Tony La Russa To Manage NL Team In 2012 All-Star Game

News: Tony La Russa will manage the NL team in the @AllStarGame, Commissioner Selig announced today.

The next manager ... must have managerial or coaching experience at the major league level.

Sandberg is going to get consideration for a major-league managerial opening, but it won’t be just from the Cubs. From Ken Rosenthal:

Monday evening on NPR, All Things Considered Robert Siegel talked to Mike Pesca -- who knows his baseball and his sabermetrics -- about the retirement of Tony La Russa. You can listen to the piece here, but here’s the chunk that caught my eye:

But has La Russa’s fondness for super-utility players caught on around the majors? Not really. There might be a few more guys like that because of La Russa, but it’s certainly not something that’s changed baseball.

Less than three years after that, La Russa was fired by Hawk Harrelson, who had been made White Sox GM in an ill-advised move by Reinsdorf. Today, Reinsdorf commented on La Russa’s retirement announcement in relation to that, saying, “Tony is one of the few people I know who would do something for a friend even if it was bad for him personally. It’s a measure of the man that we fired him and remained friends.”

It’s interesting that Reinsdorf says “we” fired La Russa, since it seemed pretty clear at the time that decision was Harrelson’s alone.

You’ll remember that the managers in the All-Star Game are the managers who managed in the World Series the previous year. With La Russa removing himself, the 2012 National League All-Star team is now a rudderless collection of stars and overachievers all pulling in different directions. It’s on Bud Selig to find the right guy who can get them all pulling on the same rope, because if the team can’t pull itself together, it’ll fall apart like pulled pork. Pull. Pull. It’s not even a word, “pull.” Pull.

After Leyland, it’s Dusty Baker (1484 wins), Bruce Bochy (1360), and Davey Johnson (1188) at the top of the list for active managers. To give some perspective on how long La Russa has been around, Johnson would have to manage a 100-win team for the next 15-plus seasons to catch La Russa; Leyland would have to do it for 11-plus seasons.

If it seems like La Russa has been around forever, it’s because he has.

On Monday, he announced his retirement, going out as a winner.

How hard is this feat to accomplish? As actor Brent Jennings, playing Ron Washington in “Moneyball”, said, “It’s incredibly hard.”

But he’s not returning. Not unless he changes his mind real soon. About 2012, anyway. By historical standards, La Russa’s old for a manager and not getting any younger. But in recent years, Bobby Cox managed at 69, Joe Torre at 70, and Jack McKeon at 80. So let’s not completely discount the possibility of La Russa returning to the dugout somewhere, eventually.

It sure looks like he’ll be taking 2012 off, though. Which will have certain ... ramifications.

To everyone’s surprise, it was for an entirely different reason — to announce Tony La Russa’s retirement as manager. Imagine that — a news conference that produces actual news.

La Russa would have had to manage just 36 wins in 2012 to pass John McGraw on the all-time manager wins list, but said that wasn’t really that important to him:

La Russa’s managing career began at age 34 in 1979, when he replaced Don Kessinger as White Sox manager with 54 games remaining in that season. He managed the White Sox to a 27-27 mark and four years later, brought them to their first postseason appearance in 24 years when they won the AL West with 99 victories.

That was the first of 14 playoff appearances; La Russa was fired in 1986 by Ken “Hawk” Harrelson in Harrelson’s brief tenure as White Sox GM. It took La Russa just a few weeks to find another job; he was hired by the Athletics on July 5, 1986 and two years later led them to the first of three AL pennants. La Russa’s A’s won just one of the three World Series, in 1989 over the Giants. But after three losing seasons, he was fired by Oakland near the end of the 1995 season.

Some baseball men know how to go out.

Oddly, nobody ever seems to talk about managers’ postseason records. Shoot, I couldn’t even find them anywhere. Not even at Baseball-Reference.com (granted, sometimes I just can’t find stuff because there’s so much there). So I compiled the records myself, punching in every postseason series managed by every manager who managed in at least six postseason series.

See, you have to draw the line somewhere. But it’s worth mentioning that Dick Williams managed in only five postseasons, Bill McKechnie and Billy Southworth in only four, and Leo Durocher and Bucky Harris in only three; all five of those men are in the Hall of Fame as manager.