Dark Times For A Baseball Man

By all accounts, he has never had a relationship with them. The 2007 Cardinals media guide lists only La Russa's 34-year marriage to his second wife, Elaine, and their two daughters, Bianca and Devon. In a 1995 lawsuit dismissed by a New York Supreme Court judge, Andrea and Averie demanded $16 million for the emotional distress of not being publicly recognized as La Russa's children. According to court documents, the divorce papers stipulated that La Russa provide some financial settlement but required no child support or long-term alimony. La Russa's lawyer stated that his client had offered early on to pay for and join in counseling sessions with his daughters, only to be rebuffed. Luzette, Andrea and Averie deny he made the offer, and the sisters contended in court papers that La Russa had rejected their attempts to reestablish contact. Since the divorce they have met with their father once, in 1995, in a Manhattan hotel, with lawyers present.

"The lawsuit was a plea for attention, for acknowledgment," Andrea and Averie wrote in an e-mail last Thursday. "We realize now that that may not have been the best way to handle the situation, but we were so hurt and angry. We guess we never understood how he--who by many accounts is a great dad to our half-sisters, a family man, a rescuer of animals--how he could have left his first two daughters and never looked back."

La Russa attributes the breakup to discord between two dissimilar people who married young. "If it's a mistake and you stay there, I mean, there was going to be suffering," he says. "And the longer you stay, the more suffering there is for everybody." His only regret? "I regret that there's three women that I affected. If I hadn't gotten married, that wouldn't be true."

But to the family left behind the reason seemed clear. "He left us," Averie said in her original complaint, "because we were 'holding him back from his baseball career.'"

When La Russa started managing, it got worse in a way. Any insecurities he had as a player doubled; his body had held him back then, but if La Russa failed now there would be nothing to blame. It's as if he knew he had to outwork, outthink, outbaseball the baseball men; his pioneering use of statistical analysis--and later video--and micromanagement of the bullpen all smacked of a man unable to leave anything to chance. Everything off the field became a lower priority. After Leyland became a manager, the two best friends would occasionally square off. They'd make plans to golf or grab dinner or a drink afterward, and to Leyland's great irritation, "if I beat him, he wouldn't go," Leyland says, voice rising. "I was never like that: If we lost, I went. I used to kid him, 'What the f--- is wrong with you?'"

Elaine--and later La Russa himself--wondered the same thing. Early in the '83 season, when the White Sox were off to a lousy start, she checked into a hospital with pneumonia, but La Russa didn't go home to Sarasota to take care of Bianca and Devon. He asked his sister to fill in while he stayed in Chicago. "A huge mistake," La Russa says. "I went over the line."

While La Russa's devotion to the game hardly wavered, his interests changed after he joined Oakland in July 1986. Following Elaine's lead, he swore off meat and invested himself in the Animal Rescue Foundation (ARF), taking in dozens of cats and dogs; in their Northern California home alone the couple now has 19. Bianca and Devon became dance devotees, and La Russa was seen wearing ballet T-shirts in clubhouse celebrations. George Will wrote a 1990 best seller, Men at Work, which portrayed La Russa as the epitome of the modern manager. La Russa read dense books (fiction during the summer, nonfiction in the off-season) and appeared yearly in charity recitals. He has been a dancing sugarplum in The Nutcracker, the Grim Reaper Rabbit in The Mad Hatter.

As the Cards' chairman of the board, Bill DeWitt Jr., puts it, "He's a Renaissance man."

Still, push come to shove, baseball man would knock Renaissance man on his ass--which is what La Russa threatened to do to Canseco in 1986 after he failed to run out a ground ball. La Russa's ploy was textbook managing: 1) Dress down player once or twice in private; 2) if transgression is repeated, call out player in front of team and threaten physical harm; 3) make sure coaches are nearby to break it up, quick. His instinct, in fact, was always to follow baseball code to the letter, even when weighing the sanctity of the clubhouse against what would become the game's most corrosive scandal.

It was La Russa who came to Canseco's defense after The Washington Post's Thomas Boswell first accused him of steroid use, in 1988. Later, when he heard that Canseco had bragged about using steroids, La Russa never told his boss, Oakland president Sandy Alderson, about it or about his suspicion that other A's--"less than a handful"--had gotten too big, too fast. "I'm not sure Tony would ever admit that you can be too protective of players," Alderson says. "He perhaps sees his job description in some way requiring that from him as a manager."