CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Gaylord Perry, the right-handed pitcher who was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1991, was recently announced as one of three new members of the Cleveland Indians Hall of Fame.

Perry will be inducted this summer along with, posthumously, Jack Graney and Jimmy Warfield.
Graney was an Indians outfielder for his entire major league career (1908, 1910-22). He was an Indians play-by-play radio announcer from 1933-53 (also working televised games in 1950), becoming the first ex-major leaguer to work as a big league games announcer.

Warfield became a trainer in the Cleveland organization in 1965. He was the Indians' head trainer from 1971-96 and their assistant trainer from 1997 until his death in 2002.

Perry pitched 3 1/2 seasons for the Indians. He was already 33, and had compiled all of his 134 big league wins for San Francisco when Cleveland traded remarkably talented but unpredictable left-handed starter Sam McDowell to the Giants for Perry and shortstop Frank Duffy on Nov. 29, 1971.
Perry then fashioned a season that, arguably, has not been matched by any Tribe starting hurler since -- though some might make a case for the seasons by Bert Blyleven in 1984; CC Sabathia in 2007; or Cliff Lee in 2008.

The 1972 season was delayed by a players strike, and didn't begin until April 15. Teams missed six to nine games that were never made up. The Indians played 156 games instead of the customary 162.
Perry, famed, and yes, controversial, for allegedly throwing a spitball that umpires never caught him doing, was 2-2 with one save and a 2.51 ERA after his first four starts and his lone relief appearance of the 1972 season. Then, he won his next six starts with a 1.17 ERA, six complete games and two shutouts during the stretch. In 53 2/3 innings, he allowed just 29 hits, 11 walks and no home runs.
On Baseball-Reference.com is the game-by-game breakdown of Perry's 1972 season, linking to the play-by-play of every game.

Perry won the Cy Young Award, finishing 24-16 with the one save and a 1.92 ERA. The Indians went 72-84 that season, meaning they were 48-68 in the games not started by Perry.
A further look into Perry's season reveals how remarkable it was. He got the win or the loss in all 40 of his starts. The woeful Indians offense managed to score a total of just 20 runs in his 16 losses. His 341 2/3 innings pitched as a starter (not counting the one inning in relief) meant that he averaged more than 8 1/2 innings per start. It would have been closer to nine, but in several losses on the road, the opponent didn't bat in the bottom of the ninth inning.

Perry led the American League in wins and complete games (29). His ERA was second to former Indian Luis Tiant, whose 1.91 edged Perry by the slimmest of margins, and who pitched 163 fewer innings than the Indians ace.

In his 342 2/3 innings, Perry allowed just 253 hits and 17 homers. He walked just 82, and 16 of those were intentional. Some pitchers give in a little after a teammate's error. Not Perry. He allowed just six unearned runs -- one per every 57 innings.

Perry pitched three full seasons for the Indians (1972-74), finishing first, seventh and fourth, respectively, in the Cy Young Award voting. He was 64-48 with 86 complete games in those three campaigns.

Perry and another tough, head-strong Hall of Famer, Frank Robinson, never quite hit it off -- in part because they had been such intense rivals as players in the National League: Perry, the pitcher who considered the inside part of the plate his, and Robby, the hitter who wouldn't be intimidated by the hard stuff thrown in on him.

Robinson was hired by the Indians as their manager, and in fact, the first African-American manager in major league history, prior to the 1975 season.

The Indians were 23-32 on June 13, and Perry had been so-so, with a 6-9 record and 3.55 ERA. That day, Cleveland traded him to the Texas Rangers for right-handed pitchers Jim Bibby and Jackie Brown and left-hander Rick Waits. The Rangers also gave the perpetually cash-strapped Indians $100,000.

By then, Perry had won 204 games, but at age 36, some thought he might be about finished. Not so. Perry won 110 more games, and at age 39 in 1978 with the San Diego Padres, he won another Cy Young Award, going 21-6 with a 2.73 ERA.

Perry, now 73, is 17th on the all-time wins list with 314. His 5,350 innings pitched are the sixth-most ever, and his 3,534 strikeouts rank eighth all-time.

http://www.cleveland.com/ohio-sports-blog/index.ssf/2012/02/gaylord_perry_new_member_of_cl.html

Ron Washington in New Orleans

Ron Washington is not happy to see me. I wasn’t supposed to come here. Not to New Orleans, the place where he was born, the place he has called home his entire life. Not to his neighborhood in the notorious Ninth Ward, where he and his wife, Gerry, have lived for more than 25 years. And certainly not to his front door, which, after a knock, is opened wide enough for him to peer out, but not so wide that I can see in. The usually jubilant, smiling Texas Rangers manager looks tired, worn down. Behind his wire-framed glasses, his normally bright brown eyes appear sunken, shot with flecks of yellow. His hair—the ring of what’s left of it—is disheveled, his mustache ruffled.

He doesn’t give interviews in New Orleans, I was told. This is his safe zone, his off time, a respite from the game he’s been a part of for all but a few of his 58 years on this planet. But I’m here to learn about Ron Washington. About the man. About what created the force that propelled the Rangers to the greatest season in franchise history. So I had to come to this neighborhood. And I had to knock on his door.

He looks like a grandfather just roused from a postprandial Thanksgiving Day nap. I tell him who I am and ask if he has a few minutes to talk.

“I’m not interested,” he says. His tone is apologetic but firm. He looks around to see if there’s anyone with me, and he squints in the sunlight. He sees I’m alone.

“Can I at least ask about what’s carved into the sidewalk over there?” I ask.

In front of Ron Washington’s house, in capital letters that span three or four squares of the sidewalk, someone has etched into the concrete “NIGGERS.” You can tell it wasn’t written when the concrete was wet, either. No, someone had to take a sharp object and cut into the concrete with so much persistence and pressure that the gashed letters would remain visible for years.

“Oh, that,” he says. “That’s some ugliness. It was done before I got the house.”

Tax records show he bought this house in 1986. He was a back-up infielder for the Minnesota Twins then. That means that a man who’s been coaching or managing—and before that, playing—in the Major Leagues for three decades has seen this racial slur every time he stepped out into his own front yard. And he has never paid the couple hundred dollars it would take to replace the concrete. And he’s never moved out of this modest single-story brick-and-brown-shingle house—valued by the Orleans Parish tax assessor’s office at $110,000—even after it was flooded and gutted and uninhabitable for more than a year.

A lot of people with money have left New Orleans. Anne Rice is gone. So are Brad and Angelina. Harry Anderson, the judge from Night Court, left, too. Even Sean Payton, head coach of the Saints, recently moved his family out of New Orleans and into the Dallas suburb of Westlake.

But Ron Washington has stayed. Though he’s certainly not among the highest-paid managers in the game—the hosts on 1310 The Ticket joke that he lives in a cardboard box by the ballpark—he has still earned millions of dollars over his career. He could live in a six-bedroom mansion in a pleasant suburb somewhere, behind a wall and gate and a guard who calls him “sir.”

But he rebuilt his house here, in an area my hotel concierge and cab driver both told me not to visit at night. I want to ask the man why he came back. Why he stays.

Standing in his doorway, in his wind pants and gray sweatshirt, Ron Washington looks like a regular guy on his day off. He could be a cable repairman maybe, or an airline employee. This man didn’t ask to be famous. He didn’t ask to have his ungrammatical utterances quoted and printed on shirts, or to have children dress like him for Halloween.

“I promise I don’t mean to bother you,” I tell him. “I just came all this way, and I figured I’d try.”

“I’m sorry you made the trip all the way out here,” he says. “I’m just really not interested.”

From the outside, the house that Ron Washington rebuilt seems pleasant enough: a modest 2,000 square feet or so, windows with new white shutters, a brick mailbox out front, a two-car garage in the back. The lawn has been mowed and edged. His is certainly one of the nicer houses on the block.

This neighborhood is full of houses that never got fixed, empty tombstones for families and friends who never came back. Just a few hundred yards from the salty waters of Lake Pontchartrain, these blocks were under 5 feet of murky sludge for more than six weeks. There are reminders of the storm everywhere. The house directly behind Washington’s has been completely gutted. The address is spelled out in scripted iron letters mounted to the front wall, and green floral-print drapes still hang over the glass behind the open front door—small remnants of a life that no longer exists—but the rest of the house has been stripped, barred, and abandoned. The rotted furniture, warped photos, useless appliances, even the copper wiring in the walls—are all gone.

The uninhabited house across the street to the west has newspapers from 2005 taped over the inside of the windows and a brown, smudgy water line that never washed off. The empty shell of a house across the street to the north still has bright orange spray paint on the brick wall: a giant “X” and a “9/6,” disaster-response shorthand for “On September 6, 2005, there were no dead bodies inside this house.”

About half the houses in Washington’s neighborhood have been rebuilt or repaired enough to be repopulated. So this is also a place for survivors, for people who have endured. This is a city that has for centuries buried its dead one on top of the other. The people here continue to endure, plodding through life one day at a time, because it’s the only way they know.

At the last Rangers press conference before spring training, an event in Round Rock, Texas, celebrating the acquisition of the new Triple-A affiliate, a reporter asked Ron Washington if he planned to go back to New Orleans when he was done in Texas.

“I haven’t left New Orleans,” he responded. “I still make New Orleans my home. I still go back there in the wintertime. I was grown there. I was born there. It’s part of my heritage. It’s slow coming back, but I want to be there and be a part of it when it do come back.”

That’s how Ron Washington talks, with a very particular syntax acquired in the Ninth Ward.

The team provides him with a house in Arlington worth a little more than $200,000—still quite modest by the standards of professional sports. But any time he gets off, he comes back here.

One thing is certain: it isn’t because he’s a neighborhood hero—or even close to his neighbors. His only adjacent neighbor, Esha McDougle, a 31-year-old hairstylist, has never exchanged more than a friendly honk and a wave with him or Gerry. McDougle moved in a few months ago. Before I knocked on her door earlier today, she had not only never heard of Ron Washington, she wasn’t sure what sport the Texas Rangers play.

“I had no idea there was someone like that around here,” she tells me. “They seem so down to earth.”

Sonja Rollins, who lives across the street, had never heard of Ron Washington either. She figured maybe the guy in the corner house was a traveling salesman. “They don’t be home too much,” she says.

Adam Owens, a firefighter in his 20s who lives a few doors down, follows baseball and has known who lives in the corner house for a few years now. Owens sees them outside every once in a while when he walks his dogs. The two men usually exchange a smile and a nod and nothing more. “He’s a quiet dude,” Owens says. “Most people around here have no clue who he is.”

So much of baseball is about failure. The best sluggers in the game fail to get a hit in two-thirds of their at-bats. The best pitchers still let in an average of two runs a game. Everyone makes errors. Everyone strikes out. The sport is about dealing with disappointments and pain and moving forward to another day. And Ron Washington has had more than his share of disappointment and pain: from growing up in the projects, one of 10 kids in a family that sometimes didn’t have enough to eat, to losing a brother in Vietnam, to losing his house in a giant hurricane, to slowly losing his mother to Alzheimer’s. He’s had his share of failures, too, with only 10 Major League games played in the first 11 years of his pro career and more than two decades spent pining for a big league manager position. But even in the cynical world of sports, his biggest failure was shocking.

In front of a line of cameras and reporters, last season Ron Washington desperately asked the public to believe that, at 57 years old, the one and only time he’d ever tried cocaine just happened to be a few days before the one time that year he was scheduled to be tested. He said he was sorry, that what he’d done was stupid, that he’d gone to counseling, that he promised he’d help young people.

He summed up the situation like only Ron Washington could: “Challenges are what you make of life that makes it interesting,” he said. “Overcoming those challenges is what makes life meaningful. And I do want to make a difference. And I do want to put something meaningful in everybody’s life.” Then he looked directly into the cameras. “That’s just been the way Ron Washington has been.”

Despite the support of his players, there were immediate calls for his firing. “Now that the story of Washington’s failed drug test is public, the question is how long the Rangers can afford to stand behind their man,” Tim Cowlishaw wrote in the Dallas Morning News. “My guess? Not very long.”

The next day, Jean-Jacques Taylor wrote, “The Rangers should’ve fired Ron Washington the day he admitted using cocaine during last year’s All-Star break. No questions asked.”

But Jon Daniels, the Wunderkind who’d gone from intern to general manager in under five years, was less inclined to give up on the man he hired. “My emotions were all over the place,” Daniels told reporters at the time. “I was shocked. I was disappointed. I was angry. I felt all those things that probably our fans are going to feel. We decided to work through it. You hope at some point some good will come out of this.”

No honest Rangers fan could have imagined what good could come of this. Even Nolan Ryan, the greatest Ranger of all time and a model of austerity and sobriety (he swears he’s never taken an illegal drug in his life), admits he had backup plans if Washington didn’t work out.

“We went into last year with a lot of questions,” Ryan says now. Looking back, he’s obviously pleased with his decision to stick with his manager, though he says so with the modesty of a lifelong Texan who, no matter where he went, always came home to Texas. “With Ron, I think that he has probably been the right person in the right place for the way that this organization has come together.”

That’s Ryan’s way of saying the Rangers needed someone like Ron Washington. They needed a survivor, someone who could rebuild.  In so many ways, Washington’s entire life had been preparing him for this moment.

The first time he moved away from New Orleans was 1970, when he was 18. It was also his first time to fly in a plane. He had just signed his first baseball contract, for $1,000 with the Kansas City Royals, and he was heading for the team’s new baseball academy in Sarasota, Florida, where he knew no one. He would later say that when he looked out the window of the plane, he couldn’t help but tear up.

He grew up in the Desire Housing Project, one of the city’s most crime-ridden developments, working hard to stretch a three-dollar-a-week allowance into five days of lunch money and bus fare. A wiry kid with glasses, he couldn’t always outrun the bullies who wanted his money. But he found refuge in baseball. He played catcher, and, as a boy, he slept with the mitt his father—a truck driver—gave him. After high school, he learned about a series of tryouts the Royals were holding all over the country, the franchise’s attempt to cultivate talented minority kids from places other teams wouldn’t even send scouts. Of the 156 players at the tryouts in New Orleans, Washington was the only one invited to the academy.

That’s where he met a quiet, thoughtful middle infielder from Mississippi named Frank White. “He was one of the most rambunctious guys I’d ever met,” remembers White, who recently resigned from the Royals front office to pursue broadcasting. “He’d sit there behind home plate and just talk nonstop. He never let things get boring.”

The two of them—the chatter-mouth catcher and the pensive second baseman—became fast friends. They were also the star pupils. The academy drilled the importance of fundamentals and technique, and the young ballplayers took direction well. When coaches told the confident catcher there was no chance he would ever make it to the big leagues squatting behind the plate at 140 pounds, he agreed to switch to the infield. He loved playing catcher because he felt he could control the whole game, but he was dedicated to playing in the majors and he did what he was told.

“He had this great ability to adapt to any situation,” White tells me. “And he could always take the lemons and make lemonade.”

Both men worked their way up into the Royals farm system. White went on to play 18 seasons in the majors, all with Kansas City. He made five All-Star games, won eight Gold Gloves, and, in 1985, he was a key part of the team that won the World Series.

That’s not what happened to Washington, though. After six years, he still couldn’t break into the big leagues—at least partially because White was so consistent at second base—and he was traded to the Dodgers for a guy who never played in the majors. After nearly two full years in the Dodgers organization, he finally got called up at the end of the 1977 season. In the 10 games he played, he batted .368 and stole one base, but the Dodgers in the late ’70s had one of the all-time great infields. The promising 25-year-old started the next season back in Triple-A.

He was trying to beat out a grounder in a freezing ballpark in Utah early that next year—“He was never one to slack off,” White says—when he tore up his knee. And because this was before the days of laparoscopic surgery, it would take four more years and another team before he’d make it back to the show.

When he finally made the Twins roster as a utility in–fielder in 1981, he was nearly in his 30s. He’d play second base one night, pinch hit the next, then not see any action for a week. But he had a reputation as a hard worker. “If he messed up, or even if he dropped a ball in practice, he’d take responsibility immediately,” says Randy Bush, a teammate from ’82 to ’86 and a fellow New Orleanian. Bush was primarily a pinch hitter in those days and spent plenty of nights in the dugout next to his friend. Day after day, no matter how long he’d been sitting on that bench, Washington would never miss the chance to stand up and congratulate his teammates as they returned to the dugout.

“Ron was always intense,” Bush says. “He wasn’t about to take anything for granted.”

The two of them used to go to the ballpark early and play pepper to make sure they were fresh. They’d also train together back in New Orleans in the off-season. They used to meet in the morning and run for miles. Then they’d throw each other batting practice. Then they’d lift weights. Five days a week, like factory workers. If it was raining too hard, they’d spend the day running sprints inside a gym.

Ron Maestri was the head coach of the baseball team at the University of New Orleans at the time, and he let the two pros work out in the school facilities. “I used to get my players together and tell them to watch those guys,” Maestri says. “I’d say, ‘This is  what it takes to make it in the big leagues.’ ”

These days Maestri is an executive with the New Orleans Zephyrs minor league club, but he still talks to both men often. “He always had this great ability to just be the same every day,” Maestri says. “When things are hard, Wash doesn’t change. When things are good, Wash doesn’t change.”

Most of his career has been long bus trips and strange beds, a long-distance call home every night and a life in a suitcase. He lived in the shadows of the game. Even when he eventually made it to the majors, not even the most dedicated stats geeks knew the name Ron Washington. He was a .261 batter who never hit more than five homers in a season.

“Ron and I weren’t superstars,” says Bush, now the assistant general manager of the Chicago Cubs. “We didn’t have the natural talent or size some of those guys had. We were never guaranteed a spot. We had to go into spring training ready to play.”

One year, Bush led the American League in pinch hits and twice more he finished in the top three. He went on to win two World Series rings with the Twins.

That’s not what happened to Washington, though. He was released in spring training before the ’87 season, the year the Twins won their first World Series. He watched his buddies—the men he’d congratulated from the dugout for six years—win a championship without him. He spent a year with the Baltimore Orioles, a year with the Cleveland Indians, and seven final games with the Houston Astros in 1989—where he was briefly a teammate of Nolan Ryan’s.

When no more major league teams wanted him, he spent another year in the minors, finishing his career the way he started it, as a catcher. And when no more minor league teams had room for him, he played in a seniors’ league in Daytona Beach until the league folded in December of 1990.

Years later, on rare occasions when the mood got serious, Bush would ask his friend about 1987, about getting cut the year the team won the World Series. “I know I would have been so mad, but I never heard him complain,” Bush says. “He said he truly has no bitterness over it. He told me, ‘It is what it is. You just gotta let it go and turn the page. You gotta keep working. What else can you do?’ That’s always stayed with me.”

His managing career began the same way his playing career did, with several years spent moving up and down through minor leagues. He didn’t get a chance to coach on a major league staff until a former Twins teammate, Billy Beane, became the Oakland A’s general manager. Beane, too, had spent nights in the dugout with Ron Washington, listening to him chatter. He knew his scrappy history and he remembered the positive attitude and focus on fundamentals. He brought him on as the first base coach.

The new coach brought the creeds he’d been taught so many years ago at the academy: footwork, situational awareness, practicing hard even if you probably won’t play, playing today like yesterday never happened. He also brought the infectious smile of a man who loves his job.

Within a few years, he’d garnered a reputation as a man who could make a professional infielder out of anyone. Author Michael Lewis took note of him when he wrote the 2003 book Moneyball: the Art of Winning an Unfair Game. “Wash’s job was to take the mess Billy Beane sent him during spring training and make sure it didn’t embarrass anyone by opening day,” Lewis wrote. “He had a gift for making players want to be better than they were—though he would never allow himself such a pretentious thought.” He also noted how wonderfully quotable the entertaining coach can be, writing, “Ron Washington can’t open his mouth without saying something that belongs in Bartlett’s.”

Despite Washington’s fine work as a coach, nobody wanted to give him a chance to manage. And that included Billy Beane, who interviewed him—and passed him over—several times.

“That definitely hurt him,” Maestri says. “He felt like he would make a good manager, and he wanted people to believe him.”

Though they were longtime friends, Beane was, at heart, a stats man. And Washington was, statistically speaking, 100 percent heart. Even if he wasn’t beloved by management, his players adored him. A’s third baseman Eric Chavez actually gave the coach one of his Gold Glove trophies. And when the trophy was destroyed in the hurricane, Chavez asked Rawlings to commission another one and gave him that.

Washington was in Baltimore the night the storm hit. His wife and family had driven to Atlanta. What the storm itself spared, the floods did not.

“He lost everything,” Maestri says. “Every room in the house was destroyed.”

He had good insurance, but both past and present players wanted to help him, to chip in. Jason Giambi, by then in the middle of his $120 million contract with the Yankees, slipped him a check for $25,000 before a game one night.

It was one more thing to endure for Washington. But when the insurance company finally got around to checking out the damage, and the supplies and construction crews eventually became available, they got to work rebuilding the house one room at a time. All told, it took nearly five years to rebuild Washington’s house, but he never complained. Instead, he went to the ballpark every day and did his job.

“For Ron, baseball is an escape,” Maestri says. “When he’s at the ballpark with all his friends, that’s like a personal heaven for him.”

His house was still under repair in November 2006, when he finally got his big league managing job—not from his A’s, but from their rival Texas Rangers—reportedly sealing the deal a few days earlier by impressing Jon Daniels and Tom Hicks at a backyard barbecue. He promised that the Rangers would no longer rely on a power-hitting offense alone. He announced the team would finally learn to play small ball. They’d work the counts, take the extra bases, never stop applying pressure. He said the Ron Washington era would include a focus on defense, which would, in turn, help out the pitching.

It sounded good in theory—even if it sounded strange coming out of his mouth. But it was slow going at first. There were reports that certain veterans were feuding with the new manager. In 2007, his first season with the Rangers, the team went 75-87, but a few of those veterans weren’t around by the end of the year.

In the 2008 season, they continued to struggle but finished the year in second place in the division. In 2009, the team was in playoff contention—and in first place for short stretches—late in the summer. Rangers fans had something to believe in for the first time in years. Then came that infamous All-Star break.

He’s never discussed the details in public. He said he met up with old friends in Anaheim. They were out drinking. One thing led to another. A few days later, there was a knock on the door, a urine sample, a phone call to the league’s employee assistance number. There was the tense conversation with Jon Daniels and Nolan Ryan, an offer to resign—if that’s what they wanted. He’d do anything to save his career. He couldn’t bear the thought that, after 39 years of giving everything to the game of baseball, this would be what he’d be known for.

They told him he could stay if he agreed to counseling and regular tests. But they warned that if the news got out, nobody would believe a 57-year-old manager just decided to try cocaine for the first time in his life.

Then the news broke. The national sports media descended upon Surprise, Arizona, for what was one of the more bizarre stories of the year. After all he’d been through in life, Ron Washington had never felt shame like this. This, he did to himself.

He called his old friend from the academy, but the old chatterbox catcher could barely get his words out. “He said he felt like he let me down,” White says. “I assured him he hadn’t. I said, ‘You’ve been accountable. You admitted to what you did. You’ve taken the right steps. You didn’t let me down, Ron.’ ”

He placed a similar call to Ron Maestri, back in New Orleans. “He said, ‘Maes, I feel like I really let you down.’ I said, ‘Wash, you made a mistake, but you handled this like a man. I’m proud of you.’ ”

The season started slowly, and it looked like the prediction that he would be fired was coming true. But then something happened. Daniels and Ryan noticed it. The players noticed it, too. Elvis Andrus started showing up early for extra fielding practice. Josh Hamilton became a more vocal leader. The Texas Rangers became grinders. They worked the count to wear opposing pitchers down. They took the extra base any chance they got. The entire team began to take on the personality of Ron Washington. They even started repeating his quirky, Yogi Berra-esque pearls of wisdom such as: “This team do what it does, it do what it do” and “I just think that’s the way my hair grow” and, of course, the slogan that launched a thousand t-shirts, “That’s the way baseball go.”

By the middle of June, they were in first place. Then the team added Cliff Lee and never looked back. And as the team won more and more, it seemed like people liked those funny things he said more and more. There were t-shirts, radio montages, songs on YouTube, a 7-year-old who, with the help of a shaved head and stick-on mustache, looked hilariously like the manager. These were strange days indeed.

In September, the team clinched first place in Oakland, right in front of Billy Beane. The Rangers entered the postseason as underdogs. First, they took down the Tampa Bay Rays—the team that had finished the regular season with the best record in baseball—in five dramatic games. Next up were the Yankees, the defending champions who had ended so many Rangers seasons in the past.

Game one, in Arlington, started well, but the team blew a five-run lead and lost. Washington got a chance at redemption the very next

night, in the bottom of the first inning. Andrus beat out a grounder to lead off, then took second on a wild pitch. He stole third on a curveball in the dirt. With two outs and runners at the corners, the manager called for a rare double steal.

As the pitcher went into his wind up, Josh Hamilton broke for second base. When the catcher tried to pick him off, Andrus sprinted for home. The throw back to home came in wide and—safe! Just like that, a one-run lead, momentum, the Ron Washington way.

After the amazing play, the manager stood smiling at the top of his dugout, ready to high-five each of his players. The Rangers won the game 7-2, won the series in six games—the clinching moment of game six coming with a symbolic Alex Rodriguez strikeout. And for the first time in franchise history, the Texas Rangers were going to the World Series.

“October was one of those magical months that you see in baseball,” Nolan Ryan says. “I can honestly say that when we clinched against the Yankees that night, it was truly one of the highlights of my baseball career and probably one of the most exciting times on a personal basis that I’ve ever had.”

And of course we know how this story ends. No, Ron Washington didn’t win the World Series. In football and basketball, they measure greatness only in rings. But in baseball, sometimes championships aren’t the most important thing. Sometimes it’s just about who finds a way to keep showing up. Sometimes it’s about surviving.

About half an hour after he sends me away from his door, I see Ron Washington in his driveway next to his white Infiniti SUV. He has a bottle of Armor All next to him and a rag in his hand. I approach one more time and hand him a piece of paper with my number on it. I apologize again and tell him I’ll be in town for a day, and if he changes his mind to please give me a call.

“I probably won’t,” he says.

If you ask Washington’s neighbors why they think he comes back here, they say it’s because the neighborhood is a nice place to live. Kids can ride their bikes and play outside after school, they say, and a lot of neighborhoods nearby aren’t like that. There’s even a local security guard who circles the blocks in an old Crown Victoria. Sure, there are empty houses, but that means it’s quiet.

And the truth is, he likes the anonymity. It’s nice to get recognized by a baggage handler every once in a while, but most of his life has been in the shadows of baseball. And the more people who know who he is, the weirder things get. He likes coming back here because this place reminds him who he is. The winter is his. He gets to spend time with his wife. He likes to keep the grass cut and the cars clean.

Before I go, I take another look at the house Ron Washington rebuilt. You could fit three, maybe four of this house into some homes in Southlake, where his players live. I can’t help it.

“Mr. Washington,” I say, “after the storm, why didn’t you buy a bigger house?”

He thinks about it and smiles. “One day,” he says, “we will. Right now, all the mansions in this town are destroyed. You do that, you just taking on someone else’s problems. But some day.”

He has said before that he hopes he can be a part of baseball until his brain no longer functions. After the wonder that was last year, 2011 seems destined to be a failure by comparison. There are injury worries and trade demands and some big names not coming back. As always, there are concerns about pitching. But for now, Ron Washington is content here, at home, washing his car as the sun goes down in New Orleans.

Strange stuff … in the 2011 postseason

The Cardinals' amazing playoff journey culminated in a memorable World Series win

The team that won the World Series led the league in near-death experiences. The team that lost the World Series picked the wrong night in October to come down with a serious case of Blown Save Fever. And the teams that sat home watching them had to be kicking themselves -- if only because they finally realized that they'd forgotten to trade for their very own Rally Squirrel.
In other words, it was one very crazy October. So let's look back at the Strange But True Feats of 2011 -- the Postseason Edition.

Strange but true team of the year

How strange was the championship journey of your 2011 World Series titleists, the Cardinals? Hoo boy. It's still hard to comprehend.

As late as 102 games into their season, they had a worse record than the Pirates. (OK, so it was by a thousandth of a percentage point. Whatever.)
As late as 89 games into their season, they had the same number of losses as the Mets.
As late as Labor Day, their run differential was 107 runs worse than the Red Sox.
They were 10½ games out of a playoff spot with 31 to play.
They were 8½ out in September.
They were still three games out with five to play.
They lost 25 games in their last at-bat.
They lost 11 games they led in the ninth inning or later.
They blew more saves (26) than 28 other teams.

They lost their best starting pitcher (Adam Wainwright) before they'd even played a spring training game
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Their other stud starter (Chris Carpenter) had as many wins on June 22 (one) as Wilson Valdez. Who plays infield for a living.

Their relief pitchers got more outs in the NLCS (86) than their starters (73).
And, as you might have heard someplace, they were one strike away from losing the World Series in twice as many innings (i.e., two) as all previous 106 World Series champions in history put together.
So if ever there was a formula you wouldn't want to follow to try to win a World Series, here's a nomination for the way those 2011 Cardinals did it. Kids, don't try that at home!

Strange but true postseason game of the year

It was a postseason full of classic, magical and often downright crazy games. But is there any doubt which game towers above the rest? I saw Game 6 of the World Series with my very own eyeballs. I still don't believe stuff like this happened:

• The Cardinals have played 19,387 regular-season games in their history. Not once had they won a game in which they trailed five times. But that's the mess they overcame to win Game 6 -- when all that was riding on it was losing the World Series. That's all.

For that matter, according to the Elias Sports Bureau, only three teams in the last 40 years (2006 Red Sox, 1996 Red Sox, 1995 Cubs) have won a regular-season game in which they trailed at least five times. And no team had ever done that in a World Series game. But the Cardinals trailed in this game by scores of 1-0, 3-2, 4-3, 7-4 and 9-7 -- and won. Unreal.

• There had been 1,329 games in the history of postseason baseball before this one. Not once had a team scored in the eighth, ninth, 10th and 11th innings of the same game. But the Cardinals did it in this game. Of course they did!

• The Rangers blew two saves in their final 41 regular-season games combined. So of course, they then blew three saves in this game in the last six innings.

• Might as well mention that the Rangers had two MONTHS this year (June and September) when they didn't blow three saves. And they were working on a streak of 965 games (regular season and postseason), over six seasons, without ever blowing three save opportunities in one game until this extravaganza came along.

• Never had both teams homered in extra innings at any point during an entire Series. Then, naturally, each team homered in extra innings just in this GAME (Josh Hamilton in the 10th, David Freese in the 11th).

• There wasn't a game played in the big leagues during the entire regular season that featured extra-inning homers in two innings by two teams, according to the Sultan of Swat Stats, SABR home run historian David Vincent. And the Rangers hadn't played a game like that in 15 years. But it happened in this game.

• And, as we'll probably be reminding ourselves for about the next thousand years, only one team in history -- Mookie Wilson's '86 Mets -- had ever won a World Series after finding itself one strike away from The End of the Line. So naturally, these Cardinals got themselves to within one strike of defeat in the ninth and 10th innings -- and still went on to win the World Series. They didn't seem to know any other way. Did they?

Five strange but true October all-timers

• All four teams that advanced to the LCS -- the Cardinals, Brewers, Rangers and Tigers -- got outscored by the teams they played in the Division Series … and won. Hard to do, friendsNelson Cruz had as many homers in October (eight) as he had HITS in September (in 42 at-bats).

• Only one manager in the American League issued fewer intentional walks during the regular season than Ron Washington (21 all year). So he was pretty much the perfect candidate to become the first manager in American League HISTORY to issue nine intentional walks in a World Series. Right?

• Before this October, no player since Kirk Gibson (Game 1, '88) had come off the bench in a World Series game to drive in the go-ahead run with a pinch hit in the sixth inning or later. Then, naturally, Allen Craig did that for the Cardinals two days in a row -- against the same pitcher (Alexi Ogando) no less.

• And Tony La Russa made 75 pitching changes in the postseason. That means all those relievers he waved for spent a combined 3 hours, 45 minutes warming up!

Strange but true World Series nuttiness

• This was the third consecutive World Series to feature a Molina brother. So what's so strange about that? It was three different Molinas (Jose, then Bengie, then Yadier).In back-to-back-to-back at-bats in Games 6 and 7, David Freese hit a game-tying triple, game-winning homer and game-tying double. How incredible was that? Only one other time in World Series history had a player gotten game-tying or go-ahead hits in three consecutive trips to the plate. And naturally, it was Allen Craig, earlier in this same World Series.

• Only once in the last 30 regular seasons have the Cardinals scored at least 16 runs one game and gotten shut out the next. How many runs did they score in Game 4 of this World Series after putting up 16 in Game 3? That would be none -- despite the minor technicality that they were facing a pitcher (Derek Holland) who had just finished compiling an 8.59 ERA in the ALCS.

• Has there ever been a more insane stretch in any World Series than the middle three innings of Game 3? Starting in the top of the fourth inning, the Cardinals scored four times. Then the Rangers scored three times. Then the Cardinals scored three in the fifth -- and so did the Rangers. Whereupon the Cardinals put up yet another three-spot in the top of the sixth. Ever remember seeing five consecutive half-innings of three runs or more in a World Series game? Of course you don't -- because it's never happened.

• Finally, there was Albert Pujols' picturesque little box-score line in that very same Game 3: 6 AB, 4 R, 5 H, 6 RBIs, with three majestic homers and 14 total bases tossed in there just for fun. Feel free to stare at that line for as long as Albert stared at his long home runs, because in the entire live-ball era -- all nine decades of it -- there has been only one regular-season 6-4-5-6 three-homer game, by Dave Winfield against the Twins on April 13, 1991.

Strange but true playoff weirdness

• Delmon Young spent 4½ months with the Twins this year and hit four home runs. He played nine postseason games for the Tigers -- and hit five home runs.

• As my buddy Danny Knobler of CBSSports.com pointed out, the Royals got six home runs out of the No. 7 hole in their lineup all season. The Rangers got seven just in this postseason.

• Your ALCS MVP, Nelson Cruz, had eight extra-base hits in that LCS (six homers, two doubles) -- but never did mix in a single.

In Game 1s of this postseason, the Yankees, Tigers, Rangers, Phillies, Cardinals, Brewers and Diamondbacks started pitchers who had been around long enough to make a combined 1,469 regular-season starts in the big leagues, plus another 30 postseason starts. But the Rays had other plans (as always). They started Matt Moore in Game 1. How many big league games had he started in his life before that game? That would be one.

• So, naturally, Moore went out and threw seven shutout innings (giving up two hits), the first time any rookie starter had done that in a postseason game. So it took 107 years for it to happen once. It then took four days, of course, for it to happen a second time -- thanks to Arizona's Josh Collmenter.

• When Cliff Lee blew a 4-0 lead in the Phillies' 5-4 loss to the Cardinals in Game 2 of the NLDS, he did something he'd done only once before in his entire career. So he's now 94-2 in games in which his team handed him a lead of four runs or more. And, as loyal reader Rob Gottschalk reports, the winning pitcher in both of those losses was -- who else? -- Octavio Dotel.

• That wasn't the only mind-boggling development in Game 2 of that NLDS, however. The guy who started that game for the Cardinals, Chris Carpenter, had made more consecutive regular-season starts (174) without allowing three runs in the first inning than any other pitcher in the entire live-ball era. So what did he do in his first postseason inning that day? Give up three in the first to the Phillies. Naturally.

• No team since 1900 had hit a grand slam in four straight home games, in either the regular season or postseason. Then along came the 2011 Diamondbacks. They launched slams in their last two home games of the regular season, then went slamming again in their first two home games in October. Before that, they'd never even hit a slam at home in four consecutive MONTHS in the history of their franchise.

• The Phillies lost three games in the Division Series, and in two of them, they scored at least twice in the first inning. So guess how many games the Phillies lost all season after April 15 when they scored more than once in the first inning? Not once, of course.

• Tigers set-up man Al Alburquerque faced 189 hitters this season. And what did those 189 hitters have in common? Not one of them hit a home run off him. Want to guess what happened on Alburquerque's second pitch of the postseason? Right you are. He served up a grand slam to Robinson Cano.

Before this October, Roy Halladay had started 380 games, regular-season and postseason. He'd given up a three-run first-inning homer in precisely one of them (to Mike Lowell in 2006). So what did Doc Halladay do in the first inning of this postseason? What do you think he did? He allowed a three-run homer to Lance Berkman.

• Finally, on the first day of the regular season at Yankee Stadium, your starting pitching matchup was CC Sabathia versus Justin Verlander. Six months later, on the first day of the postseason at Yankee Stadium, your starting pitching matchup was (yep) CC Sabathia versus Justin Verlander. How strange -- but absolutely true -- was that?

The Real Story behind 10 Cent Beer Night

It was a night when fans were admitted to the bleachers at old Cleveland Stadium for 50 cents. It also was a night when a 12-ounce cup of beer was sold for a dime. What could you buy for 60 cents? Try six cups of beer, the purchase limit for one person. How's that for restraint? You are limited to a mere six cups ... 72 ounces ... of beer. Of course, you could get into another line at another concession stand and buy six more beers, assuming you had another 60 cents. So for $1.70, you could buy a bleacher seat to a Tribe-Texas Rangers game ... and drink a dozen beers.

"But it was only 3.2 [percent alcohol] beer," the Indians would later plead, as if it were unsweetened Kool-Aid. It was June 4, 1974. Joe was calling the game on the radio with Herb Score.

Most Tribe fans know what happened. Drunken fans stormed the field in the ninth inning, starting a riot. The game was suspended. But for several innings before that, drunken fans staggered onto the field. This was in the era of streakers, and a few folks shed their clothes and dashed across the outfield. At one point, a gallon jug of Thunderbird -- yes, someone smuggled a gallon jug of cheap wine into Beer Night -- was heaved out of the stands and landed near Texas first baseman Mike Hargrove. Yes, that's the same Mike Hargrove who later played for and managed the Indians. Joe watched it all, and when remembering it 36 years later, he shook his head and said: "I was sick to my stomach. It was the worst thing that I ever saw during a broadcast." This is not to stumble down memory lane of a beer-soaked event that lives in infamy in the memory of many Cleveland fans. It's to tell the story behind the story

"I called Beer Night a riot," said Joe. "I said it was 'a disgrace to the game and to the Indians.' I said the Indians 'have only themselves to blame because it was a STUPID promotion. ... Members of the front office left early.'" Joe paused and shook his head again. "When I first heard about the 10-cent promotion, I knew it was stupid," Joe said. "Whoever is going to show up for 10-cent Beer Night was going to be there to get drunk. If he's not drunk before he gets there, he will be when he leaves. ... We first had two streakers ... then five streakers. ... I think I counted about 20 by the end of the game. ... Never knew why, but running around naked was a big deal back then."

Umpire Nestor Chylak called the game in the ninth inning, awarding a victory to Texas. By then, fans were on the field, trying to steal caps, gloves and anything else they could from the players. Some threw up on the grass, a few passed out.

"Even Herbie [Score] said this was getting totally out of hand," said Joe. "Then we saw some of the Indians hierarchy bailing out in the sixth inning.

It got serious when a fan took [Texas outfielder] Jeff Burroughs' cap. Burroughs ducked and sort of stumbled. ... [Texas manager] Billy Martin was worried about Burroughs, and he came out of the dugout with a fungo bat. A bunch of players went with him.

"Fans stormed the field ..." Joe shook his head yet again. "Fans were swinging chains -- don't ask me where they got to chains from. They broke off pieces of chairs ... [Indians manager] Ken Aspromonte led his players to the field, and you had the picture of the Indians and Texas players fighting together, retreating back into the first base dugout ... [Tribe pitcher] Tom Hilgendorf had his head split open when someone threw a chair out of the upper deck and it hit him."

The national publicity was horrible, a game in Cleveland destroyed by a bunch of beer-soaked fans. The team had a ridiculous promotion and not much extra security. "[Tribe President] Ted Bonda wanted me fired because I called it a riot," said Joe.

"Well, it was a RIOT. The only reason that it wasn't a worse RIOT is because I called it a RIOT on the radio, and a bunch of police heard me, and they came down to the Stadium to see what was going on. Some of them told me that they called the station house and said they better send reinforcements down to the Stadium to check it out."

So when Bonda confronted Joe about calling it a riot, Joe said, "That's because it was a RIOT!" Joe said it's important to remember what life was like for Cleveland in the 1970s. "Every week, the Laugh-In show did Cleveland jokes," he said. "It was when the mayor's hair caught on fire, the Cuyahoga River caught on fire. Cleveland was a butt of national jokes."

And then there was Beer Night. Plain Dealer columnist Hal Lebovitz wrote this: "Joe Tait, who is going to get a National Basketball Association referee killed some night with his highly charged criticisms, didn't help on the Indians play-by-play broadcasts by his repeated huckstering 'Come out to Beer Night and let's stick it in Billy Martin's ear.'"

Reading the story 36 years later, Joe said, "What I said on the air was, 'Let's make a lot of noise and stick it in Billy Martin's ear.' For that, he wanted to blame me for what happened." The Indians had a few near brawls with Martin's Rangers before Beer Night when they played in Texas. Martin had said his team had nothing to worry about when they came to Cleveland "because nobody goes to the games." He didn't know about Beer Night.

Lebovitz wrote: "The impression may not have been one that Joe intended, but that's the inference the listeners got. Thus, Joe, with his high-voltage delivery, conceivably helped create an atmosphere that led to the final scene." Joe countered with a charge about a cartoon in Lebovitz's own sports section of an Indian holding boxing gloves, as if preparing to fight the Texas players.

Lebovitz came back with a second column, admitting the problem was not the cartoon or Joe's remarks. It was "only because the fuel was there ... the alcohol. Without the fuel, it's impossible to have a fire."

The Indians sold 65,000 beers that night. Lebovitz estimated the average adult had about five beers. Bonda wanted to fire Joe to take the heat off what had happened on his watch. He was team president. The team was being ripped by nearly every media outlet across the country.

Comedians used it for an endless series of jokes. "Nick Mileti owned the team back then," said Joe. "He was out of town during the riot. He came back, talked to me on the phone about what happened. He talked to the ushers, the police and the players -- anyone he could who was at the game. He also listened to the tape of the broadcast. He told Bonda something along the lines of 'I can't see anything wrong with what Joe said. It obviously was a riot.' That was it. I kept my job."

Joe said he listened to the game tape "several times. ... I don't regret a thing I said." Then Joe remembered this story, meeting Chylak. They talked about Beer Night, and the umpire mentioned how the Indians were down, 5-0, then came back to tie up the game.

"Joe, I figured as long as they're not shooting or anything like that, we'll get it done," said Chylak. "All of a sudden, I felt some pressure behind the left heel of my shoe. I turned around, looked down and there was a hunting knife sticking in the ground right behind my shoe. That's when I said, 'Game. Set. Match. We're outta here!'"

World Series 2011 - Historic Game 6 and series

ST. LOUIS, Mo. -- Fans climbed the bronze statue outside of Busch Stadium on Friday night to have their picture taken at the feet of Stan "The Man" Musial as the celebration roiled and rocked around them. On the base of the statue are engraved these words, "Here stands baseball's perfect warrior. Here stands baseball's perfect knight."
 
The days of perfect knights in baseball have gone the way of Camelot and King Arthur's round table. But what about a World Series of perfect nights? If not perfect, then seven that range from good to great?

Maybe Friday's Game 7, in which St. Louis clinched its 11th World Series title with a 6-2 victory over Texas, fell flat. But we will always have Game 6, in which Texas dropped five leads, which meant St. Louis rallied five times before finally winning, 10-9, on David Freese's leadoff homer in the 11th to avoid elimination and make Friday night a reality.

The Nineth: 98 mph Neftali Feliz and David Frese HR

It wasn't just Freese's walkoff homer that made the night, it was his game-tying, season-saving, two-run, two-out, two-strike triple off a 98 mph fastball from Neftali Feliz in the ninth inning.

Turns out that was just the appetizer.

The Tenth: God Told Me and the Lance of Destiny

In the top of the 10th, on a mission from God, Josh Hamilton hit a two-run homer off closer Jason Motte to put Texas back in front, 9-7. Hamilton told reporters after the game that God told him he was going to homer in Game 6.

"But he didn't say we'd win," Hamilton conceded. 

In the bottom of the 10th, with Texas still leading, 9-8, the Cardinals were once again down to their final strike. Scott Feldman had a 2-2 count on Lance Berkman, who was not enjoying himself.
"It's not fun to go up there with the season on the line," said Berkman.

He put his feelings aside long enough to bloop a single into center field to tie the score and ensure that Freese would get a chance to bat in the 11th. When it was over, after Freese sent a 3-2 pitch from Mark Lowe over the center field fence, Berkman had a firm hold on the moment
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"The reality is that if we don't win Game 7, then this just becomes a footnote to a nice season," said Berkman. "But if we win, this is the stuff of legends."

The Eleventh

Enough said. This joins Joe Carter (1993), Kirby Puckett (1991), Carlton Fisk (1975) as one of the best Game 6 of the World Series with memorable walkoff HRs, short of Game 7 Bill Mazeroski (1960) legend.

No burning cars

The Cardinals, who didn't make the postseason until the final day of the regular season, can consider themselves legends. Their fans certainly do. The St. Louis faithful were still packed into Musial Plaza at least two hours after the game. When a Cardinals official walked by carrying the World Series trophy along the second deck of the ballpark, they spotted him and cheered.
 
The crowd snaked along Stadium Drive, up to Mike Shannon's Bar and Grill. The joint wasn't just packed, it was overflowing into an elbow-to-elbow crowd on the street. Music blared, cops and beer cans were everywhere. A guy on a makeshift set of drums pounded away.

Market Street, a main drag through the heart of downtown, was at a standstill going and coming. Cars were bumper-to-bumper blowing their horns. People walking up and down the exchanging high fives with strangers. The police had portions of the street blocked off, but no one seemed to mind.
It was loud and friendly. No cars were burning. The Cardinals have been to 18 World Series. This was their second title in five years. They know how to celebrate.
 
Said Freese, "These fans are the best."
 
Freese not only won the World Series MVP, but the NLCS MVP as well. In the World Series he hit .348 (8-for-24) with three doubles, one triple, one homer and seven RBI. In the postseason, he hit .397 (25-for-63) with eight doubles, one triple, five homers and a record 21 RBI. If he didn't get the World Series MVP, St. Louis was going to give him The Arch.
 
Now for the topper. Freese grew up just outside of St. Louis rooting for the Cardinals. When they acquired him from San Diego for Cardinal icon Jim Edmonds, his buddies kept asking him, "Who else did we get for Edmonds?"

Was Game 6 the greatest World Series game ever played? Maybe, but St. Louis did make three errors in the early going.

Pujols, Reggie and the Babe/ Pujols, Matsui and Bobby Richardson

While that is a debatable matter, there can be no denial that Albert Pujols' performance in Game 3 was the best single offensive game in World Series history. Not only was he just the third man in World Series history to hit three homers in one game, he had five hits, six RBI and 14 total bases.

The homers, hits and RBI tied World Series records. The 14 total bases set a World Series record.
Game 7 could have been Pujols' last as a Cardinal. He's a free agent this winter, which means the soap opera will soon begin. Before Game 7, Commissioner Bud Selig said he hoped that Pujols stayed in St. Louis.

After Friday's game, Pujols was asked about his plans. "I'm just going to enjoy the moment," he said.
Regarding the 107th World Series, he'll have a lot of company.

World Series Game 5 - This kind of thing is supposed to happen to the Tribe, not the stately Cardinals as they try to win their 11th World Series championship.

ST. LOUIS, Mo. -- For the second straight day manager Tony La Russa came bearing answers to explain how his Cardinals lost Game 5 of the World Series Monday night.

No matter how much he talked, or how eloquently he pleaded his case, St. Louis is still facing elimination Wednesday night in Game 6 at Busch Stadium.

All this because of a couple of phone conversations between La Russa and bullpen coach Derek Lilliquist in Arlington went terribly wrong. It's so confusing, and so unexpected of the precise and detailed La Russa, that at any minute a new version of Abbott and Costello's "Who's on First" routine could break out.

Here's what happened.

The 8th: Rzepczynski and Motte

In a game tied at 2-2, Michael Young opened the eighth with a double off Cardinals reliever Octavio Dotel, who struck out Adrian Beltre and intentionally walked Nelson Cruz after a visit by pitching coach Dave Duncan.

While that was going on, La Russa said he called Lilliquist and told him to get lefty Marc Rzepczynski and righty Jason Motte ready. Lilliquist heard Rzepczynski's name, but said he never heard La Russa say Motte.

"The first mention of Motte was probably after he (Lilliquist) hung up," said La Russa. "Maybe I didn't say it quickly enough."

Weird Hop and bounce

Rzepczynski replaced Dotel to face lefty David Murphy. On cue, Murphy sent a potential double-play ball back to the mound, but it took a weird hop and bounced off Rzepczynski's body for a hit, loading the bases. La Russa's next move was to bring in Motte, who can throw close to 100 mph, to face Mike Napoli, the Rangers' right-handed power-hitting catcher.

Lance 'emergency' Lynn, Rzepcynski and Motte
Before heading to the mound, La Russa looked into the Cardinals bullpen and didn't see Motte throwing. He called Lilliquist again to get Motte ready. But Lilliquist thought La Russa requested Lance Lynn, another right-hander. Lynn wasn't supposed to pitch except for an emergency.
La Russa was caught.

"There is no way you can stall long enough to get him ready," said La Russa, even though it was Lynn, not Motte, who was starting to loosen.

So Rzepczynski had to face Napoli, who hit .319 against lefties during the regular season. Napoli doubled into the right-field gap on a 1-1 pitch to score two runs. After Rzepczynski struck out Mitch Moreland, La Russa went to the mound thinking Motte was finally going to enter the game.
Wrong again.

'Emergency' Lynn emerges

As La Russa waited on the mound, Lynn jogged in from the pen.

"When he got to the mound, I said, 'What are you doing here?'" said La Russa.

He then ordered Lynn to intentionally walk Ian Kinsler to reload the bases because he didn't want to risk Lynn injuring his arm. At last, he was able to hand the ball to Motte, who struck out Elvis Andrus. Not only was it too little, but it was far too late.

La Russa took the blame.

"I told Derek, 'Believe me, this is not your problem,'" said La Russa.

But the fact that Lilliquist at one time pitched for the Indians seems to put things into perspective. This kind of thing is supposed to happen to the Tribe, not the stately Cardinals as they try to win their 11th World Series championship.

All in all, this was not a postseason game that covered La Russa in glory.

The Cardinals stranded 12 runners and went 1-for-12 with runners in scoring position. Texas pitchers tied a World Series record by issuing four intentional walks, three to Albert Pujols. Every time Texas manager Ron Washington displayed four fingers, he escaped without a run being scored.

Who should call 'Hit-and-Runs'?

The 7th: The game offered a revealing look at how much freedom Pujols has under La Russa. Allen Craig walked with one out in the seventh against Alexi Ogando. Pujols flashed him the hit-and-run sign. Craig took off on the next pitch and was thrown out by Napoli. Pujols didn't offer at the high fastball from Ogando and was intentionally walked for the third time.

"Albert has had the ability for several years to put the hit-and-run on," said La Russa.
La Russa said Pujols has earned that because of his talent and baseball smarts. It will be interesting to see if Pujols gets the same freedom should he bolt St. Louis through free agency.

The 9th: In the ninth, it was La Russa, not Pujols, who called for a run-and-hit with Craig on first and Pujols batting. Trailing, 4-2, he was trying to create a first-and-third situation with no outs. Instead La Russa ended up with a strike-'em out, throw 'em-out double play.

It was that kind of night.

On Twitter: @hoynsie

Irabu Got Lost on the Road Back - NY Times

By KEN BELSON Published: October 8, 2011 It was the kind of inquiry that curious pitchers make, even ones with World Series rings. How, Hideki Irabu wanted to know, do you throw a changeup? Jerry Spradlin, his pitching coach on the Long Beach Armada in the spring of 2009, was all too happy to show him. A former journeyman major league reliever, he was a newcomer to coaching and was eager to share some of what he knew, even something as basic as a changeup with a pitcher once called the Nolan Ryan of Japan. The lesson was impromptu and informal, typical of the way things were done on the Armada, an independent league team that served as a halfway house for older players making last-ditch comebacks and younger players still hoping to make it as professionals. With the help of an interpreter, Spradlin showed the grip to Irabu, who threw about 10 warm-up pitches in the bullpen before his start that day. Even though he was 40 and a former Yankee, Irabu was an attentive student. He was also a quick study. He struck out the side in order during the first inning using his new pitch to put away the batters. “He clearly had something left in the tank,” Spradlin said with a chuckle. As per tradition at Armada games, the fans passed the hat to reward players for their feats. Irabu had made millions during his career and did not need the $300 that reached the dugout. Some players wanted to give it back to the fans while others thought they should split it among themselves. Garry Templeton, the team’s manager, felt otherwise. He told Irabu where the money had come from, and without hesitation, Irabu told him it should be spent on food and beer for the team. The clubhouse attendant was dispatched to a store for provisions. “We had a party on him,” Templeton said. Two years later, Irabu, 42, was found hanging in his house in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., an upscale Los Angeles suburb. At some level, all suicides are mysteries. Irabu apparently left no note, but he had his troubles. He was known to drink heavily at times. His wife and two children had moved out weeks before. His two noodle restaurants had closed, and he was casting about for something else to do. “When I saw him last summer, he told me he was having a midlife crisis,” said George Rose, who befriended Irabu when he worked for two years as his interpreter on the Yankees. Rose then repeated what had been a kind of conventional wisdom about the Irabu: he had a big heart, but could be his own worst enemy. Irabu, for sure, had seemed to battle demons throughout his meteoric rise and fall. A No. 1 draft pick in Japan, he was best known for his record-setting fastball, and his temper off the field. Even during his best years in the mid-1990s, he had a love-hate relationship with the news media, which needled him by writing about his mixed heritage, a taboo in Japan. He called some Japanese reporters locusts. He was eager to play in the United States, but he bucked the baseball establishment by refusing to be traded to the San Diego Padres, despite their generous contract offer. Instead, he held out until the Yankees could sign him, and he received a hero’s welcome in New York. He twice was named the American League pitcher of the month, but he faded late in seasons. His moodiness, injuries and weight problems led George Steinbrenner to call him a fat toad, a stinging tag that he could not shake. He returned to Japan in 2003 and helped the Hanshin Tigers win the Central League pennant for the first time in nearly two decades, a redemption of sorts. But the next year, the injuries piled up and he retired after pitching in three games. His time with the Armada in 2009, then, turned out to be Irabu’s last attempt to recapture his love of the game and to fulfill some of his unmet expectations. But like many things Irabu did, his time on the Armada came with conditions. He was with the team only on days when he pitched, and he went to those games with a personal assistant and an interpreter. Because of his limited English, his teammates had little sense of Irabu as a person. Some of the players, chiefly those who had never had a whiff of the major leagues, were in awe of Irabu nonetheless. But they could also be irked that Irabu kept his distance. “To get to know him as a teammate or friend was nearly impossible,” said Scott Lonergan, a starting pitcher that year who now works as a scout with the Padres. “He didn’t come off as a prima donna. There was no sense that he was better than anyone. It was a strict business transaction. He would show up, pitch and leave.” A Toss Leads to a Quest Irabu’s road back to baseball began with a bit of serendipity. In 2007, a Japanese television crew visited Irabu in California to see how he was faring nearly three years into his retirement. They visited his restaurants, followed him as he rode his three-wheel motorbike and filmed him on a sandlot field in Torrance, obligingly tossing a ball in jeans and flip flops. Irabu had not pitched in several years, but he seemed genuinely pleased that his knee did not hurt and that his arm felt good. The pitching session was brief, but it planted a seed in Irabu’s mind that he might just have a shot at returning to baseball, according to Don Nomura, his longtime agent. “He just picked up a ball and fired the hell out of it,” Nomura said by phone from Japan. Nomura did not give it much thought, but a year or so later, Irabu started working out with two other players. Takateru Iyono, who was Irabu’s teammate in Japan, traveled to Los Angeles to seek guidance from his sempai, or elder, on how to revive his career. They recruited Hajime Nishimura, who had played on a Japanese industrial league team and moved to Los Angeles to pursue an acting career, to be a personal catcher. He now is a youth baseball coach. While training with Iyono at the M.L.B. Urban Youth Academy in Compton, a gritty part of Los Angeles, Irabu began to take his conditioning more seriously. Tentative at first, he gained confidence when his knee showed no signs of faltering. So in early 2009, with Iyono having left, Irabu picked up the pace. Each weekday, he took two half-hour whirlpool baths in the morning. Nishimura would arrive at 10 a.m. to work on fielding and pitching for two hours. Then they would go for a vegetable-heavy lunch before Irabu returned to the academy to take another bath. The regimen helped Irabu shed more than 40 pounds, buoying his spirits. “At first, I wondered if he could do it,” Nishimura said. “But he was very serious about baseball. He loved the game and didn’t think about how old he was. As long as he could play, he wanted to play.” With the season approaching, Nomura discussed the options with Irabu. It would be hard to find a major league club in the United States that would sign an aging pitcher who had not played in years. But with his mix of pitches, big-league savvy and brand name, Nomura thought that Irabu could become a useful reliever in Japan. The easiest shot at reaching that goal would be for Irabu to showcase his talents in an independent league, where the barriers for entry were lower and teams and fans were used to seeing aging stars give it one last go. The Golden Baseball League was the best fit. Each team had a handful of former major leaguers. The league also had links to Japan, including the Samurai Bears, a traveling team that had been stocked with Japanese players and managed by Warren Cromartie, a former major leaguer who played for the Yomiuri Giants. Always on the lookout for budding talent regardless of the potential guffaws, the league recruited Eri Yoshida, a Japanese teenager known as the Knuckle Princess for her signature pitch. She pitched last season in Maui, Hawaii. The league also had teams in Orange County and Long Beach, which would allow Irabu to live at home during his comeback. So in April, Nomura’s Los Angeles-based assistant, Toshi Hoshino, set up a tryout with Templeton. The session went well. “He wasn’t throwing 98 anymore, but he had the experience and the other pitches,” said Kevin Outcalt, the commissioner of the league, which also owned the Armada. “You don’t often get a player of his caliber.” A Pop-In Pitcher Outcalt was so impressed that he agreed to a contract that allowed Irabu to show up only on days when he pitched at home games. It would force Templeton to find an extra starter when the team was on the road, and knock other pitchers one game back in the rotation when they returned home. Still, Outcalt thought that the concessions were worth it because Irabu, he hoped, would be a big draw, especially with Japanese fans in the Los Angeles area. That could help the struggling club. It was a standard formula: mix hungry young players with a sprinkling of recognizable former major leaguers, add theatrics and keep prices affordable. In fact, Rickey Henderson spent a season in the league and Jose Canseco had played on the Armada, which used Blair Field, an aging stadium in Long Beach. Irabu’s teammates were paid depending on their experience, with some of the highest salaries hitting about $1,500 a month. Many players had not been drafted out of college and needed a place to play until they could be noticed by a major league organization. That meant playing in front of small crowds in places like Chico, Calif., and Yuma, Ariz. Despite their grumbling, no players were openly hostile to Irabu. His teammates recall that Irabu would show up an hour or so before his scheduled starts and disappear from the clubhouse before the last out. Some players spotted him between innings smoking cigarettes in the shower. When he was on the bench, few players had more than passing conversations with him, even though Nishimura was there to interpret. Sean Buller, a pitcher on the team who became the pitching coach halfway through the season, said no one on the team directly challenged Irabu and his seeming diffidence. Everyone, he said, had their own hopes, and did not want them damaged by possibly causing dissension. Despite the enigmatic attitude, Buller said of Irabu, “I feel bad because we never got close.” Good-Natured Needling The only teammate who felt compelled to communicate with Irabu was Jose Lima, a former all-star pitcher on the Los Angeles Dodgers who was also attempting a comeback. In many ways, he was Irabu’s polar opposite: funny, lively, involved and generous. He would sing the national anthem before his starts, take teammates to Dodgers games, serenade them with his guitar and chart their pitches on his days off. He was perhaps the only person with enough stature to needle Irabu, and he did not miss the chance. About an hour before the Armada were to play the Scorpions in Yuma, Irabu had still not shown up. (Irabu pitched twice on the road because the parks were within driving distance of his home.) Typically, the manager or coach would give that night’s starting pitcher the ball to be used to start the game. It was a bit of ceremony, but Irabu was nowhere to be seen that night. So Lima took the ball, put it in a clear plastic baggie, taped it to the clubhouse wall and wrote, Irabu #?, on the tape. Irabu chuckled when he showed up, then he threw five innings, gave up four runs and struck out six to earn the win. Another time, someone left a sign at Irabu’s locker that had a picture of two Japanese businessmen laughing with the words, ROR: Raugh out Roud. Some said Irabu got the joke. The club tried to make the most of Irabu’s occasional, mercurial presence. Josh Feldman, who organized on-field entertainment at home games, invited some Japanese drummers to perform as part of an Irabu Mania night. At another game, performers from a local martial arts academy broke boards, including some that they had set on fire. In Japan, One Last Chance By early August, Irabu had compiled a respectable but not overwhelming record given the competition. In 10 starts, he was 5-3 with a 3.58 earned run average and 66 strikeouts in 65 1/3 innings. Like his time in the major leagues, Irabu had some games in which he was unhittable, and other games when his control eluded him. Still, after several years away from organized baseball, he was happy to be back in uniform and on the field. “He was having a good time and enjoyed playing baseball again,” said Hoshino, who videotaped his starts from behind home plate. “He was really excited to take the next step.” That next step came partly as a result of Japanese reporters who had come to see Irabu pitch in Long Beach. He received an offer to pitch for the Fighting Dogs in Kochi, on the island of Shikoku, a backwater by Japanese baseball standards. Independent leagues are relatively new in Japan, where high schools, colleges and industrial leagues provide most of the young talent for the top teams. Even so, Irabu’s reputation in Japan was still strong, so he stood a better chance of catching the attention of a Japanese big-league club by playing in Kochi than if he remained in California. It was a brief stay. His first start went as well as could be expected. In seven innings, he gave up three runs, walking five and striking out three. About three times the usual crowd showed up for the game, and replica Irabu jerseys and shirts were on sale. His second start was a step back. Irabu lasted five innings and gave up five runs. Afterward, an inflamed right thumb effectively ended his season and, it turned out, his professional baseball career and his time in the public’s eye. With baseball now a fading memory, Irabu returned to Los Angeles, where he looked for things to do. Coaching was one option, but without a strong command of English, he had a hard time finding work. He appeared occasionally at clinics and talked of getting into movies someday. But none of it amounted to much. Earlier this year, his wife and two children moved out of their home. They had become acculturated to American life, leaving him more isolated, friends said. And he never picked up a baseball for the Armada again. “He was kind of searching for what to do next,” said George Rose, his old interpreter, “and he never did.”