Blogs By FansC70 At The Bat
Sponsor
Cardinals_WideSkyscraper.jpg

Baseball Schedule is your best source for the latest St Louis Cardinals Schedule information as well as keeping up with division rivals including Cubs Schedule, Reds Schedule, Brewers Schedule and Astros Schedule.

Bet on the Cardinals with Sports Interaction's MLB betting lines


Slots Galore Casino Tournaments

Get your tickets from Bubba! Cheap St. Louis Cardinals Tickets and more, including tickets for the next MLB All-Star Game. Bubba's got Boston Red Sox Tickets and New York Yankees Tickets

Subscribe
RSS Feed

Archives

Players

Categories


Alliance tickets has an extensive inventory of St. Louis Cardinals Tickets , Colorado Rockies Tickets, San Francisco Giants Tickets and Seattle MarinersTickets.

With all of the St Louis tickets out there, Cardinals tickets and Rams tickets make for great presents. GoTickets.com can fill all of your sports tickets needs, just check out our testimonials!

Book Review: One Last Strike

Posted on September 23, 2012 at 6:49 PM
Filed Under: St. Louis Cardinals
I've had occasion to review a number of books (as you can see if you look through the "book review" tag on this site) but there have been few, if any, that I've been more excited about reading than this one.  As its author might say, it's tied for first.

Oftentimes, when a book is generated less than a year after a momentous occasion, it can feel like a cheap, quick grab for the spotlight.  That's far from the case in One Last Strike, written by Tony La Russa (with much able assistance from the Commish, Rick Hummel).  TLR might not get quite as indepth as we want, may not necessarily give us the complete inside scoop, but he does a pretty good job of helping us revisit the remarkable 2011 from his perspective.  There's no doubt, he had a good view for it.

While 2011 forms the core of the book, it's not the whole book.  While the tagline of "Fifty Years In Baseball, Ten and a Half Games Back, and One Final Championship Season" may be the most unwieldy phraseology since, well, ever, it does tend to tell you what the book is about.  La Russa spends some time looking back on his time in Oakland and Chicago as well as his days in St. Louis.  It's a similar style of writing as John Smoltz did with his Starting and Closing, but Smoltz used the last season to move chronologically through his career.  TLR doesn't do it like that, using themes of 2011 and what he was thinking at that time to inspire stories of the past.

You get to be inside the car trip he took from St. Louis to California at the end of the 2010 season and find out how close he was to retiring.  There are other things in there, such as if the Cards had lost their last couple of games against Arizona before the '11 All-Star Break, there's a good chance that La Russa would have answered John Mozeliak less enthusiastically when Mo asked if they were still in it, which may have meant no Colby Rasmus deal.

I think that's one of the things that Cardinal fans would have liked to see out of this book, a real discussion about his relationship with Colby and how that all went south.  He does talk about his concept of "co-signers" (basically veterans that get some say, like Albert Pujols, Chris Carpenter and others) and how he went to them before 2011 and said that if Rasmus could "get on board", he could take this team from good to great.  He got the co-signers to commit to working on Colby, so to some degree maybe the entire Rasmus fiasco shouldn't be pinned on TLR.  Of course, it is him writing this, so you take it for what it's worth, but La Russa does give a better argument against the "Tony hates young players" meme than some would give him credit for.

What was also intriguing to read early on was that it was this group of co-signers who came to La Russa before the cross-country trip he took at the end of 2010 to tell him that there were unity problems on the squad.  To me (and, obviously, La Russa doesn't come right out and say this) that was the Brendan Ryan issue.  A lot of grief was laid at TLR's door for shipping Ryan off during that offseason, but it sounds like it came more from those in the clubhouse than it did the management of the club.  Whether that's "letting the inmates run the asylum" or it's more the case of recognizing a workplace issue and dealing with it, I'll leave to your judgement, though I think it's probably more of the latter.

Of course, there's a lot of good stuff in here and most people will be anxiously anticipating the chapter on Game 6.  (I think the most shocking stuff comes in the chapter on the NLDS Game 5, where he claims Carp smiled before getting Ryan Howard to end the game.  Carpenter smiling on the mound?  Do we have video proof of this?)  Those World Series chapters don't disappoint, helping you realize how they were preparing for a Series loss just in case and bringing you the sheer joy of everyone--players and families--being on the field after Allen Craig caught that fly ball.

Tony doesn't necessarily let bygones be bygones in this book either.  He gets another subtle dig in at Ozzie Smith while explaining his side of that controversy and takes a shot at an unnamed Dusty Baker in the afterword in regards to the 2012 All-Star Game controversy.  I mean, it's his book.  You can't expect him to completely play nice.

All in all, Cardinal fans are likely to put this book well above those Series books that came out last winter and probably ahead of Rob Rains' book on him from a couple of years back.  It's a great look at the definitive personality of the last decade and a half of Cardinal baseball and, as long as you don't expect an expose, you'll enjoy just about every page.   


Leave a comment




2 Comments

2 Comments | Leave a comment

user-pic
UnHolyDiver | September 24, 2012 2:56 PM | Reply

Sounds like a good read. I'll read it sometime in the near future; maybe I'll ask for it for Christmas.
Hey btw.. I found out last night that TLR will be on Kevin Pollak's online chat show one Sunday next month. Pollak said the exact date is up in the air, but it'll happen. I've been hoping that Pollak would have La Russa on his show, especially since he's producing the film version of "3 Nights in August"(it's due for a 2014 release). Buzz Bissinger is doing the screenplay, and so far, Edward Burns and Billy Bob Thornton are set to star in the movie. The chat show is on almost every Sunday, usually at 6PM EST, and goes anywhere from 80 minutes to almost 2 hrs, depending on the guest, and it's just Pollak and his guest in a set-up very similar to the one Charlie Rose uses. It'a fun show, and the guests are free to be open and say whatever they want. Oh yeah; he takes questions for the guests from the watching/listening audience, too. Fear not, though; if you can't watch it live, the shows are put on Hulu, YouTube, and iTunes, usually by the following Tuesday. I'll update you when I find out the actual date and time.

user-pic
Author Profile Page Cardinal70 replied to comment from UnHolyDiver | September 25, 2012 6:38 AM | Reply

Please do. That sounds like a great thing to listen to. I didn't know 3NIA was actually being adapted. I'd heard a lot of talk about it, but wasn't sure it was going to happen. That is great news!

Leave a comment




Cardinals_MediumRectangle.jpg

UCB_11_trans_dark_sm.png

Search

 

You can also hear Conversations With C70, along with other great podcasts, at Baseball Podcasts.net.

BallHyped Best Sports Blogs Book
This blog was featured in the Best Sports Blogs of 2010 Book! (As well as the 2012 version!)
• Pick up the limited print edition
• Free Best Sports Blogs ebook 



United Cardinal Bloggers

FRIENDS OF THE UCB


Some Guy Named Robb--The Music of Conversations With C70 (coming soon!)

Check out the UCB Network over at LockerDome!
lockerdome-share_63x63.png
  


Other Cardinal Blogs

Recommended Cardinal Forum

Other Cardinal Sites

General Baseball Blogs/Sites

Get a Cardinal theme for your browser!

Cardinals banner.jpeg


Heroes
Carlos Beltran (5)
Matt Holliday (4)
Jon Jay (4)
Daniel Descalso (3)
Matt Carpenter (3)
Jaime Garcia (3)
Shelby Miller (3)
Yadier Molina (3)
Adam Wainwright (3)
Allen Craig (2)
Pete Kozma (2)
Lance Lynn (2)
Edward Mujica (2)
Jake Westbrook (2)
Joe Kelly (1)
Tyler Lyons (1)
Seth Maness (1)
Trevor Rosenthal (1)
Ty Wigginton (1)

2012 Top Hero: Matt Holliday (17)
2011 Top Hero: Lance Berkman (24)
2010 Top Heroes: Matt Holliday and Albert Pujols (24)
2009 Top Hero: Albert Pujols (28)
2008 Top Hero: Albert Pujols (25)

Goats
David Freese (5)
Jon Jay (5)
Joe Kelly (4)
Mitchell Boggs (3)
Matt Carpenter (3)
Allen Craig (3)
Daniel Descalso (3)
Jaime Garcia (3)
Pete Kozma (3)
Yadier Molina (3)
Matt Carpenter (2)
Lance Lynn (2)
Carlos Beltran (1)
Matt Holliday (1)
Seth Maness (1)
Shane Robinson (1)
Fernando Salas (1)
Adam Wainwright (1)
Jake Westbrook (1)

2012 Top Goat: Rafael Furcal (11)
2011 Top Goat: Ryan Theriot (12)
2010 Top Goat: Brendan Ryan (14)
2009 Top Goats: Rick Ankiel and Todd Wellemeyer (13)
2008 Top Goat: Troy Glaus (13)

Cardinal Nation Approval Ratings (March 2013)
Yadier Molina 96.2% (up 8.8%)
Chris Carpenter 89.8% (down 0.3%)
Derrick Goold 89.1% (up 6.3%)
Matt Holliday 88.4% (up 0.9%)
Allen Craig 88.3%
Adam Wainwright 88.2% (down 3.7%)
Jose Oquendo 87.1% (up 2.4%)
Jason Motte 86.9%
John Mozeliak 86.5% (up 1.1%)
United Cardinal Bloggers 85.2% (up 6.3%)
Bill DeWitt 85.1% (up 5.3%)
Mike Shannon 85.1% (down 0.2%)
John Rooney 84.5% (up 3.0%)
Mike Matheny 84.4% (up 3.3%)
David Freese 82.9% (down 2.6%)
Jon Jay 81.8% (up 10.7%)
Lance Berkman 80.6% (down 8.0%)
Jenifer Langosch 79.5%
Lance Lynn 79.5%
Dan McLaughlin 76.0% (up 8.0%)
Jim Hayes 73.0% (up 1.1%)
Ricky Horton 65.5% (down 2.0%)
Jaime Garcia 64.1%
Albert Pujols 59.2% (up 4.3%)
Ballpark Village 58.3%
Joe Strauss 54.3% (down 13.4%)

2012
Tony La Russa 88.2% (up 17.4%)
Mark McGwire 82.6% (up 20.1%)
Skip Schumaker 73.3% (up 9.2%)
B.J. Rains 69.5% (down 0.9%)
Kyle Lohse 68.9% (up 13.8%)
Al Hrabosky 66.4% (up 3.2%)
Colby Rasmus 46.5% (down 35.3%)

2011
Dave Duncan 87.9% (up 0.9%)
Matthew Leach 85.5%
Pop Warner 76.7%
Ryan Franklin 72.8% (up 3.1%)
John Vuch 68.9%
Jeff Luhnow 66.4%
Dan Lozano 58.7%

2009
Rick Ankiel 83.9%
Chris Duncan 69.1%


Looking for St. Louis Cardinals Tickets?  TicketCity is your source for New York Yankees Tickets and World Series Tickets.

Looking for Cardinals tickets? Stop by OnlineSeats. We’ve got Blues seats and even Rams games. Go to the coasts as well and catch a Celtics game or get Dodgers tickets.

Referrals