The Trials of Job (and Tony La Russa)

This is April, when the bees in Clare’s bat would go straight for her wrists in cold weather. The bees are still coming even with my daughter pregnant. I do not understand the female body. But know this about my child: No matter the pregnancy-related malady, she still knows her baseball. Yesterday afternoon, she called to give me a head’s-up on our friend Danny Mendick getting an RBI single while subbing for the injured Tim Anderson. We both like Mendick, and Clare probably knew I was picking up her mom from the train, which meant I hadn’t seen Mendick get his first hit of the season. “The pitchers are going to have a meltdown,” she warned me in advance of my catching up on the game courtesy of TiVo. Talk about your understatements. In two starts, Dallas Keuchel has looked like Gio Gonzalez light. Oh, he had a 4-1 lead against the Mariners in the top of the sixth alright, but only because Seattle was generous to a fault; the score could’ve just as easily been reversed, and soon would be. Keuchel gave up two hits and yielded to Matt Foster. Lord knows I want to be wrong about this, but Foster sure looks like a one-year wonder, and 2021 isn’t the year. The right hander threw 34 pitches over what felt like the course of an hour before White Sox manager Tony La Russa finally, mercifully, lifted him for Jose Ruiz. Foster’s line included five earned runs on five hits and a walk. Bad pitching? Not so, said La Russa after the 8-4 loss. “I did a really lousy job of managing that inning and it really hurt our chances of winning,” La Russa informed reporters. “[Foster] faced too many hitters. That’s lousy managing. Matt’s a gamer. I pushed him too far. Just stupid. Lousy.” [La Russa quoted in today’s Tribune, with variations of the above appearing across local media.] So, now Sox fans are left to wonder if La Russa suffered a senior moment, with more to come. In truth, he didn’t. Foster gets a groundball double play along with a strikeout and the game goes an entirely different way. Back in October, Rick Renteria went through relievers a mile a minute, and what did that get him? Unemployed. No, the problem is that the players aren’t performing at the level we’ve been told to expect, not yet at least. La Russa’s job is to get them to that point. Until then, we fans suffer as Job, one and all.