The St. Louis Cardinals won their 11th World Series title on Friday night, following up Thursday night’s classic with a 6-2 win over the Texas Rangers. After being left for dead in late August, Tony La Russa’s squad sprung to life, completing one of the more impressive runs to end a season.
2011 World Series: Tony La Russa’s St. Louis Cardinals Take Game 7
Over at Viva El Birdos, DanUpBaby says the Cardinals’ run to the World Series title was everything about their manager wrapped upped into one tidy package.
This team was everything 16 years of Tony La Russa Cardinals teams have been in two months—immensely talented and frustrating, overachieving and frustrating, deeply lucky and frustrating, and impossible, frustratingly impossible, to stop watching, no matter how brutal things looked. It was as much Allen Craig as it was Albert Pujols, as much the bullpen phone as it was Marc Rzepczynski and Octavio Dotel showing up at the perfect moment, as much David Freese getting a second chance after that E5 as it was David Freese doing something about it.
Warning: The above link contains 11 gifs of Raul Ibanez’s famous lawn dart throw. Bandwidth beware.
This series was a hilarious ball of management, from the bullpen phone incident mentioned above to La Russa running out of players in Game 6 and still winning. The second-guessing and questionable moves added to the charm of it all, and created odd subplots along the way.
For more on the Cardinals’ Game 7 win, check out the Baseball Nation live-blog and Rob Neyer’s recap.
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