One Last Strike by Tony La Russa

Author:Tony La Russa
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780062207531
Publisher: HarperCollins

AS GAME 2 GOT UNDER WAY, I FOUND MYSELF THINKING, AS I HAD since August: We have to be realistic in our goals, we have to make this a series. That’s all I really had in mind at that point. Let’s make this competitive. I’d had my share of lopsided playoff series. When you win them, it’s great, but when you lose them, especially in a sweep, it’s soul-killing. You have failed at your number-one task: having your club do a good job of representing how you prepare them to be competitive.

In 1988 the A’s I led lost to the Dodgers 4–1, winning only Game 3 with a walk-off home run from Mark McGwire. Not a competitive World Series.

In 1989 we experienced the flip side of that, beating the Giants 4–0 that tragic year.

In 1990 the Reds swept their way to a World Series title, outscoring us 22 to 8.

Sometimes a team falls short of being truly competitive in a critical game rather than over an entire series. We lost 15–0 to the Braves in the seventh game of the NLCS in 1996. We also lost Game 5 by a score of 14–0. You don’t like being on the losing side of series like that or games like that.

I knew going into Game 2 that a kind of tsunami effect could occur if we lost. Going down 0-2 in a five-game series meant that every game after that was a potential elimination game. I’m not saying that we couldn’t have climbed back out of that hole, but it would have been a steep, dark, and dangerous climb. Not one I would recommend to anyone. With Carp on the hill, we at least liked our chances to be competitive. When Rafael Furcal, using the same mind-set we’d had against Halladay, tripled on the very first pitch, I knew we weren’t going to have any trouble bouncing back from that opening game loss. When we failed to bring him in, I was still confident in our club’s ability, but disappointed that we’d failed to capitalize.

The Phillies backed us up further against the wall by taking a 4–0 lead after the second inning. We didn’t capitalize and they did, with a crooked number in the first and then by adding on with a single run in the second. Crap. Part of the reason for that early deficit was that Carp wasn’t getting ahead of the hitters. He threw a first-pitch strike to only one of the seven hitters he faced, and that one, Shane Victorino, flied out. He fell behind, and then he had to come in with strikes, and a good-hitting team takes advantage of that. He threw thirty-eight pitches in that first inning, a lower total than it might have been only because he got an inning-ending double play. Carp’s not one to fall behind so consistently. Something was up. I didn’t like the idea that our starter had thrown more than a third of the total number of pitches he might be expected to deliver in the first inning.

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