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BY RICK HUMMEL • rhummel@post-dispatch.com > 314-340-8196 www.STLtoday.com | | Posted: Tuesday, November 2, 2010 12:40 am
ARLINGTON, Texas • In Oakland, Calif., Cardinals manager Tony La Russa, attending a rock concert with his family, had received word that one of his all-time favorite players, Edgar Renteria, had won the World Series for the San Francisco Giants with a three-run, tiebreaking homer in the seventh inning.
“He’s such a rise-to-the-occasion player, it’s not a surprise,” La Russa said by telephone as he spoke at intermission of the concert.
“Two years he’s been hurt and he got healthy at the right time.
“He’s built such a well-deserved reputation over his career for taking the tough at-bat. Now he’s proven it for the whole world to see.”
Renteria won the first playoff game he ever played in with a single to beat the Giants, of all teams, for Florida in 1997. He won the World Series that year with an 11th-inning single to beat Cleveland in Game 7 and now he’s won another Series. He even made the last out of the 2004 Series for the Cardinals when they lost to Boston.
“That’s a pretty darned good career he’s had,” La Russa said.
La Russa, who managed Renteria for six years, said the latter’s best off-field quality was that “he has a real awareness of what his teammates are feeling and thinking and what they need to do, regardless of whether the team is up, down or sideways. He communicates in a quiet, private way without drawing attention to himself.”
Then, poking fun at himself, La Russa said, “He also probably coined the phrase that ‘We need to get far enough ahead so that I don’t mess it up.’
“That became our rallying cry in 2002 (a division championship year). He was smart enough to figure that out.”
Texas manager Ron Washington said of Renteria, “He’s a big-time player. The word I got was he was slow at shortstop. He looked like the young Renteria.”
A DREAM COME TRUE
The World Series victory was the career highlight for baseball lifer Bruce Bochy, the Giants manager who had had two previous opportunities at the prize when he was a backup catcher for San Diego in 1984 and then the Padres’ manager in 1998, losing to Detroit and the New York Yankees, respectively, in the Series.
“This is our dream,” Bochy said. “It starts out when you’re a kid playing Wiffle ball in the backyard.”
When the game had ended and the Giants had won, Bochy said, “I was numb at first because you understand how hard this is to do. As long as I’ve been fortunate to be in this game, you dream about this.”
POWER OUTAGE
The high-powered Texas Rangers offense, which hit .276 in the regular season, was held to a .190 average in the five-game World Series and one of the surprising Rangers hitters missing in action was Vladimir Guerrero.
Cleanup man Guerrero, who struck out three times in a game for the first time all year Sunday in Game 4 of the Series, had just one hit, a single, and five strikeouts in 14 World Series at-bats.
Furthermore, he struck out 16 times in 59 at-bats for the entire postseason, which is is a pace of one every 3.68 at-bats. During the season when Guerrero season batted .300 — the 13th time in 14 big-league seasons he had hit at least .300 — Guerrero struck out only 60 times in 593 at-bats, or a pace of one strikeout every 9.9 at-bats.
Washington said he didn’t think the Giants employed any different pitching strategy against Guerrero or even Josh Hamilton, who was held to two hits, including a homer, in 20 at-bats.
“They just made some better pitches because they’re a very good pitching team,” Washington said. “Good pitching stops hitting.”
Texas general manager Jon Daniels was asked before the start of Game 5 Monday night whether Guerrero’s time in Texas will be limited. He will be a free agent after the World Series.
“He’s got a pretty big body of work that we can evaluate,” Daniels said. “For me, he’s clearly a first-ballot Hall of Famer.
“Obviously, we’ll look at it all in context, but we’re not going to evaluate him on the two weeks of games when he’s had a 10- or 15-year career of excellent performance.”
Guerrero has 436 homers, 1,473 runs batted in and 2,427 hits for his career.
Among other free agents the Rangers will have is ace lefthander Cliff Lee, who started and lost Game 5. Daniels, who was hamstrung financially for much of the season, should have more money with which to operate next season, with the club having been bought by new ownership during the season.
“We don’t have a formal budget number yet,” Daniels said, “but I’ve got a general idea of what it’s going to be and it’ll definitely be north of where we’ve been the last couple years.
QUICK RESOLUTION
Game 5 was played in 2 hours, 32 minutes, the fastest Series game since Game 4 of the 1992 World Series between Atlanta and Toronto.
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