Tracing some managerial trees

Walt Weiss played for four managers, two of them
Tony LaRussa and Bobby Cox. The other two were
connected to LaRussa.

Three sure-fire Hall of Fame managers, and one with a pretty good case, abandoned the dugout the past couple of years, and some of the managerial hirings this offseasons led me to ponder how the careers of Bobby Cox, Tony LaRussa, Lou Piniella and Joe Torre have affected the current crop of managers.

Cox: His managerial progeny includes Ned Yost of the Kansas City Royals and Fredi Gonzalez, who succeeded him with the Atlanta Braves. Walt Weiss, just named to the Rockies job, also played a couple of seasons for Cox, but I'm putting him in LaRussa's group, for reasons I'll detail later.

Torre: Joe Girardi (Yankees) played for and coached under Torre. Don Mattingly (Dodgers) coached for Torre in New York amid speculation that he was being groomed to succeed Torre; when the Steinbrenners replaced Torre with Girardi and Torre went to the Dodgers, Mattingly followed and eventually inherited the job.

Lou Piniella managed for 23 years,
but spawned few managers.

Piniella: This is odd for a guy who managed for 23 years with five different franchises, won a World Series, had a 116-win season: I can't identify any manager, current or past, whose career trajectory was clearly affected by Sweet Lou. Mattingly and Willie Randolph played for him in the early years of his managerial career, but Donnie Baseball belongs in the Torre family and Randolph had so many skippers it's hard to identify a mentor.

In an odd way, Piniella may have been indirectly influential on Ozzie Guillen, who never played for or worked with Piniella; Joey Cora spent the bulk of his career with Piniella, and Guillen leaned as heavily on Cora as any manager has relied on a coach in recent memory.

LaRussa: He's got literally generations of managerial progeny — too many, probably, to accurately recount. Consider this this: Jim Leyland was LaRussa's right-hand man during LaRussa's first job, with the White Sox in the early 1980s; Leyland's been managing pretty much forever himself. Heck, Gene Lamont spent eight seasons with managerial jobs in between coaching stints with Leyland.

Mike Matheny led the Cardinals
back to the NLCS in his first
year as manager.

Besides Leyland, current managers in the LaRussa tree would include:

• Mike Redmond, new Miami manager; he clearly regards Leyland as a crucial figure in his career;
• Weiss broke in under LaRussa in Oakland, then played one season for Rene Lachemann in Florida (Lachemann is to LaRussa what Lamont is to Leyland — a coach who left periodically for managing jobs only to return after losing those jobs). Then Weiss moved on to Colorado, where he played for Don Baylor, who had played for LaRussa himself, although it would be difficult to claim LaRussa as a primary influence on Baylor. (More likely influences on Baylor would be Earl Weaver and Gene Mauch.)
• Mike Matheny, who succeeded LaRussa in St. Louis.
• Robin Ventura of the White Sox played three-plus seasons for Lamont, the longest period for which he had a specific manager. Ventura also played for shorter periods for Torre, Bobby Valentine and others. I'm not sure which of them was most influential on him.

There are 30 big-league managerial jobs; at least eight of them are now held by the managerial descendants of LaRussa, Cox and Torre.

Bobby Cox and the end of infield practice

It's a very minor footnote in the long and illustrious managerial career of Bobby Cox, but it's something I think about almost every time I get to a stadium early enough to watch batting practice: He's the man who essentially killed infield practice before major league games.

Say good-bye, Bobby

Twenty years ago it was routine: Batting practice was followed by a round of fielding fungoes. Coaches would rap grounders to infielders, who would throw to the various bases; they'd hit flies to the outfielders, who would fire throws to third or home. (Legend has it that during one World Series, Joe DiMaggio had a sore arm and figured he had just a couple good throws a day. He used them in infield practice, figuring that the opposition would see him throwing hard and decide not to run on him.)

Nobody takes infield anymore. It's hot in Atlanta in the summer, or so I'm told (I've never been there, but it's difficult to believe it can be worse than Cincinnati or St. Louis in July or August), and Cox — doubtless with the concurrence of his players — decided it was better to save their energy for the game. And since the Braves won consistently without taking infield, other teams followed suit.

I miss watching infield. I understand the rationale for its demise, but I enjoyed the rhythm of the baseball ballet. (Some of the barnstorming black teams in the days of the old Negro Leagues would do infield without a ball — shadowball, they called it.)

It came to mind again the other day when Brooks Conrad, an Atlanta infielder, had a three-error game at second base. It helped cost the Braves the game; that game would have put the Braves up 2-1 in the division series, and instead it put them down 2-1.

Conrad is a 30-year-old rookie who won some games for Cox as a pinch-hitter, but he's spent the bulk of his baseball life in the bushes because he isn't a major-league quality fielder. There was probably no amount of infield practice that would turn Conrad into Nick Punto. The old Pepper Martin line applies: I got me a mule back in Oklahoma, and you can work him from sunup to sundown, and he ain't never gonna win the Kentucky Derby.

But it seems appropriate that the man who ended infield practice had his career end because his utility infielder couldn't handle second base.