David was waived by Sparky Anderson and then ranted:
DL> You have great faith in Whitey Herzog as a manager.
I'm looking at the fact that he was able to get the best out of Lonnie Smith,
who has had his adventures on the basepaths. The Cardinals were always smart
baserunners under Herzog and while you can credit coaching, it takes a
manager who has an idea about baserunning to make it so. If he didn't care
about whether his speedsters did better than average, the Cardinals wouldn't
have been as good at stealing bases.
He took KC and made them into an above average team in base-stealing and that
continued for years after he left (They had some bad spots but they were
mostly above average until about 5 years ago). His worst teams in St. Louis
were his first 4. The first two were below the NL average and while the
second were above, they were below .700, a figure that the rest of his teams
were well above. Torre, who I'll never defend when it comes to how he handles
his baserunners, had teams that were about .100 points below what Whitey had
during his time. After he left, LaRussa, who has almost always had above
average teams (His worst were his early squads in Chicago), brought that
average above the league average to .723.
DL> The problem with Polonia is that his skill set was so marginal that he
DL> almost had to steal an excessive number of bases just to do anything
DL> positive.
Polonia had all the makings of an ABOVE AVERAGE runner. Don't mistake
stupidity or poor coaching for ability. If you'll look at his career, he was
a 76.7% stealer with Oakland while he went 66.7% with New York and 68.0% with
California. LaRussa knew how to handle him and I'm positive that Herzog would
have as well.
--- TrekEd 1.00
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* Origin: Support Pete Rose and Nolan Ryan for the HOF (1:170/1701)
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