The White Sox came to Target Field on Monday 10½ games up on the Twins. After three games, they left Target Field 11½ games up on the Twins. They beat up on a left-handed starter for a route in the opener. They paired an excellent start with barely adequate offense against an ordinary right-handed starter to take the finale. It's the same script they've been using all season, and it's good enough to lead the AL Central standings by 2½ games.
As for what happened in between, the White Sox appeared no worse for the wear. In fact, the conversation as they departed for New York concerned what they wore.
And while Lucas Giolito defended Yermín Mercedes postgame and Tim Anderson dropped a "keep swinging 3-0" into an IG live, Tony La Russa wasn't completely invisible during the proceedings.
One could look at the display of teamwide unity and regard La Russa's unwritten-rule addiction as grandmaster-grade chess. When La Russa was hired, I thought one of his selling points was a long track record of managing friction, which is necessary to be good at the job. The friction is positively chafing, and yet here he is, looking askance at anybody who thinks it odd.
However, the kind of conflict he confronted head-on before was standard managerial fare -- demanding a level of effort and performance within his clubhouse, and doling out retaliation for those who attacked his team from the outside. Nobody has been able to cite examples of him inviting/excusing retribution against one of his own players like he did with Mercedes.
What we're seeing out of La Russa -- the replaying of his public-comment hits over the last decade while actually running a team again -- looks like a guy who treats his Hall of Fame ring as a shield against public input, and it doesn't help that the only guy who wanted to hire him is similarly insulated. There are myriad benefits of not caring what anybody thinks, but some level of awareness is necessary in order to properly function in a society.
Fortunately, the players seem to like playing for each other, which is something that couldn't be said about previous White Sox teams. One of the benefits of the rebuild was the opportunity for players and coaching staffs to iron/work/smoke out any major personality conflicts while the stakes were lower, rather than adding Todd Frazier to Adam LaRoche to Adam Eaton to Brett Lawrie to Jimmy Rollins to Mat Latos at The Exact Moment Where Everything Needed To Work.
The result is a stable hierarchy, one that has been able to integrate and elevate veterans like Dallas Keuchel and Lance Lynn while also circling the wagons around a guy like Mercedes. As long as that's the case, they might be durable enough to withstand La Russa stumbling in new and curious ways every 10 to 14 days.
I like the way David Roth put it in his post at Defector, which is worth reading if only for his description of the Mercedes-Willans Astudillo matchup as a meeting of "two all-beef parties."
The idea of a team tuning out its manager entirely certainly sounds bad, and it is by now a familiar part of the postmortem stories that get written about underachieving or otherwise doomed teams. But while a manager can certainly influence games by screwing up important managerial decision-making stuff, which La Russa has already done, it seems clear by now that the White Sox don’t really need whatever broader lessons La Russa will, pompously and seemingly by reflex, try to impart. They seem to be doing just fine on their own. “Lance has a locker and I have an office,” La Russa said after Lynn publicly contradicted his manager’s stance on the primacy of the game’s unwritten rules. As high-handed executive kiss-offs go, it’s not bad—a little spicy, a little salty, nicely economical in its expression. It is so well-turned, in fact, that it is easy to miss how much it sounds like something that someone who is outnumbered might say, to himself, while business continues as usual outside his office door.
If there's any wizardry to what La Russa's doing, it might be the way he's spun the White Sox's lack of depth into a sort-of asset. He might've hung Mercedes out to dry in public, but he kept Mercedes in the lineup, because there's no better play at DH. As long as the team needs all the arms and bats it has to fill the front lines of the depth chart, all his oddities and antiquities might be met with a pleasant lack of actual consequences.
(Photo by Bruce Kluckhohn / USA TODAY Sports)
