The Eighth Wonder Of The World, This Guy Isn't

First of all, I just want to say it feels so nice to finally start blogging about this incredible Cubs team. I was never going to be able to maintain a blog strictly about Chicago sports, but I think these postings are the most delicious for me.

That said, this post really isn’t about this incredible Cubs team and is only weakly connected to the Chicago sports at all. The deal is, I got back in town just in time for the always contentious Cubs-Cardinals series, which gives me a chance for a rip on Cardinals manager Tony LaRussa that I’ve been meaning to make for a long time.

My late friend Jeff Ponczak, a Daily Illini legend, used to go ape-scat whenever he heard baseball announcers refer to LaRussa, a former White Sox manager (see? there’s the weak connection) as a genius. The real reason Ponz got so irate is that he was a die-hard Sox fan and therefore felt jilted that LaRussa moved on to win a World Series in Oakland, but the purported reasons he offered actually had a lot of merit.

His most vociferous objection was that LaRussa’s use of his pitcher in the eighth spot of the lineup was flat-out stupid, and I cannot agree more.

LaRussa’s reasoning is that this system allows him to ensure his best hitter will bat in the first inning, by hitting him third, and then function as a cleanup hitter in later innings because he will have three legitimate hitters in front of him. This “logic,” for lack of a better word, completely misses the point. If hitters are getting on in front of the best hitter, he will come up in the first inning from the cleanup spot, and if no one’s getting on in front of him, his only RBI opportunity is to hit a solo home run, which counts the same whether it comes with two outs in the first or none in the second.

So all you accomplish by moving up the pitcher is to move your worst hitter up in the lineup, and move a leadoff-quality hitter to the very bottom.

This is not the only objection to the overrating of LaRussa. In fact, Sunday night’s Cubs-Cardinals game gave a shining example of how his “genius” is actually just LaRussa outsmarting himself.

With runs at a premium, the Cubs had Alfonso Soriano at third and Derrek Lee at bat with one out in the sixth. LaRussa pulled his infield halfway in, causing barely literate announcer Joe Morgan to gush so hard about how clever this strategy is that he actually managed to express in complete sentences that the intent is to cause a runner uncertainty as to whether to run on a ground ball (hint: don’t). After all that, Lee just ripped a line drive through the spot where the shortstop had been standing, and Soriano put the Cubs up 2-0.

Of course, if the infield had been a normal depth, Lee would have been likely to try to poke a ground ball somewhere. But it’s a lot harder to score from third on an infield grounder anywhere than it is on a sharp single. LaRussa may be one of those people who has a pathological need to show everyone that he’s smarter than the conventional wisdom, even though anyone who thinks he is, is by that very notion a fool.