La Russa on "scoring in three innings"

Recently, the Cardinals had a spell in which all their runs were coming in a single inning.

Manager Tony La Russa decided that's not good:

"… We want to (score) in three innings. That's the goal. But the bigger goal is to win the game."

A follow-up article reported:

La Russa said back in Oakland Jim Lefebvre said a team’s chances of winning dramatically increase when it adds a third inning of scoring in any game. They started keeping track of such things and found the three-inning rule true.

The article shows that teams scoring in only two innings have a winning percentage of .417, but if they score in three innings, they jump to .623. If you score in three *or more* innings, you'll be .711.

But that's irrelevant. Obviously, only runs are important. If your opponents score more runs than you, you lose. Even if they scored them all in one inning, you still lose. And it's not like "scoring in at least three innings" is a skill you can teach your team indpendent of scoring runs in general. So what's the point?

In the game La Russa complained about, his team scored four runs in the seventh and won 4-1. Someone should show him page 173 of the 1986 Bill James Baseball Abstract, where James found that if you score four or more runs in a game, you'll be .747. (It's probably lower now in this high-offense era, but the point still holds.)

In any case, I don't think this is anything that La Russa can screw up the team with ... there are few reasonable managerial strategies that increase the number of scoring innings while decreasing the number of runs. And maybe La Russa didn't really mean what it sounds like he meant; perhaps he was just making conversation for the reporter.

But still ...

(Hat Tip: Bob Timmermann)