By S.L. Price

	Though he didn't make K.C's roster in 1964, the bonus-baby infielder played 132 games in 10 years with three clubs. The Topps Company, Inc.

Even four hours later in his Busch Stadium office, when he should be savoring a 9-2 win or concentrating on dialing numbers into the cellphone in his lap, he's still thinking about that word. "Believe me when I say it," La Russa says, fingers still fiddling with the buttons. He's slumped in a folding chair, alone and spent, and when he glances up the harsh light does its work: Suddenly the man looks his age. "I am not embattled."

Say this for the game: It can give you what you want. If you pay its price -- if you sacrifice your prime years and spend your downtime over a book in a restaurant while your family grows and hurts and laughs 1,700 miles away, you can become one of the greats. You can be Tony La Russa, with a ticket punched for the Hall of Fame. You can stand in a ballpark with the sweet percussion of batting practice filling the air, and it will all seem worth it.

"I don't have a crystal ball for this afternoon, this season," he says. "And that intrigue of whether we can piece it together and be good enough is a terrific turn-on. The only thing right now that really grinds at me? The possibility that we won't be good enough. If you could tell me we will be good enough to contend, then you can shovel all the s--- you want onto us. I'm doing something in the game I love for 40 years. How tough is that?"

In St. Louis, the ultimate baseball town? For some, it can be paradise. Once a generation, like clockwork, the Cardinals have produced champions and Hall of Famers. The city, in turn, has cultivated a devotion that can be bracing and blind. Football may have become the national pastime, but not around this particular bend of the Mississippi. The tickets to Busch read baseball heaven, and few locals -- and even fewer of the pilgrims who travel hundreds of miles to get their yearly taste -- consider that an exaggeration.

As such, St. Louis has always found a certain type of manager irresistible: the plain-speaking lifer, timeless salts like former second baseman Red Schoendienst and the brush-cut avatar Whitey Herzog. The fact that he wasn't like the White Rat dogged La Russa throughout his first years in town, but dealing with skeptics wasn't anything new. From the moment Bill Veeck tapped him as Chicago's skipper at 34 in '79, La Russa was viewed by some as an impostor. His big league playing career? A .199 batting average in 132 games in six seasons spanning 10 years. His managing résumé? Running a Double A team for part of one season and a Triple A team for part of the next. "Too cheap to hire a real manager!" White Sox broadcaster Harry Caray said constantly of Veeck's hire, and at his worst moments La Russa suspected he was right. He ran scared but smart, gradually surrounding himself with coaches bearing the credentials he lacked: batting coach Charley Lau, pitching coach Dave Duncan and third base coach Jim Leyland, an old school hand, face already hollowed by 11 years in the minor league wilderness.

"I'm holding on like this," says La Russa, hands curled as if grasping a window ledge on the 49th floor. "They had started to upgrade the club, so now there's expectations. And the American League had these unbelievable giants, guys you knew just by first name: Earl, Whitey, Sparky, Gene. And you're sitting there wondering what you give your club versus what they give. So on almost a nightly basis Jim and I would reconstruct the game and figure out what we could learn from them. Jim was talking a helluva lot more than Tony was. Jim taught me to manage."