of slump happening to a team. Control your mind and your own team. Ninety wins would be great, but considering that we were playing at .524, getting on that .667 pace would be difficult—not impossible, but even if we did, we’d likely still fall short of a division title. We weren’t thinking too much about Atlanta at that point, though the irony is that on that same August 20 date, their record was the same as the Brewers’. They were trailing the Phillies, who were pursuing a franchise-best record, but were still playing terrific baseball.
I sat there on the flight from Chicago back to St. Louis turning all of these things over in my mind. My biggest concern, as we looked ahead to a seven-game home stand against the Dodgers and Pirates, was the feeling that the club seemed different. It wasn’t that we were backing off our intensity, but something felt slightly off. To date, our team had been so determined to compete the right way, no matter what we’d had to overcome. With all the injuries and setbacks we’d been through, to be six over .500 as of August 20 was an impressive achievement. When the season was in the books, if our 2011 club continued to scratch and claw, then whatever we finished with would be our best. If we were not going to be a playoff team, we’d be disappointed, but we wouldn’t have regrets. You can live with disappointments, but regrets will haunt you.
One of the realities of playing the last third of August with the season’s end in sight is that you really narrow your focus. The decisions are now all short-term. They are not about confidence-building versus your best chance to win, not about using all the roster to keep players fresh and sharp. They’re about staying in contention, and what that meant right now was figuring out the lull in our play and winning the home stand.
Unfortunately, that didn’t happen. Despite their ownership issues, led by Don Mattingly, the Dodgers had done a remarkable job of separating their off-field problems from their on-field competing. We lost the opener 2–1. I relieved Carp, who had pitched brilliantly, in the ninth inning, ahead 1–0, after he hit the leadoff batter. As I walked to the mound, the fans were “unhappy.” A triple and ground ball later for two runs, the boos were deafening. Twice so far in 2011, both against the Dodgers, I’d relieved Carp in the ninth with a 1–0 lead. Both times we lost. Maybe the next time Carp was ahead 1–0 in the ninth, I should just let Carp finish and not butt in.
In game 2, Lohse was the starter, and we lost 13–2. The sweep was complete when they jumped on Garcia and we lost 9–4. As the game’s last innings played out, we were officially in crisis mode. Ten games behind the Brewers and ten and a half behind the Braves. As we gathered ourselves in the dugout, Carp came to me.
“Are you going to talk to the team?” he asked.
“Something has to be said,” I replied.
“The veterans want to hold a team meeting after the game.”
I thought about that for a minute before replying, “That’s not a good idea.”
He shot me a confused look, but before he could ask anything, I continued: “If you want to have a meeting, don’t do it after the game. Have it before tomorrow’s game, and don’t let anyone outside of the club know about it. Keep it private. Keep it purposeful.”
I’ve never been a big believer in players-only meetings, and I always thought the team sends out a mixed message when they have one after a game. Of course, the press is going to find out about it, and then that meeting gets perceived as a “cover your ass” move. It’s like sending a signal out there that says, “Look. We’re trying.” Before a night game, the press is allowed into the clubhouse starting at 3:40. I thought they should have the meeting start at 3:00 so no one from the media would know about it. Carp agreed that was a good move.
“Do you have a message I can share with the guys?” he asked. I looked over at him. Carp knew that I would have preferred to be there. Not that I’m such a control freak, but because as a manager and a staff we were all in this thing together. I wasn’t going to stop them from having it. In fact, I was impressed that they were stepping forward.
“What do I want to say to them?” I asked Carp. “Tell them that for months scouts, front-office people, players have said things like, ‘Man, you guys have hung in there great with everything that you’ve gone through.’ And from what I’ve seen in the last ten days or so, for the first time all year, we’ve lost an edge.”
I let that all sink in for a moment before continuing. “This is my quote for the team: We’re getting ready to mug that respect that we have earned. From the media, fans, everybody. We can mug everything we’ve earned in the last six weeks. We have done so much to keep the urgency in how we compete that I believe it’s a part of us. The lull or difference is because we’re discouraged. Milwaukee has gotten very hot and pulled away from us. I think we feel all that gutsy work and the payoff is disappearing.
“We need to regain our intensity. Convince yourself that each of our last thirty-two games is the seventh game of the World Series, the last game of your life.”
Obviously, I don’t know how that got translated in the meeting since I wasn’t there. I also don’t know how well received the message was. All I can do is look at the results, and whether the guys did what they did in spite of what we were saying to them or because in some way it motivated them, I know something clicked. I could see in every at-bat and every pitch from that point on that the fire was back. Whether it was what Dunc and Jeanine were dealing with, the message I offered, or what the guys told one another, I can’t say with any certainty. All I know is that during that 12-14 sequence following the trade, most of the headlines about the Redbirds had to do with them getting their wings clipped, being grounded, or whatever other bird metaphors you can think of. Most people believed we were done with. I won’t go so far as to say that we rose like a phoenix from the ashes, but after that meeting we put together a damn good stretch of baseball, one that made history. We also kept pecking away, doing some of the big and little things it takes to win ball games. A game at a time, a series at a time, we shook off whatever was troubling us and moved forward.
During the off-season, a friend told me about a website called coolstandings.com. I’m not a big Internet surfer, but this caught my attention. The owners of that website use what’s called the Bill James Pythagorean theorem to calculate a team’s chances of winning a game, their division, or the wild-card playoff position. They claim to run millions of simulations in order to arrive at their conclusions. I once heard George Will say in a speech in San Francisco, “Statistics could be tortured to the point at which they will confess anything.” On September 1, 2011, coolstandings.com and its algorithm gave us a 2.6 percent chance of winning the division and a 1.7 percent chance of winning the wild card for a combined 4.3 percent chance of making the postseason. I didn’t consult the website back then, and I didn’t have any kind of percentages calculated, but as I said earlier, I was more concerned with the basics of maintaining our hard-earned self-respect and respect from others than I was about the playoff possibilities.
I don’t think Adam Wainwright was a big follower of coolstandings.com either. The night we lost that last game of the Los Angeles series, he, along with a bunch of players and staff, attended a dinner hosted by the Knights of the Cauliflower Ear. A man named Robert Hannegan founded the group to promote St. Louis as a sports capital. In fact, he was a co-owner of the Cardinals from 1947 until he died in 1949. So this group is very supportive of the Cardinals and the other St. Louis teams.
We ate first and then got to the speeches. Mo got up there first and delivered, without actually coming out and saying it, a “we’ll get ’em next year” message. “A lot of the things that we had tried to plan for didn’t go right,” Mo said that night. Who would blame him? Our prospects were low, and he was being honest.
When it was my turn to speak, I got up and said, “We won’t quit.”
Then Adam Wainwright, our injured pitcher who had been out for the season, rose to say his piece. He was even more emphatic than I was as he laid out the plan for what would be the miracle comeback, starting with the next week’s series in Milwaukee. Adam had been a real presence around the home clubhouse during his rehab, and I commend him for saying what he did, particularly if it reflected the rest of the team’s belief. “If we sweep Milwaukee and then beat them three more times at home, all of a sudden we’ve gained six games in the standings,” Wainwright said. “If we do that, all we have to do is make up a couple more games down the stretch. We’re still in this thing.”
AFTER THE DINNER, I WENT TO TONY’S RESTAURANT, A PLACE WHERE the family that owns the place treated me like one of them, and sat at a table by myself to think everything through. Dunc is a master of all things as a pitching coach, and sitting down with him and mapping out the rotation with him over the years had been like participating in a graduate school seminar in the art of managing people and situations. Because of him, I was in a good position to look at those final thirty-two games. As I sat there trying to come up with the rotation for those ten series that would close out the season, I worked on a sheet of paper where I had listed the dates and opponents to the last game. I noted that thirteen of the thirty-two games were the toughest of tests. Six versus the Brewers, four against the Phillies, and three head-to-head opportunities with the Braves in St. Louis. I was thinking about who would give us the best chance to stay above .500 and not get caught by the Reds. This was where we were:
67-63
Plus-four
Three games ahead of the Reds
Ten series left to play
By that point in the year, when assessing the pitchers, I was looking at the fatigue factor as much as anything else.
We can see that as the year goes on, pitchers’ velocity, the sharpness of their breaking pitches, and the amount of movement on their fastballs vary from start to start. When most or all of these factors are trending downward, we know that they are tired. We can see it in an individual game, and we can see it throughout the course of a season.
The defensive part of the game begins with your starting pitcher. The four starts for the Pittsburgh series were already set—Jackson, Westbrook, Carpenter, and Lohse. The remaining twenty-eight games included three off days, so there was some flexibility in setting the matchups. Throughout the season, an off day meant you could keep everyone in the five-man rotation pitching with an extra day’s rest or you could skip a pitcher and keep the others in the rotation. As often as possible, Dunc and I preferred to roll through the rotation without disrupting the flow and providing them all with the extra rest. If a starter was fatigued or sore, then it made sense to bump or skip him. The other reason to adjust could be the career successes or difficulties of a starter against a particular team. By moving a pitcher ahead or holding him back, you add a plus start and subtract a negative one.
At this stage, I thought that three guys were still fresh enough with their regular four days of rest to really be as effective as needed: Carp, Edwin Jackson, and Jake Westbrook. Jaime Garcia and Kyle Lohse had been taking their regular turns all year. In Lohse’s case, he’d reached the 200-inning mark—a kind of gold standard for durability in starting pitchers—only twice in his career, in 2003 and 2008. In the two seasons since that last time, he’d gone only 92 and 117 innings, respectively, because of injuries. With Jaime, we didn’t have as long a track record to look at. In 2008 he’d pitched only 16 innings, didn’t pitch at all in the majors the following season owing to injury, and had pitched 163 innings in 2010. Now, in 2011, he was already at 163 innings.
The way I worked out the rotation was from the last game of the season backward. I knew that I wanted Carp to be on the mound that last day. Call it intuition, call it whatever, but I wanted him out there for that last game, no matter how meaningless or meaningful it was. Then I looked at the thirty-two remaining games and tried to figure out a way to get as many starts from the fresh three as we could. That way, I could let Jaime and Kyle get more rest and be more effective. Carp, Jackson, and Westbrook were all penciled in to get seven starts from August 25 to September 28—that covered twenty-one out of the thirty-two remaining games. With three off days thrown in, the fresh three wouldn’t be going with short rest.
When I sat down with Jaime and Kyle, separately, to explain what I’d devised, their reactions were a bit different. Being a veteran, Kyle was more comfortable expressing his displeasure: he told me he felt strong and wanted the ball. That was exactly the kind of response I had hoped for. Kyle wasn’t happy about it, and he let me—and later the press—know that he was willing and able to go out there. I told him that it was a good and productive thing for him to get angry. Be pissed off at me—that’s fine. Now take that anger to the mound and be pissed at those opposing hitters.
Jaime’s just a quieter guy all around, and it was only his second year in the big leagues, with that arm injury still fresh in his mind. He, too, wasn’t happy about the idea of not taking his regular turn in September. But he also said that he wanted to do what was best for the club, and if I felt this was the best thing, then he was okay with it. They both expressed the desire that we make it clear to the rest of the team that this was my decision and not something they had asked for. Understandably, they didn’t want the rest of the guys having questions in the back of their minds about their willingness to take the ball when the stakes were high. We told them that of course we’d make that clear to everyone. That was yet another important way to personalize things—to manage their emotions as well as their innings.
In the end, with the extra days of rest, Kyle and Jaime were terrific down the stretch. They both won three out of their last five starts with two of those victories coming on extended rest. Looking back on it now, that move was one of the keys to our comeback. It was based as much on keeping them healthy as it was on winning games.