Tony La Russa wasn't "suspicious" of the pitch that went behind Yermín Mercedes' legs and led to the ejection of Minnesota Twins reliever Tyler Duffey in Tuesday night's game.
The White Sox manager said he didn't see any ill intent behind the throw, which came a night after Mercedes irked both the Twins and La Russa by swinging at a 3-0 pitch from a position player in the ninth inning of a blowout win, homering to grow his team's already massive lead.
RELATED: La Russa: Mercedes homer 'big mistake,' 'won't happen again'
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"It wasn’t obvious to me," La Russa said of Duffey's seventh-inning throw. "The guy threw a sinker. It didn’t look good. So I wasn’t that suspicious. I’m suspicious if somebody throws at somebody’s head. I don’t have a problem with how the Twins handled that.
"What did they do? The guy might have just been trying to get a sinker in. We don’t read minds. I’m not going to read their mind, and I’m not going to second guess the umpire when it’s his judgement. The ball was thrown at somebody’s head, and then you don’t give anybody the benefit of the doubt."
Some of that wording, especially when presented in snippets without accompanying context, made it seem like La Russa might have been OK with what plenty perceived as the Twins exacting vigilante justice — upholding the game's tiresome unwritten rules — on Mercedes for what La Russa himself derided as an unsportsmanlike swing from a night prior.
The South Side skipper reiterated multiple times during his postgame media session that he didn't believe there to be any malicious intent at all, even while backing the home-plate umpire's decision to eject both the pitcher and Twins manager Rocco Baldelli from the game.
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"The umpire does his job. We do our job. I don’t ever second guess the umpire’s judgement," La Russa said. "I’m sure he was watching, and he reacted. I can see why he did it. I gave him my opinion. I didn’t have a problem with what the Twins did.
"I don’t second guess Jim Reynolds. He’s one of the better umpires out there. I trust his judgement."
During his pregame media session, La Russa said he would have been fine had Mercedes homered on a 3-1 pitch in the same blowout situation but that doing so on a 3-0 pitch deserved punishment. He brought up specifics again postgame, seemingly reserving any judgment over potential retaliation for when a specific body part was targeted or not.
La Russa made it clear pregame that revenge is what he was hoping to avoid, saying he apologized to the Twins and hoped his expression of his own displeasure over Mercedes' decision to swing would be enough to avoid retaliation.
"I don't ever want to give the other team an excuse to take a shot at one of our players," he said. "You say 'unwritten rules,' but they're just common sense."
He didn't see Duffey's throw as retaliation.
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