LaRussa has mistreated Yermín needlessly and in public. Even if he had actually seen the sign and did not obey it, any issues have to go behind close doors. So, he saw at 48mph ball and took it to town, so what? They are all pros, many of them making millions. I don’t care that it was 15-4 or whatever. You play to win. Were the Twins pusposedly getting strikeout so as to not even try to score?
Yermin had been busting his ass for years to the to MLB, let him get his stats. He’s no spring chicken. LaRussa almost congratulated the other team for throwing at HIS players and said “there will be consequences”. Defend your guys and solve your issued in the club. Rip him a new if you must, but in private.
What a moron.
Cut it out with this silly “respect the game” stuff.
Even for an unwrittern rule it is stupid. If you are putting a position player in to pitch, you just want the game to be over with. Why would you want batters to take pitches to extend the game? If he swings he might get out and if not you move on quickly to the next batter.
The guy is an asshole for many reasons, and this is another. His strong defense of the stupid “unwritten rules” and his support for beanings is idiotic behavior that hurts baseball. Calling out your own player publicly, and worst of all, advocating that the other team is right to try to injure him, is beyond the pale. Any other industry, a boss would be fired if he pulled that shit on his employees.
As for whether it was OK for Mercedes to swing away in the first place:
[Mercedes] still plays for a league minimum salary and likely will for the next two years. Then he’ll be eligible for arbitration, and his stats will directly affect how much money he makes. To ask him not to try his hardest is to ask him to compromise his livelihood and what makes him a good hitter in the first place.
Read the article below for even more reasons to dislike La Russa.
One day, a beanball is going to severly injure or kill a player and then all the “he knew he had to expect it because unwritten rule X” will sound even more stupid than it does now…
The Giants are not Showing Respect For The Game against the Reds today.
With his team already up 16-2 in the 7th inning, Longoria hit a two-run homer to make it 18-2 Giants. Worse yet, that left the Reds pitcher with a 6.66 ERA which could be very disturbing to a devout Christian.
At least the Reds shortstop who took the mound the following inning escaped further damage. Maybe the Giants batters took half-hearted swings out of Respect.
What particularly irks me is a lot of these folks defending the “unwritten rules” crap are the same folks who complain about the concept of “participation trophies” and the idea of non-competitive leagues at the lower levels and stuff like that with absolutely no sense of irony. I’m no Sox fan, but the way LaRussa threw Yermin under the bus is offensive to me as an on-again-off-again baseball fan, and this constant “unwritten rules” shit is part of why I’ve become more an “off-again” baseball fan over the last decade or two.
The worst was last year when Tatis homered – was it last year or the year before – on a 3-0 count when the Padres were up by seven in the eighth. WTF was that? It’s a sizable lead, but teams regularly score 7 runs across two innings (though not necessarily the last two), and the dugout sent him a “don’t swing” signal that he either missed or ignored. I seem to recall the coach apologizing for that as well. That’s just stupid. It’s not like whoever they were playing were just gonna lay down their bats in the bottom of the eighth and ninth and stop trying, so why should Tatis.
Tony La Russa is arguably one of the most successful baseball managers in the history of the game. Save the outrage for someone else. He’s trying to get across to his young players that baseball is a team sport, and that it’s not all about you and your stats.
The “so what” is that HE disrespected his manager in public. He went on to disrespect him a lot more when he told the media flat out that he would continue to do whatever he wanted. “I’ve got to be me”, was his comment. Is that what you do at work? How about the rest of us? Do you intentionally disobey a mandate at work and then announce that you will continue to do so? If you do, I have to wonder how you still have a job.
Since this is the Pit, I can safely say that Tony LaRussa isn’t the idiot, YOU are.
Yes, baseball is a team sport, and his teammates were supportive of Yermin.
A manager publicly announcing he has no problem with opposing pitchers deliberately throwing objects at 90mph at his own players isn’t acting in the best interests of his team. That’s not about teaching the player about the team or about sportsmanship (on that note, what does giving up and sending in a position player to pitch say about the other team?). That behavior would get you arrested in any other context than athletic competition.
That’s not about the team or being a team player but the sort of toxic masculinity BS that no longer has a place in the game.
CC Sabathia said it much more eloquently than I can:
And AFAICT, LaRussa’s position has been SOP in MLB forever, and is also comparable to “unwritten rules” which exist in other major sports as well.
Basically, when you have a big lead, you don’t stop playing hard but you also don’t try to run up the score by taking an aggressive high-risk-high-reward approach, and instead you adopt a more conservative approach to the game. That means taking a pitch on a 3-0 count and trying for a walk, instead of the more aggressive “swing for the fences” approach.
Similarly, an NFL team up by 30 points in the final minutes doesn’t throw a Hail Mary pass, even if it’s easier because the other team’s scrubs are playing defense.
I don’t understand how the game changed so radically in a 10 year span that he’s out of touch with it, especially since La Russa has almost certainly been involved in the game in an executive capacity in the years since. Whether La Russa can be as effective in 2021 as he was from 1982-2011 is probably a question that remains to be answered, but so far he’s doing his job.
The whiny ass players who haven’t accomplished shit and take to Insta-flake to air out their grievances are the problem. People pointing out that La Russa is everything that’s wrong with the game are tools. Baseball still had some fans left when La Russa was managing. The teams he managed had fans. Baseball has turned into a league with helmet throwing crybabies like Bryce Harper and bat throwing showboats like Jose Bautista.
The game has changed massively in the last ten years. The increasing amount of available data is enormous and it has greatly impacted player and team strategy. I would have been surpised if La Riussa wasn’t out of touch.
I haven’t watched much White Sox games, but have seen enough to see he is a terrible tactical manager now. One 10th inning he used a pitcher to run as the designated runner because he didn’t know the rule that he didn’t need to. With first and third and one out he had the runner try and fail to steal 2nd. Maybe that would make sense as a designed play with the runner breaking from 3rd, but again he had the pitcher there. The batter btw was Billy Hamilton who has no business being up in a key spot at this point. He promptly got out and the White Sox loss. And that was just one inning.
Also who exactly are the whiny players? La Russa is the only one I see whining here. This wouldn’t even have been a story if LA Russa didn’t have a temper tandrum.
Maybe you knew this, but Jose Bautista retired after the 2018 season…
If Yermin had a take sign and he ignored it then he should be disciplined internally. But the idea that you can’t tee off on a 3-0 meatball from a position player pitching is nonsense (again, unless your coaches specifically instructed you not to). The idea that the opposing team has a right to throw at your teammates in retaliation is even stupider.
The only person that complained about this incident, as far as I know, was Tony LaRussa, so I’m not sure why the players are being called whiny.
Whiny players? Which players are whining? They are rightly saying Yermin teed off on a little league pitch and saying he did nothing wrong.
If the Twins didn’t want that to happen, they could have put an actual pitcher in the game instead of giving up and letting a fielder pitch to save arms.
It must be nice to live in that reality.
The one we live in is the one where a position player lobbed a 48mph pitch over the plate. What risk was there? Getting a strike?
The count was 3-0. There was no risk. It was literally a low-risk, low reward situation. At worst, Yermin pops it up for an easy out. And what would that have risked? An extra out in a game that was already out of hand? As it was, the reward was an extra run in a game that was already out of hand.
If the count was 3-2, I might agree with you, but there was literally no risk and it was not only insulting to the White Sox but also a pitch a high schooler could have knocked out of the park.