Tony La Russa is expected to miss the Cardinals’ entire six-game road trip that began last night after leaving the team to have his shingles treated at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota and Joe Strauss of the St. Louis Post Dispatch reports that the manager could miss “significantly more time.”
Strauss quotes a source who calls La Russa’s leave an “open-ended convalescence” rather than a predetermined absence and general manager John Mozeliak indicated that there’s no timetable for his return, saying: “We don’t have a real high level of confidence on that to know what the outlook looks like.”
Bench coach Joe Pettini, rather than longtime pitching coach Dave Duncan, will serve as acting manager while La Russa is out, but Strauss reports that he’s chosen not to use La Russa’s office “as a show of respect.”
La Russa has experienced eye swelling, diminished vision, and “excruciating pain ... radiated from the eye to the back of his head.” Strauss writes that he “typically eschewed pain medication because it made him drowsy” but “Mozeliak, coaches, and some players pressed La Russa to seek more aggressive treatment.”
