Tony La Russa won three World Series championships in his Hall of Fame career, including managing his team to six appearances, and in a recent interview on Monday with Randy Karraker and Matthew Rocchio of STL Sports Central, said that, “It’s actually easier to win now if you just play the game correctly”.
During the interview, La Russa was talking about Albert Pujols when Mark McGwire suffered an injury in 2001. La Russa said that Pujols told him he needed to hit for more power because of McGwire’s absence. La Russa says he told the young Pujols, “We play hard contact all over the field, the higher your average, the more rallies you start, and if you’ve got the power, it’ll be there, you’ll in fact hit more home runs.”
La Russa may have struggled during his return to the dugout with the Chicago White Sox, but his baseball mind is a sharp as it was during his World Series runs with the Oakland Athletics and St. Louis Cardinals.
Starting rallies and scoring runs has always been the way to win games against good pitching, and with pitchers continuing to evolve through the years, they have gotten better and better at limiting hitters. La Russa would continue to say that the problem in today’s game is that batters go up and swing as hard as they can three times, trying to hit for extra bases.
Each season, fewer and fewer hitters are reaching the .300 mark, with not one qualified hitter in the National League this season hitting .300 at the All-Star break. If a team implemented La Russa’s strategy and were successful in starting rallies and turning in crooked numbers, then they would be able to win more games against teams that are obsessed with hitting home runs.
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