Appreciation

Cardinals Are Losing Baseball’s Greatest Manager

There’s been lots of talk about Moneyball this fall, but The Daily Beast’s Buzz Bissinger dismisses it as undeserved hype for an exaggerated story. If you’re looking for a real-life tale of Major League brilliance, look no further than retiring St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony LaRussa. Bissinger, who wrote a book about LaRussa, calls him baseball’s “best manager, best innovator, best thinker, and best strategist” of the past half-century. It was LaRussa (not Moneyball’s Billy Beane) who first started experimenting with computer analysis in the 1980s, and more recently he has revolutionized the use of relief pitchers, calling for his bullpen a record 75 times during the playoffs. The result? He gets to retire a world champion.