Tony La Russa

Tony La Russa won 2,884 games, more than every manager in history except Connie Mack, and three World Series across three decades and both leagues. He was a lawyer who managed like one, a relentless tactician who turned bullpen management into a science and put the modern closer on the map. He ran the Bash Brothers in Oakland and the gritty Cardinals in St. Louis, and at 67 he walked away three days after the wildest championship of his life, then came back at 76 for one more turn. The Hall of Fame elected him in 2014.

A Lawyer in the Dugout

La Russa was born on October 4, 1944, in Tampa, Florida, and reached the majors as an infielder, though he barely hit and his playing career came to little. He spent his off-seasons in law school, earned a degree from Florida State, and passed the Florida bar in 1980, a licensed attorney who never practiced because the game would not let him go. The law-trained mind became his signature. "His intelligence," said the White Sox owner Bill Veeck, who gave him his first managing job, "was the thing that first attracted me."

The Youngest Manager in the Game

The White Sox made La Russa a major league manager in 1979, at 34 the youngest in the game, and in 1983 he won the American League West by 20 games and the first of his Manager of the Year awards. Chicago fired him in 1986, and Oakland hired him two weeks later, the move that made him. He brought his pitching coach Dave Duncan with him, beginning a partnership that would last across three teams and nearly 30 years, one of the longest in the history of the job.

The Bash Brothers and the Closer

La Russa's Athletics won three straight pennants from 1988 through 1990 behind the Bash Brothers, Mark McGwire and José Canseco, and the best of his innovations. He took Dennis Eckersley, a fading starter, and used him one inning at a time in save situations, and Eckersley became the most dominant closer in baseball and the model every other team would copy. "When I got to Oakland I still wanted to start," Eckersley said, "but Tony La Russa put me in the bullpen." The 1989 Athletics swept the Giants in a World Series interrupted by an earthquake, the lone championship of the Oakland run.

The Bullpen Revolution

More than any manager of his time, La Russa changed the way the late innings are played. The one-inning closer was only the start, and he matched relievers to hitters with a precision that slowed games down and won them, and once he batted his pitcher eighth to put a hitter in front of his sluggers. Some of it worked and some of it barely moved the numbers, but all of it came from the same restless, lawyerly conviction that every inning could be argued and every edge was worth chasing. He thought about the game harder than almost anyone who ever managed it.

The Cardinals Years

La Russa took over the St. Louis Cardinals in 1996 and managed them for 16 years, winning pennants in 2004, 2006, and 2011 and the World Series in 2006 over Detroit. He built around Albert Pujols and the pitchers Duncan coaxed out of castoffs, and he made the Cardinals a perennial contender in a baseball town that demanded one. The cerebral reputation grew into legend, the subject of a best-selling book that shadowed him through three games and called him the best manager of the modern era.

The Miracle of 2011

The best of it came last, when the 2011 Cardinals fell 10 games out of a playoff spot in late August and stormed back to reach the postseason on the final day, then ran through October as underdogs. In Game 6 of the World Series they came down to their final strike twice and would not die, David Freese tripling to tie the game in the ninth and homering to win it in the eleventh. The Cardinals won Game 7 the next night, and three days later La Russa retired, walking out the door at 67 a champion.

Coming Back

La Russa could not stay away for good. The Hall of Fame elected him in 2014, in a class with the managers Bobby Cox and Joe Torre and three first-ballot players, and then, at 76, he returned to the White Sox for two more seasons, a run that ended in friction with a younger game and a heart problem that sent him home. He and his wife had founded an animal rescue foundation back in his Oakland days, the cause closest to him away from the field. He finished with 2,884 wins, three rings, and a place just behind Connie Mack on the longest list there is.