The question asked in Houston this past week was meant to get Tony La Russa to draw on his three decades as a big-league manager and offer insight into how his previous teams have pulled out of tailspins like this one.
The answer was far more revealing.
The Cardinals' skipper raised an eyebrow at the reporter and responded, dryly: "You don't stay in the game that long if you have a lot of experience getting out of something like this."
La Russa's club returns home tonight from a 2-8 road trip that has put its season on tilt, its postseason chances in crisis, and those dewy-eyed expectations of three weeks ago in new focus. The Cardinals have lost eight of their previous nine games and plummeted to eight games behind division-leading Cincinnati.
It is, as La Russa's answer implied, a free-fall favored clubs such as the Cardinals or tenured managers such as La Russa do not face often. As the Reds arrive for the final three games of the regular season between the NL Central's top two teams, the Cardinals are scrambling to prove they're still a contender and not some flawed club finding its level.
The series that opens tonight at Busch Stadium was supposed to be the sequel to the bitter, compelling standoff the Cardinals' swept three weeks ago in Cincinnati. This is no longer a showdown for the Cardinals.
This series is about survival.
"If you look at our club as a whole it has underachieved, but it has also been inconsistent," general manager John Mozeliak said. "I think this team is capable of being a quality team, but the bottom line is all about performance and getting it done. As we stand here today, we have not been able to get it done. ... Excuses cannot be our approach. We have to be accountable. Right now, we need to right this ship and get back to playing better baseball."
Added La Russa: "If this was later in the season we would have put ourselves right out of the race. As it is, we have an opportunity to go on a real rush."
The eight-game deficit is larger than any a Cardinals team under La Russa has had on a Sept. 3 and overcome for a postseason berth. The 2001 club trailed by seven on Sept. 2 and won 20 of its final 26 games to reach the postseason.
When last the Cardinals faced the Reds they won all three games and left Cincinnati with a one-game division lead. Since, the Cardinals have gone 5-13 and surrendered nine games in the standings. The recent 10-game road trip distilled the Cardinals' faults. The offense scored two runs in three games at Houston. The team has lost six of the past seven games started by co-aces Adam Wainwright and Chris Carpenter.
"That part is very difficult to explain," Mozeliak said. "When you get back to the blocking and tackling of this, it's as simple as the nights we pitch, we don't hit. The nights we hit, we don't pitch. There is some baserunning and defense (problems) in the middle of all that. We haven't played consistently good baseball for a while. ... When you're losing, I think teams start to have doubts. Rather than playing to win, they are playing not to lose."
Mozeliak dismissed the adjectives 'stale" or "flat" as ways to describe the team's malaise. La Russa took issue this week when asked if the team had lost a competitive edge, insisting that effort was the same thing. Houston veteran Geoff Blum made a telling observation when he told reporters Wednesday that the Cardinals' "backs are against the wall ... and it didn't look like they wanted to come out and beat us at all."
That's a stark difference from the team that razed the Reds in early August. In that series, Cincinnati infielder Brandon Phillips described the Cardinals as "whiners" and deployed a more colorful invective for complainers. A brawl erupted between the two teams, and Cardinals backup catcher Jason LaRue was kicked hard enough by Reds pitcher Johnny Cueto that he sustained a concussion that has ended his season. La Russa dismissed any lingering animosity. "What stuff?" he said, rhetorically.
The clubhouse remains irritated by LaRue's injury, but the unified surge that produced the Cardinals' best baseball has faded. That 'sleeping giant" one Cardinal said the Reds woke up hit the snooze button.
"At that point, we were more gelled together than ever before, and we felt that maybe that was what we needed," infielder Skip Schumaker said. That series sweep "was such a good thing to happen for us I thought we were going to start running the table. I thought for sure we'd just take off from there."
Carpenter said this week the Cardinals are past needing a "rah-rah talk" to remind them of what was expected from them this season. They shouldn't need external motivators, he said. If they need anything, a couple officials said, it's a bat to, in La Russa's words, "get hot." Much of the team's offense has been isolated around Albert Pujols and Matt Holliday. On the road trip, the Cardinals hit .235, slugged .359 and scored three or fewer runs six times.
Of the 38 runs the team scored on the road, Holliday or Pujols had a role in 23 of them. The duo was responsible for nearly 60 percent of the runs in August.
A third run producer changes the look of their lineup.
This series can change the look of the remaining season. La Russa's three decades of experience have taught him to stress winning the series, any series, no matter who the series is against. The skipper conceded that each game this weekend is worth more in the standings. But he batted away the notion that these three games will determine if the Cardinals are still playing for October or just playing out September.
"I think we need to go out there and play as hard as we can as good as we can for as long as we can," La Russa said. "We can't be distracted by trying to figure out answers to questions like that. (The Reds) are in good position. There are still games that have to be played, and we're good enough that we could go on the run. It's still there for us."
