AJ Hinch and Tony La Russa are good, probably, at the jobs they were hired for. Between them, they have four World Series titles as field managers (two within the last decade), lengthy dynastic stretches of winning, and one career that was officially Hall of Fame quality. Hinch came off a suspension to run point on the Tigers’ rebuild and La Russa left retirement to rejoin the upstart White Sox.
But while “count the rings” may work for Modell’s shirseys, they can’t be the only factor in a managerial hire. We’re still living in the illegal sign-stealing epoch Hinch was centered in and temporarily dismissed from, which, again: He’s sorry about all that. Meanwhile, La Russa’s loud expressions of his personal politics, including his repeated criticisms of social justice protests, are a terrible match for a young and diverse roster. Just as Hinch said he’s learned from his mistakes, La Russa claimed he was “evolving” at his introduction. A leopard may never change its spots, so can a Cardinal change his feathers?
So, the question moves beyond their established strengths to: Are these men singularly special enough to merit one of the most coveted, selective and well-paying jobs in the world despite everything else?
And there’s a lot of everything else.
Even though the books, plural, about Hinch’s Astros aren’t even out yet, it is highly unlikely that anyone reading this does not already know the story beats behind his brief exile, but here they are. A good and talented team brewing in Houston chased winning at all costs and crossed several ethical lines to do so. Hinch shifted between private unspoken disapproval for the trash can “banging scheme” and vehement public denials of any wrongdoing before the exposés and investigations cost him 60 regular-season games of his job.
La Russa’s baggage might be even heavier. He presented an award to his former star Albert Pujols at Glenn Beck’s rally. Even while he was away from public-facing managerial work, he still chirped up on the wrong side of the issues, from ripping Fernando Tatis for a 3-0 grand slam to dismissing Colin Kaepernick’s prescient protest. Kaepernick’s protest is now the bare minimum for the current racial justice movement among athletes; La Russa’s new superstar Tim Anderson is one of the faces of that movement. At least one active Black pro, Mets free agent Marcus Stroman, liked tweets critical of La Russa’s apparent cultural disconnect.
(To tie the two together, we know sign-stealing isn’t a brand new phenomenon because of La Russa, who pioneered the practice during the ’80s with Comiskey Park’s center field camera.)
Again, these dudes have the hardware. And we shouldn’t assume Hinch’s Astros and Alex Cora’s Red Sox weren’t the only cheaters. To bring it close to home, the Yankees and MLB are actively contesting a sealed letter sent by Rob Manfred regarding a league investigation of the 2017 team. So one can understand how Hinch clears the bar as a skilled, particularly gifted and not singularly guilty baseball man, one that in the words of Tigers GM Al Avila, “can talk to an analyst, and he can talk to a baseball guy.”
“He can tell analysts, ‘You’re wrong, we’re going this way.’ He can tell baseball guys, ‘You’re wrong, we’re going to use this data,'” Avila said. (Unfortunately, Hinch didn’t tell either his jocks or nerds what they were most wrong about.)
La Russa, too, has his defenders. Bruce Maxwell saw his career disappear after taking on Kaepernick’s posture while he was still a rookie with the Athletics. But upon the public blowback, Maxwell swore by La Russa’s character, who he says reached out to him in 2018 during the time when he was out of affiliated ball entirely.
“We sat down and had a long conversation with me about the kneeling, my situation, everything,” Maxwell told the Daily News. The catcher admitted he was nervous about meeting a man that in 2016 said, “I really question the sincerity of somebody like Kaepernick.” But, to Maxwell’s surprise, he found La Russa to be “an amazing individual” who offered his support both privately and publicly, even making phone calls around the league to help Maxwell make his way back.
“He told me it wouldn’t be easy,” said Maxwell. “To continue to work my ass off. Be the person I know I am.” And while he acknowledged they still disagree on kneeling, “I do know he understands what the message was.”
Like Stroman, or me, Maxwell can’t speak for all Black people in and around the sport, but the La Russa he described at the very least, prioritized a player’s right to his opinion even when they contradicted the values expressed in his politics.
That won’t win La Russa an NAACP Image Award, but Maxwell’s depiction is consistent with the general attitude of players in their 20s and 30s who declined to kneel with the Black teammates they said they supported. And years before The Players Alliance, a Black-led organization of current and former players, La Russa was advocating for Maxwell when few else would.
Baseball hasn’t progressed so rapidly that a septuagenarian skeptic of anti-racist protests slowly evolving with the times can’t catch up. Not yet.
But even if Hinch and La Russa’s skills are a legitimate counterweight to their scandals, having the discussion still means losing time, energy and attention that could be spent on other worthy candidates elsewhere.
For example, Sandy Alomar Jr., the Indians’ longtime bench coach, said before Game 2 of his Wild Card match against the Yankees that he’s been through plenty of, in his words, “token” first interviews that never become seconds. “Maybe three or four…some of them being last-minute interviews, when I didn’t feel like I was ever given a chance.”
Alomar could certainly be describing the hiring processes in Chicago and Detroit, which all but made a mockery of the Selig Rule requiring minority interviews for these types of job openings. By all accounts, White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf only seriously considered La Russa for the job, while the Tigers openly admitted to calling Hinch “about 30 minutes” after the World Series (and his suspension) ended.
It’s not for a lack of experienced candidates that powerful bosses often lament when criticized for their monochromatic hires. Alomar, the Puerto Rican legend, pointed out that he played 20 years in the big leagues and knows his way around the analytics. “I do a lot of reading, a lot of sabermetrics, I do all that kind of stuff,” Alomar said.
Meanwhile, Marcus Thames has co-piloted the Yankees’ analytically-savvy all-world offense while being a vocal supporter and mentor for his Black players during a summer completely saturated by the reality of racial terror. We heard about him being interviewed by Detroit during the postseason, but he’ll have to settle for a return to New York.
In fact, the only minority managerial candidate in a nearly entirely-white field is Alex Cora. Cora’s sign-stealing experience is roughly as messy as Hinch’s, and he can match his ring too. One absolutely exceptional minority should not distract from the trend, and it shouldn’t take a title for a non-white manager to be considered on the same level as the white candidates.
In contrast to deserving voices that haven’t gotten their due, Hinch and La Russa got inordinate attention, discussion, debate and ultimately, the job. Justifying the hires of these two over the Thameses and Alomars of the world requires submission to one’s blind spots instead of examination of them.
Which brings us back to that first question: What makes these guys so special?