With the Brewers and Cardinals playing an incredibly important three-game series this week, Tony La Russa has gone ahead and done what he’s always done best: make the baseball games that he’s involved with about him and only him.
Before last night’s Cardinals/Brewers’ game, La Russa filed an official complaint about the lighting at Miller Park during Monday’s game (a 6-2 Brewers win), claiming that the area around home plate was darker when the Cardinals were batting than it was when the Brewers were batting. The home plate umpire during Monday’s game, Gary Darling, passed the complaint on to the Brewers’ baseball operations people, but in talking to the media he basically mentioned the complaints with an eyeroll said that he noticed no difference during the game and didn’t expect anything to be done.
Then, in the seventh inning of last night’s game, Brewers’ reliever Takashi Saito hit Albert Pujols on the hand with a pitch. At the time, the Brewers were up by a run, the tying run was on third base, and the go-ahead run was on first. Matt Holliday and his .560 slugging percentage, 25 doubles, and 16 home runs was on deck. Why on earth would Saito have been throwing at Pujols in that situation? Why would Ron Roenicke put the a go-ahead run on second base with no outs for Matt Holliday in his team’s most important game of the year? The Brewers are 12th in the National League in intentional walks, so it’s not like Roenicke’s an IBB-happy guy who just decided to hit Pujols instead of walking him.
La Russa, though, took things into his own hands and in the bottom of the very same inning had reliever Jason Motte throw two pitches at Ryan Braun, with the second one hitting him in the back. When asked about it, La Russa seemed incredulous that anyone would even question his decision. He said that he didn’t think that the Brewers were trying to hit Pujols, but he felt it was necessary to “send a message” back. He claimed that he didn’t necessarily want to hit Braun, but it’s hard to imagine why else that message took two pitches to send.
La Russa then kept on ranting about how dangerous it is to throw “high and inside” to anyone and that if you want to pitch someone inside, you should go down and in. This is an established part of La Russa’s schtick. I get it. Still, pitchers have a right to come inside, and Pujols is an incredibly difficult guy to back off of the plate. According to Joe Lefkowtiz’s Pitch f/x tool, about four of Pujols’s 24 homers have come off of pitches in and around the high and tight part of the strike zone. Righties have thrown 30 fastballs up and in on Pujols this year. Pujols has swung at 12 of them and of those 12, ten have gone for hits. He crushes pitches from righties up and out over the plate, too, with an .818 slugging percentage on 30 pitches. If Saito had missed even a little bit in a different direction on that pitch, there’s a good chance Pujols would’ve crushed it. So, in a situation where Saito couldn’t afford to put a runner on base, he threw a ball up and in with the chance that he could either hit Pujols or serve up a game-changing extra base hit. Saito wasn’t trying to hit Pujols and he was taking a huge risk into his own hands by throwing there. It didn’t end up costing him as much as it might’ve, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a bad risk for him to take in that situation.
But that wasn’t enough for La Russa, so he responded by throwing at Ryan Braun, using the aforementioned two pitches to hit him after he ducked the first, putting the go-ahead run on base for Prince Fielder in the bottom of the seventh of a tie game that the Cardinals’ really needed to win. On Monday, he apparently couldn’t fathom hos his Cardinals would lose unless the opponents were cheating. On Tuesday, La Russa put his team into a difficult spot in a tight game and risked getting Motte, of the best relievers in a thin bullpen, suspended to send a purpose pitch in a questionable situation.
The Cardinals ended up winning on Tuesday, and today we’re all talking about Tony La Russa again, which is exactly what he wants. That’s all he ever seems to want.
