Major League Baseball

Sorry Tony, but you have to go

Published Aug. 26, 2011 1:00 a.m. ET

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With six days remaining in August, a baseball season in St. Louis that oftentimes has felt like watching a drunk friend stumble, right himself, then puke and fall has mercifully crashed. All that is left is the hangover, an almost four-week walk of shame into another playoff-less offseason.

What is crazy is, as recently as late July, I remember thinking to myself what a genius job Cardinals manager Tony La Russa had done holding this team together through all manner of drama. They had a half-game lead in the weak NL Central despite losing pitcher Adam Wainwright and myriad issues of varying degree. And still, I woke up Thursday morning trying to wrap my brain around a Dodgers sweep and a 10-game Brewers lead, which led to contemplating a deeper question about sports.

Winners stay. Losers go. That's the natural order. What happens, though, when those states of sports being intersect, when a longtime winner, a genius really, seemingly is unable to do what was once their identity? Does what they have done buy them infinite pardon against what they are not doing?

Because I am starting to believe La Russa has to go.

After typing what is frankly blasphemy, I feel compelled to bust out my Lou cred card. So I admit to often asking people “what high school did you go to?” — a standard litmus tests for determining if a person grew up in The Lou or just passed through for a while. I am born and raised Lou, a diehard Cardinals fan with Bob Forsch and John Tudor baseball cards for proof.

People always ask “Can you still be a fan?” My answer is I do not want to read the sports journalist who no longer has any fan in them, who does not bleed with at least one team. You have to or you risk becoming that guy, the journalist who seems not to enjoy that which we cover.

So I disclose my loyalties, a premeditated apology for my way-too-close rants about Mizzou and Cardinals baseball. We always hurt the ones we love, which brings me back to La Russa after a way to way-too-long and esoteric disclaimer.

I read a good blog by Bernie Miklasz of the St. Louis Post Dispatch. His thought was fans failed to properly blame players in St. Louis, heaping everything on poor La Russa.

Well, of course fans do.

The Cards have become all about the manager — his genius, his odd rants, his complaints, his machinations with varying players, his brutal feud with Colby Rasmus, his illogical defense of Mark McGwire, his status for next season. This typically happens with geniuses with longevity.

But as we saw with the Mavs' takedown of LeBron and The Heat, the best coaching sometimes means allowing your team to become a team. Rick Carlisle taught and prodded and drew up plays and gave what I am sure were outstanding motivational speeches. He also gave them latitude to become a team capable of withstanding withering pressure.

So while it is fair to say La Russa is not the only problem or even the biggest problem, it is also fair to say he may be getting in the way of the solution.

No, he was not responsible for his team's mediocre hitting but why the histrionics with Rasmus? The Wainwright blow was wicked but why has that only in the last month caught up with them? This is the second year the team has faded down the stretch, unlikely to reach the postseason despite a sizeable payroll and entry in a weak-butt division. And this feels indefensible.

Hesitation comes from La Russa still being a damn good manager.

This is irrefutable, and dangerous. The Cardinals have a history of premature firing. They dispatched with Joe Torre, not LA-Torre but just-about-to-go-to-Yankees-and-kill-it Torre. I often wonder if they would have been able to escape the malaise of the 1990s more expediently if he had stayed.

But they got La Russa and now wonder what happens if they fire him prematurely, what impact that has on Albert Pujols (although that is a dollars matter now). Or what if the mutual option is deployed and it leads to another year of underachieving with a really good manager.

I know what the Cardinals peeps have said publicly — that La Russa can manage until he no longer wants to — and I believe them. I also believe empty seats will play no role. This is St. Louis, fans will come even if they name white Michael Vick as manager. What this really comes down to is the tipping point between loyalty and production, between rewarding what happened vs. what is happening.

In my mind, La Russa always will be as he was in 2006. It is arguably his best work. That team barely squeaked into the playoffs and was favored to win exactly nothing. They came together, believing in themselves when nobody else did. The Adam Wainwright strikeout of Carlos Beltran, with one of the nastiest curve balls I have ever seen, to win Game 7 of the NLCS is one of my favorite moments in sports and the memory always plays with Jack Buck’s “go crazy folks, go crazy” as background.

He was the sound track for so much of my youth. It was matched only by the brazen guts of Anthony Reyes in Game 1 of the World Series, his to win and La Russa to start him.

That seems like so long ago. And now it feels like it is time for La Russa to go.

Blasphemy, I know.

We always hurt the ones we love the most.

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