is that it takes him entirely too long to acknowledge that something is not working which is compounded by his snail like pace in accepting other alternatives. I belive the definition of insanity is repeating the same action while hoping for a different result. I hear Tony refered to as a genius alot but with the shades on in the dug out he reminds me of wily e. coyote from the road runner cartoons. Tony will always be less of a genius to me and more of a super genius like Wily E. Now imagine Flores, Franklin or izzy as the giant ACME rocket he straps to his back as he takes the Cardinals over a cliff – yipe!

Yes, he’s an asshole. I’d have no interest in being friends with the guy… but he’s a hell of a manager. Some day he’ll be gone and fans will wish we still had him.

... has managed about as well as he could this year, given injuries and ineffectiveness. we all bitch about how little he’s used Perez (although that’s been picking up lately), but it took huge cajones to put McClellan on this roster and use him in the high-leverage situations he’s been put in all year.

Izzy/Franklin were nails last year, and TLR didn’t really have any options to supplant them when they both went nutso. again, you could say that Perez should’ve immediately been put in the closer’s role, but very few MLB managers do things like that in the middle of the season unless they absolutely have to. TLR has also had to use guys like Parisi and Boggs in situations where they were prone to struggle because he simply didn’t have any other choice. the most consistently positive bullpen pitcher has been Springer, but he seemingly can’t pitch more than two or three times per week. Flores has only pitched 23 innings this year, so TLR has tried to limit him as much as possible.

honestly, i think Tony’s done a very good job this year considering what he’s had to work with. for most of the season, he’s had to make do with a 3/5 rotation comprised of Looper, Piniero, and Parisi/Boggs/Garcia. he and Dunc and have turned Welly into a very good pitcher, and Lohse has improved a lot also.

TLR has, for the most part, done what everyone here wanted him to do: he’s given Ryan a chance to win a job, he’s given Ankiel and Ludwick time to solidify solid roles, he’s incorporated kids into the club (Parisi, Boggs, Garcia, Perez, McClellan, et al) and let them get a taste of the bigs and further their development. he’s gotten more out of Schumaker than any of us thought was there. he’s dealt with injuries to many of the important players on the team (Carp, Waino, Izzy, Molina, Ankiel, Duncan, Welly, Ty Johnson) and some of the minor players. he’s had the disappointment of Clement and Mulder not being able to contribute.

all of this, and the team is competing. honestly, i don’t think the bullpen failures were predictable by either Mo or TLR. as i said, Izzy and Franklin were nails last year, and those two plus Springer were expected to anchor the staff. they haven’t. that’s not TLR’s fault. perhaps he should’ve inserted Perez or McClellan into the closer’s role earlier, but many closers struggle for a little while before regaining their form. i can understand why TLR tried to get these guys back into form. TLR knows that without them, we aren’t a contending team.

he’s held this team together this year, against all odds. they probably won’t make the playoffs, but that isn’t TLR’s fault.

I think there are a lot of people like me who think TLR has been a great asset to the organization, but see room for improvement. There are also many people who think that criticizing TLR, or even suggesting he do some things differently, amounts to sacrilege or even “hate”. If that is true then you can count me among the haters.

I will be the first to admit that he is a HOF manager, but I will also qualify that endorsement by saying he is not a top tier HOFer. To use a player analogy, he is no Babe Ruth, Willie Mays, or Stan Musial. By my way of thinking he is more like a Paul Molitor or a Dave Winfield who will make the HOF largely by grinding out a long career. Nonetheless, still a HOFer and should be appreciated as such.

Here comes the however. However, I think the party that should get the most credit for the TLR/WJ era and all the playoff runs is the ownership. Many of you will recall that Tony’s catalyst for leaving Oakland was an ownership change. The new owners made it clear they were not going to sponsor large payrolls. In TLRs last five years in Oakland they were consistently in the top half of the league in payroll, were in the top ten three times, the top five twice, and #1 once. So TLR found a wiling ownership group in St. Louis and a familiar face in WJ and made the jump.

Many fans fondly remember the Whitey Herzog era in St. Louis and with good reason. Three World Series in six years is something to be proud of. USA Today’s salary database only goes back to 1988, but in the last two years of Gussie’s life the Cardinals were at the top of the division in payroll. However, once Gussie passed on the brewery began running the franchise as a profit center and payroll suffered accordingly. While the 1990 squad, in the first season after Gussie’s passing, led the division in payroll, the Cardinals were to be in the bottom half of the division payroll-wise for the remaining duration of the brewery’s ownership.

However, when the current ownership took over things began to change. Since the ‘95 season the Cardinals have outspent every team in the division except the Cubs and the difference is only 1.4%. We have outspent Houston by $111M, Cincinnati by $268M, Milwaukee by $385M, and Pittsburgh by $496M. In every single season except two the Cardinals have either been #1 or #2 in division payroll. The other two seasons they were #3.

So what does it mean? Anybody can spend money, the Cubs have spent more than us since 1994 and what do they have to show for it? Obviously, it is important to have a front office that is a good steward of the ownership’s money and a field manager who can get the most out of the team. Nevertheless, all you have to do to get a feel for the answer is to look back at the Cardinal teams of the early ‘90s. They were so awful and frustrating that they drove Whitey Herzog from the game. With a payroll that averaged next to last in the division TLR would have experienced a similar fate.

time after time after time after time after time after time after time after time after time after time after time after time after time after time after time after time after time after time after time after time after time after time?

everyone knows that. to me, the rub is that we are all a little sick of his managing style, and I halfheartedly wished that he would move on instead of signing again. I have few problems with his character, as some have brought up. he may come off as an asshole at times, but someone mentioned that they would not want to be friends with the guy, what an ignorant comment. like you know the guy. he is a charitable man (is it bad to help animals?), and who gives an F if he got a DUI? that crap happens all the time (sure it sucks that someone rich can get off from it more easily than the average guy). anyway, the less said about that the better, that’s just my opinion. obviously he should not have been drinking and driving, but no one can say that everyone abstains from driving when over .08. anyway, he’s a very successful manager, so it’s difficult to criticize him imo. this team he has been asked to manage is obviously a big challenge, and things have been changing rapidly for the team this season. it’s easy to defend him as well as easy to criticize, since he doesn’t do things the way most deem traditional or the accepted way to manage. facts remain that baseball is evolving in new ways, and TLR seems at least quite capable of adapting with it, especially with such a big ? of a team. why not argue that “Hey, the Cards are 10 games over .500 and still have a shot at the playoffs when everyone picked them to suck this season”. That’s obviously some success for the head honcho in the dugout, the Shot Caller if you will. my criticisms only amount to nitpicking over the season (I don’t get why he rests multiple good hitters in the same game and puts out joke lineups from time to time, the guy isn’t perfect, and I’m sure he’d be able to somehow justify most of those instances). sure he put too much hope into izzy regaining form, and franklin should not have been the closer… but then again, Perez had control issues, and there weren’t really a whole lot of other viable options. we paid the price this year for having a lot of injured starters, and still TLR made them into a force to be reckoned with, although he didn’t get as many innings out of them to save the bullpen. I guess what’s interesting is how many people criticize him outright for a job that is obviously more complex than they realize, when you have to shift things around you always are going to pay the price in other areas. the point I’m trying to make is, sure he could be doing better, but he’s definitely not costing the team much; he may have actually gave us a chance this year. it’s just frustrating that we are so close yet so far away.

Once in his entire managerial career has his team finished in last. That was the terrible 1993 A’s. I’m confident that at the very least TLR keeps the Cardinals from being a laughing stock. Love him or hate him you can’t dispute the results.

But I recall being picked to finish 3rd in the division that year, behind Houston and Chicago. I recall the pundits at the start of the year thinking we had little chance at the division. By the end of the year, a 105 win season wasn’t enough to get TLR manager of the year because the prevailing sentiment was “How can you not win with all that talent”. If it was such a slam dunk, why didn’t people pick us?

I guess my overall point is that a lot of these teams look different to us in retrospect than they do looking forward. Jocketty made some great moves to get us there, don’t want to sell that short. But LaRussa shows an ability to get a lot of juice out of the orange too.

I’m like many in that I don’t always agree with the tactical. I can look at any one days lineup, or bullpen decision, and question it just like anybody else. But stepping away from the detail, and looking at the overall theme, TLR keeps all the guys on the roster into the game. He seems to manage a hungry team year in, year out. That big picture stuff is what is most important, and that can get lost on us if we fixate too hard on the tactical. He gets killed on here for using small statistical samples for lineup moves. I do it too, so I hope I don’t come across as condescending. What I really believe though, is that LaRussa probably doesn’t really find it to be all that meaningful mathematically either. It just fits into the greater goal, in his mind, of keeping everybody fresh and giving people rest. And it seems to work.

And I also agree with the point I believe Kindred was making. He usually arrives at the same conclusions for roster management as many of us do, it just may take him longer to pull the trigger than we’d like. But on the flip side of that coin, I don’t want him chasing his tail going after every one month statistical abnormality either. It’s a delicate balance. If a guy does a job well for several years, maybe it should take more than a bad month, or even 2, for a permanent change to be made.

As much as I may disagree with certain moves, decisions, whatever….overall I have a lot of respect for how well he does his job.

because he deserves it. if tony was playing chess, he’d have to move every piece on the board every game, or he’d feel bad. how can you out-manage the opponent if you make fewer “moves”. this rarely happens with tlr. i threw a few +1s in above supporting criticism of moves like playing miles at short. he’s all for “roles” in the pen, but moves position players arpund like every position is the same. i firmly believe even your left fielder is a better defender if he just plays left field, even more so in the infield. ball comes off the bat different in left than right, etc. tlr moves these guys around like a random walk much of the time. i also firmly believe the cards did well because walt brought in the bats and arms. on top of that dunc helped many cheap pitchers exceed their historic norms. without dunc, tony would not be viewed as such a great manager.