Institutional Memory
Series #8: vs. Pittsburgh Pirates
It was surely a great disappointment to the anti-Cardinals lobby when Tony La Russa announced his retirement in the days following the 2011 World Series. In the years before the club’s record of success became truly excessive, before “Best Fans in Baseball” and “The Cardinal Way” had been sufficiently blown out of proportion, La Russa was the be-all, end-all of Cardinals hate, the ever-scowling, double-switching, Tea-Partying godhead of fetishistic Old Way ignorance and micro-managerial sophistry.
This was caricature, of course, and the real La Russa bore little resemblance to any of it. His supposedly strident conservatism was a dog that never really barked (and also, you know, welcome to pro sports), while his reputation as a Morgan-caliber Moneyball-bashing philistine is overstated at best, having mostly to do with his problems with the film adaptation’s streamlined narrative and not the book’s lessons about the value of advanced analytics. La Russa was far more adaptable than many gave him credit for, and it’s hard to see how he could have stuck around long enough to become the third-winningest skipper in Major League history if that weren’t the case.
That’s not to say that both the manager and the man didn’t have their flaws. His crusty joylessness may have been more style than substance, but man was that style crusty and joyless and occasionally caustic and divisive and exhausting, of a piece with the old-school hardball asceticism that doesn’t really fit with the vision many of us have for baseball in the 21st century, even if the gap between them isn’t nearly as wide as the average isn’t-Puig-sick-bro Deadspin editorial wants you to think it is.
But La Russa’s worst habit, the one that arguably caused the Cardinals the most harm, is—not coincidentally—the one his critics paid the least attention to: his unrelenting bias towards veteran players at the expense of the organization’s emerging talent. Time and again, highly-touted prospects reached the majors only to ride the bench or run afoul of La Russa’s sensibilities and eventually get shipped elsewhere. Some of these players have gone on to have productive careers, some haven’t, and the jury is still out on others. Worst of all is the possibility that some of them would have thrived but were instead derailed by a temperamental manager at a formative stage in their careers.
For those of us who grew to appreciate La Russa, his monomania and competitiveness and encyclopedic knowledge of the game—and maybe even his perma-frown and bullpen shenanigans, too—his departure came with a trade-off. Yes, the Cardinals would lose his experience and clout, but at least they’d lose his stubborn aversion to young players, too. It seemed like a milestone in the organization’s shift towards forward-thinking development and a reliance on homegrown talent, and a belated realignment to baseball’s new GM-driven normal. There was a common objection to the hiring of the inexperienced, utterly clout-less Mike Matheny: He’s just going to be John Mozeliak’s pawn. And the proper counterargument: Yes, but he’s just going to be John Mozeliak’s pawn.
About that. Kolten Wong went 0-for-4 against the Pirates on Friday and got sent down to Memphis on Sunday, hours after being passed over for a start at second base in favor of Daniel Descalso and a week or two since Matheny began benching him for Mark Ellis, a veteran infielder in the La Russa mold if there ever was one. For the time being, the keystone will belong to Ellis and Descalso, who are batting .160 and .097 on the season, respectively.
It’s the second time in eight months that Wong has been elevated to the big-league roster only to fall quickly out of Matheny’s favor. Mozeliak, for his part, wasn’t very subtle about why the move had to be made: Wong wasn’t going to get regular playing time going forward, and needed to be in a place where he would. As for an explanation from Matheny as to why that was the case, we got whatever the fuck this is:
“He hasn’t had a whole lot of struggle throughout his career,” Matheny said this weekend. “You’ve got to figure out how to get through it.
“Without question, he’s going to be his own toughest evaluator. But he’s getting better at that, by the way. He’s better now than he was in spring training. He might be faking part of that. Good for him. That’s part of the process, too.
“When he’s that hard on himself, it makes it more difficult to get through these tough runs.”
“Everything’s there. It’s a matter of him believing it.”
Ben Humphrey at VEB bravely attempted to follow Matheny’s quote-unquote logic:
Wong will return to Memphis, a level at which he has nothing left to prove, and play every day, which will help him learn how to overcome adversity in spite of the fact that he’s doing a lot better at overcoming adversity in the majors although he is probably faking it but that’s good, too, and part of the process of becoming a big-leaguer which can be learned in the minors playing every day. Or something.
We’ll get more clarity sooner or later, and these are still just the opening few chapters in what will hopefully be the long career of Kolten Wong, Cardinal. For now, though, there is only exasperation, and a little bit of rage—either because the Cards have a manager who is so easily swayed by such (all together now) small sample sizes or because there’s more going on here than we’re being told, and because out of all the qualities of its legendary former manager the club could have internalized, it seems to have picked the very worst.
