St. Louis – When St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony La Russa was told Monday that Oakland’s Ken Macha had been fired, La Russa was shocked.
“I beg your pardon?” he said.
Told that reports out of the Bay Area said that friction between Macha and A’s players was one of the reasons general manager Billy Beane fired Macha, La Russa was nonplused. After all, hadn’t Macha led the A’s to the American League West title, and then defeated the Twins in the divisional playoffs?
“They had such a great second half. There was friction? How did they beat Minnesota? How did that happen?” La Russa demanded.
But as La Russa well knows, managing in the age of big money and guaranteed contracts is a delicate dance.
“I think what you look for, in the best situations, is you have a personal and a professional relationship with your players,” La Russa said. “In my opinion, if it’s just an effective professional relationship, where they respect you, that’s OK.
“But the dynamics of a baseball team is from spring training to, hopefully, October. You’re together so much. … There’s got to be something personal with your players so that they respect you. But there’s feeling and there’s caring and there’s trust and all that.”
New York Mets manager Willie Randolph explained the dance this way: “Everyone has a different style. I don’t think there’s any blueprint to what it should be like. So it depends a lot on the team and the makeup of your ballclub and their personalities. Sometimes you have to be firm talking to certain guys, and sometimes you have to back off a little bit. But for the most part, you have to be true to yourself and to what you do.”
La Russa is viewed as very controlling, but for the most part, his relationship with his players is on solid ground.
“The good thing about Tony is that he doesn’t sugarcoat anything and you know where you stand,” Cards utilityman Scott Spiezio said. “The thing is, a manager has to be respected, but he’s got to deserve the respect.”
La Russa, of course, is not on terrific terms with all of his players. An underlying theme of these playoffs has been a simmering feud between La Russa and third baseman Scott Rolen over injuries and playing time.
Bernie Miklasz, a columnist from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, wrote: “It’s my belief that the mutual hostility runs a lot deeper than either man is willing to reveal publicly, and I question whether Rolen and La Russa can work together next season.”
As for the need to have a friendly, social relationship with his manager, Spiezio said: “You don’t have to have that, but it’s nice if you do. It makes it much more fun. Tony has called me on my cellphone, and said, ‘I’ve got tickets to a concert; let’s go.’ So my wife (Jenn) and I have gone out with Tony. That’s a cool thing to have happen, but at the same time, he’s got to be able to call me into his office and chew me out if he thinks he needs to. I understand that, but not all players do.”
But ask any player, from Todd Helton to Albert Pujols, to name the cardinal rule in player-manager relationships and they tell you that their boss must “have their back,” especially when talking to the media. In Oakland, a number of A’s players said Macha broke the cardinal rule.
“The atmosphere wasn’t positive, for some reason,” third baseman Eric Chavez, Oakland’s longest-tenured player, told the San Francisco Chronicle. “That was hard for us to deal with. Here we are, winning the division, we’re banged up but were still doing what we should be doing. And every time he spoke to us, he’d say how much he appreciated the effort, but then you’d read things where he was always smashing people. … This negative cloud was just eating at everybody.”
