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Help, please, someone, help! I’m caught in a Tony La Russa time loop. Now, I’m just a fan, but it seems to me a good manager has to know which of his relievers can come in with runners on base and which ones need to come in with everything “clean,” or nobody on. Off of what he did (and didn’t do) Sunday, White Sox rookie Garrett Crochet would seem to fall into the latter category. Oh, my bad. La Russa brought Crochett in for the second straight time with a runner on base to start extra innings. Check that, La Russa’s bad. That, or he’s insane to think the same action would yield different results, because they didn’t. Crochet—who, by the way, doesn’t look to be throwing nearly as hard as he did last September—gave up what proved to be the winning run. Unlike Sunday, he couldn’t even get through the entire inning. Not good, to my untrained eyes. But fear not, for Captain Jibber-Jabber is here to make it all right. “Who didn’t struggle tonight on our side?” La Russa was quoted in today’s The Athletic. The Captain felt a particular need to defend left fielder Nick Williams, a journeyman playing in place of promising rookie Andrew Vaughn; Williams struck out three times against in four at-bats on the night. “Everybody struggled,” Captain continued. “I felt good. He’s [Williams] an aggressive hitter, and they fed off that a couple of times. They got him to chase a couple of times.” Hmm, an aggressive hitter the other side knew to exploit? What did La Russa say last week about the “lousy job of managing” he did in a game against the Mariners? Williams, who strikes me as being a really decent guy, is hitless in ten at-bats, with a walk. Vaughn is only hitting .143, with two hits in fourteen at-bats, yet he has a .400 OBP. Why? Because he’s been able to control his rookie nerves to walk five times. And that’s what the Sox needed in a game where they didn’t score a run in ten innings while managing all of four baserunners last night, or five, if you count the extra-inning freebie. If La Russa wants to talk about his hitters, I suggest he start with third baseman Yoan Moncada, he of the .179 BA, with fifteen strikeouts and two RBIs in 39 at-bats. I can’t wait to hear the jibberish those stats might unleash.