Tony La Russa Is Not a Fan of Bad Poetry

Tony La Russa's frustration with the Cardinals' poor start is beginning to pour over into other avenues. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch printed a poem by Derrick Goold about the plight of the Cubs called "No Tinkers. No Evers. No chance." La Russa then exploded on reporter Bernie Micklasz in the locker room, saying that he refuses to answer questions from the paper for the cheap shot. From MLB.com:

"That cheap shot against the Cubs, I don't want to be a part of it, and I want them, I want everybody to know that the St. Louis Cardinals and their manager have an absolute disregard for that," La Russa said.

Miklasz suggested that rather than boycotting questions, the manager take up the issue with the paper's editors.

"I know it's the editor [who] makes those decisions," La Russa said. "But I have a couple of ways [to protest], and the one way I'm going to do it is I'm not going to answer questions from the Post-Dispatch. If you disagree with that, write that you disagree with it. I don't care. I really don't. What I care is that I don't put my stamp, any way shape or form, on the cheap shot like that at a Major League organization."

If you want audio of the confrontation, fellow Fanhouser Larry Brown (who tipped me to the story) has a link to it on his site, Larry Brown Sports.

La Russa clearly has the right to be pissed off about one of his own local papers taking a shot like that at the Cubs (or any other team for that matter). Still, I think La Russa is angry about something else; the poem really sucks. It's supposed to be written in the style of one of the most famous baseball poems ever, "Baseball's Sad Lexicon," popularly known as "Tinkers to Evers to Chance," but I don't see it. I mean, I'm not the Fanhouse Poet Laureate or anything, but the Sad Lexicon is beautiful in it's simplicity (it was written like 85 years before I was born and I still get it, save the small fact that I don't know what a gonfalon bubble is) and Goold's poem has footnotes explaining his bad jokes. Tony La Russa: vigilant defender of the nation's poetry standards.