The two things Tony La Russa hoped to quickly convey to his players on the White Sox were how much he wanted to win and how much he cared about them and the game. “I’m nor just sitting in the corner of the dugout, idly watching the scoreboard, trying to be a strategical genius in the eighth inning,” La Russa said. “Another manager once told me that the first five or seven innings belong to the teams on the field, and that if the game is still close in the seventh, the last three innings are his; that’s when he really gets into it. I don’t agree with that. I get into it from the first to the ninth.”...
La Russa did not have as many rules as some managers, but he knew what he wanted out of his players and he knew that discipline would be an important key to his team’s success. “I don’t believe in organizations that builds discipline by telling you how to wear your socks,” La Russa said in the spring of 1980. “The way you can build discipline is by having everyone play like a pro. I won’t say, ‘Geez we’re not running it out to first base, so you have to cut your hair shorter.’ That doesn’t make sense. The public doesn’t like to see rubber-stamp players, and part of our job—besides winning games—is to provide entertainment. I like guys to be individuals.”
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Another thing his players appreciated was that he made it a point to speak to each of his players at least once every other day. Joe Goddard, covering the team for the Chicago Sun-Times, wondered if that was really true so he made a special point of arriving very early before a game one day just to watch La Russa in action. “He was down sitting on the tarpaulin talking to some guys, then I saw him behind the batting screen in the middle of the field,” Goddard said. “Next he was in the dugout, then behind the batting cage. He really did talk to almost everybody on the team while they were on the field. I was impressed with that.”
From "Tony La Russa: Man On A Mission" by Rob Rains
