With the local and national media pouncing on Tony La Russa for mismanaging the Cardinals to a Game 5 loss last night, we’re actually for once content to let them do the covering (though it’s worth noting that many of those who only days earlier heralded the Cardinal micromanager as genius are just as cognitively dissonant as their hagiographied subject). As observers are wont to say, ultimately the players win or lose games, and so a player — Albert Pujols — deserves some of the blame for the Game 5 fiasco.

After all, TLR wasn’t the only person on the team who suffered vapor lock. What kind of player a) calls his own hit-and-run b) then doesn’t even swing at the next pitch, hanging his running teammate out to dry and c) finally, when confronted, churlishly asks “Is that a problem?”

Well, for starters, you foolishly cost the team a baserunner in the seventh inning of a tie game. You tell us.

To that point in the game, it was the Cardinals’ fourth-biggest loss of win-probability behind only Matt Holliday’s third-inning GIDP, Craig’s strikeout with runners on second and third in the fifth, and Holliday’s bases-loaded groundout in the fifth. But it was different from those plays in a crucial way: It could have been prevented.

Is that a problem?

Former player Doug Glanville, in defending Pujols’s prerogative to call his own play, nonetheless wrote:

This is where I scratch my head. Maybe the pitch was unhittable, but if you take the time to call your own hit-and-run, then as a hitter my next thought would be, “I need to throw this bat at the ball if need be, and if nothing else, make Mike Napoli blink for just a split second.”

As Allen Craig observed, “It was a hit-and-run and an unhittable pitch. It was a perfect play for them.” A perfect play — for the opposition. Is that a problem?

If Pujols had stopped to think about it, he might’ve realized that the chance of seeing another strike after Ogando’s first-pitch get-ahead strike and given how the Rangers are pitching him — Ron Washington’s pitchers have intentionally walked him four times — was infinitesimal. But that’s Pujols’s achilles heel: His competitive desire often overwhelms his rational side, and he eschews smart choices in favor of reckless ones. In some ways, it’s a refreshing vestige of the breezy and brash character of childhood pickup games, but it manifests itself as folly in a World Series game.

As Glanville makes clear, in many cases it makes sense to give players leeway to make decisions about positioning and other on-the-spot events. That’s why, in additional to his tortured explanation about his eighth-inning managing, TLR’s claim that Pujols doesn’t have special privileges is also ridiculous. When Allen Craig, the betrayed baserunner, returned to the dugout, La Russa made him give an account for what happened. Did La Russa similarly question Pujols — the one who actually messed up the play? Furthermore, why did La Russa not initially admit to Pujols calling the play himself? The fact is clear that Pujols does indeed have special privileges, and saying otherwise doesn’t make it not so. Can La Russa at least be honest with fans, who after all aren’t as stupid as he takes us to be?

Make no mistake: Pujols is and has been the most productive player in the game, in no small part because of his feel for the game, and deserves that on-field trust. But Pujols, for all of his accomplishments and instinctive knowledge, has a longstanding pattern of abusing that decision-making trust. Even though he errs on the side of aggressiveness — which was the case in Game 5 — he still costs the team.

Pujols gets a pass on this behavior during the regular season as an understandable “cost of doing business” — Albert being Albert, in which case you take the considerable good he does with the frustrating bad. But when it matters — like say, in the World Series — he needs to be called to account. For all of the dozens of articles properly critical of La Russa’s mental boners and subsequent prideful sophistry to explain them, few writers have pointed to another momentous play in Game 5, Pujols’s half-hearted audible. La Russa doesn’t need to strip Pujols of his freedom, but he needs to make his superstar face the music and be subject to critical analysis — including from the manager — if for no other reason than that it can make him a better player. Even the best in any occupation — perhaps especially the best — need to be questioned.

Pujols may return to the Cardinals next year. It would be a shame if part of his Cardinal legacy was that his considerable talent combined with considerable pride to run the Cardinals out of a potential comeback in Game 5. Hopefully in Game 6, Pujols’s habit of overreaching won’t be a problem.

This entry was posted by Pip on Thursday, October 27th, 2011 at 11:11 am and is filed under analysis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.