La Russa’s celebration long overdue

ST. LOUIS — Tony La Russa is finally going to get his parade.

The man who joined Sparky Anderson as the only managers in 130 or so years of major league baseball to have won a World Series in both leagues doesn’t know the time, date or place. Yet.

Finding out the details, frankly, won’t even cross his mind until the rivers of champagne overflowing the St. Louis clubhouse following Friday night’s 4-2 clinching win over the Tigers and good buddy Jim Leyland have long since dried up. No matter.

La Russa was hardly in a hurry to celebrate when Adam Wainwright’s final fastball buzzed past Brandon Inge. He let his ballplayers have the stage, sharing a quick hug in the dugout with his coaches and a long one with his wife, Elaine. Then he walked slowly toward the mound, turning toward the Detroit bench and Leyland and doffed his cap in tribute.

“I’m doing a good job of holding it together,” he said. “I’m just bursting. I’m so happy for guys here. We had a lot of guys without a ring, and this is an experience they will never forget. The greatest.”

It meant plenty to La Russa, too, but good luck getting him to admit it. Instead, remember the uniform number La Russa demanded in 1996 when he arrived in St. Louis, No. 10, which just happens to be the same number of championships the franchise now possesses.

La Russa didn’t get a parade, at least not a proper one, when he won his first ring in the earthquake-interrupted 1989 Series with an Oakland ballclub that never received its propers, either. That lone win by La Russa’s A’s was sandwiched between a pair of World Series losses, to the Dodgers in 1988 and the Reds in 1990. And if all you know about the manager is what you’ve read, you wouldn’t know how much that little oversight burns him.

But that’s the funny thing about La Russa. All everybody talks about is how smart the guy is. Pick up the books “Three Nights in August” or “Men at Work.” Yet, what impresses the men who work for him even more is his desire.

“That’s one thing Tony preaches,” Series MVP David Eckstein said afterward. “We play with a hard mind no matter what the situation is. We keep battling and never give up, and fortunately we came through.”

La Russa goes to great lengths to mask that desire. But just two nights earlier, while the cold, steady rain that forced postponement of Game 3 soaked the playing field a few hundred yards from his office, it was smoldering.

With a handful of sports writers sitting on a couch and some easy chairs scattered around the room, someone asked whether winning this Series would make this his most satisfying season ever. La Russa never gets ahead of himself, either. In any other situation, he’d rather have his molars yanked out, without anesthesia, than answer that question.

This time, though, he looked off in the distance for a moment and then said softly, “I’ve never been in a parade.”

La Russa went on to explain that with so much of the Bay Area so devastated in the aftermath of the 1989 quake, a full-blown celebration would have been disrespectful.

Instead, the A’s ownership arranged for the team to take a short ferry ride around the bay and stop at Jack London Square in Oakland, where a thousand or so fans shared brief toasts, applauded politely and headed back home. La Russa understood.

What baffled him was how only baseball purists recalled what an awesome blend of pitching, power and speed it was. If it’s any consolation, it won’t be confused with this one.

These Cardinals staggered into the postseason hampered by injuries, practically begging to be finished off. But after a masterful job by La Russa of plugging the holes in his lineup, they leave the Series as the champions with the fewest regular-season wins.

“Most challenging by far,” center fielder Jim Edmonds said, when asked to rank La Russa’s task, “with these idiots we got. We got a bunch of wild men on our team.”

That hardly fazed La Russa. He’s won everywhere he’s been, at every level, with all kinds of teams. He has almost 2,300 regular-season victories, four league championships and the two World Series rings. But after bombing out of the three previous LCS appearances and had the Cards failed to go all the way this time, all those other wins might have been easy to forget.

Yet when La Russa was asked to shift his focus from his feelings for those “wild men” and talk about what this meant, he took off like a player rounding third and running right through the coach’s stop sign.

“It was really fun to be around this group. They were so determined. And as we got into it, I actually started getting concerned because they were wanting it so much. I didn’t want them to be disappointed,” La Russa said, “and they’re not.”

Switch out some pronouns in the quote above and you’ll have the answer to the original question. La Russa might be a lawyer by training, but he’s a gambler by choice. And for all his need to get things right, the one thing he never forgets is that this is a game played by people. And in the extended string of choices that make up baseball, he’s made it his mission – make that his obsession – to put everybody in a position to succeed.

Including, this one time, himself.

“I thought, wow, winning is great, but to win at home, to just experience what we experienced on the field,” he said, pausing, “and a doggone parade.

“And that’s something a lot of us have never had,” La Russa said, “including myself.”