Baffoe: Cubs' Tommy La Stella Answers, Creates Questions

By Tim Baffoe--

(CBS) There are greater tragedies than the arguably best team in Major League Baseball having a bench player go AWOL. But it wouldn't be a week with the 2016 Chicago Cubs without some sideshow, be it a thematic team dress-up or deep concern over one cog in a pretty strong machine.

Reserve infielder Tommy La Stella was optioned to Triple-A Iowa by the Cubs on July 29. He has yet to report and is at home in New Jersey instead. This is a topic of conversation amid the Cubs' eight-game winning streak en route to a 12-game division lead, baseball's largest. Exacerbating the situation was a lack of infornation on La Stella's reasons and whereabouts, turning what might have been an overall nothing-burger into an increasingly curious drama.

Is La Stella just being a typical entitled baby about a tough-but-pretty-simple organizational decision with too many bodies and not enough spots at the moment? Are there family issues that need taking care of? What if it's something more psychologically serious with him?

These sorts of questions get asked when the answers aren't readily obvious and the 26th man on a high-functioning team is creating a silence about something seemingly minor that becomes deafening. La Stella finally spoke Tuesday for the first time since his demotion, letting ESPN.com's Jesse Rogers know where he's coming from in all this. His comments put at ease some of those above speculations but create even new questions about a very unusual bit of athlete autonomy.  

"I'm a baseball player by profession, my identity is not tied up in that," La Stella told ESPN.com.

That's a really noble statement and one that in a vacuum speaks against the grain of the perception the public has of pro athletes and our assumption (and sometimes demand) that the game be all-consuming of the player. Some will read that quote and be jarred and bothered. We would kill to be Tommy La Stella. And August in a pennant race isn't the time to have some Ricky Williams/"Song of Myself" existential epiphany, right?

"That's not who I am as a person," La Stella told ESPN.com. "I don't need to make every life move centered around my profession because that's not who I am. I kind of disassociated with that identity. It felt a lot better to me going out there playing because that's what I felt in me not because I felt obligated to do it. It was a lot more enjoyable this year."

More enjoyable than what? Matthew Trueblood of BP Wrigleyville noted in  a string of tweets Tuesday that (sic'd):

"I remember hearing something, when the Cubs traded for La Stella two year ago, to the effect that the Braves felt La Stella didn't have enough -something-, be it fire, love for the game, whatever. I therefore find it perfectly plausible that he's a bit more willing to make a career-threatening Thing out of this than most players would be."

As hard as it is for us mortals to believe, once in a while someone with an amazing gift all of us dream of possessing isn't a fan of that gift. That gift doesn't make that person happy for whatever reasons. And that's OK and should be tolerated.

If La Stella wants to walk away from this game in a way that isn't pouty and while tossing his chance to be part of the biggest positive sports story of the century, I have to respect that, as brain-exploding as that is to me, as much as it's lighting the Wonka golden ticket on fire before our very eyes, as it goes against every meatball reflex in my sports soul.

Past the surface, there's admirability in this. There's a proper selfishness that isn't about money or even pride but about some inner peace I don't understand but won't dismiss just because #sports.

In his comments to ESPN.com, there was no bus tossing from La Stella, no vitriol. This isn't an obvious petulant child here.

Still, questions are raised.

"Going into this season it was a shift in how I looked at it," La Stella told ESPN.com. "I said if I'm going to do this, I'm going to do it the right way. I'm going to be here because I want to be here. That was pretty much what I told them in spring training when we had that sit-down meeting. I thought that went well."

What sit-down meeting? Rogers notes that La Stella considered retiring this past offseason, which means that the current retirement talk should he be traded isn't an organic tantrum. So there was a session with La Stella and Cubs brass in the spring that convinced him to play this year? And if so, what's so different now?

"The perspective we've chosen to take is we're dealing with 25 different human beings in that clubhouse and everyone has different backgrounds and we try to be understanding of that," general manager Jed Hoyer said. "I know his teammates like him I know he can help his teammates win. Right now we're trying to give him time to clear his head."

What does "clear his head" mean? La Stella seems pretty clear about himself yet maybe not to some of us. He only wants to play baseball in a Chicago Cubs uniform because that specifically is the only happiness he pulls from baseball. Anything else is toil.

But that's not how pro sports work.

"There wasn't much more that went into it than 'this is where I want to be,'" La Stella told ESPN.com. "It was as simple as that. It didn't feel right to me to go be somewhere else just to continue playing. That's not what my thoughts center around, being a ballplayer and making it happen anyway possible. We all have a right to dictate what we do to some extent."

Damn right we do. This is also another case of even the most socialist of us reflexively siding with sports management rather than labor. The Cubs and "what they're owed" has become the sympathetic side in this, as is the case with any athlete considering himself as something more than a tool or part. But isn't this ultimatum the wrong way to go about this? Isn't La Stella putting the organization in a position it can't bend to, one in which a player says, "I will absolutely only do this one thing and nothing else, or I quit"?

"It had nothing to do with trying to leverage anything," La Stella told ESPN.com. "It was just where I was in my life and my career. It was an obvious decision for me. There was no other consideration."

The staunchness of this leaves me wanting here. Even though it was seemingly unexpected and undeserved, did La Stella always have a plan that should he ever get demoted he would refuse the assignment?

"No other consideration" is an especially fatalistic choice of words. As he continues to train and hit back in New Jersey, La Stella has emphasized he won't play for anyone but the Cubs.

But wouldn't continuing to train and hit be just as well accomplished with the Iowa Cubs and help the Chicago Cubs in the process? I get that it's easy for me from my couch to tell a guy to go move to Iowa for a month (where he's play before) and suck it up. But a gap I can't fill is how this seems explainable to La Stella's coaches and teammates -- that he deserves to walk back into that clubhouse without doing what Justin Grimm or any of thousands of guys with fewer than 200 career games played have had to do. How is putting this unnecessary onus on those teammates and coaches to answer non-baseball questions every day now until this crisis ends worth the limbo?

I'm fine with La Stella being willing to walk away from one of the most enviable jobs in the world when he's still capable of doing it well. That's an internal decision that I'm sure weighed on him in unimaginable ways when all factors are considered. Nobody should belittle that because it's beyond most of our comprehensions.

What I'm not fine with is the assumption that he seems to think this drama can just as easily be dropped if the Cubs recall him as can the desire to play at all. You don't get to just come back to work after this. It doesn't just return to normal.

"I'm just trying to get people to hear where I'm coming from and whatever conclusions they draw are up to them," La Stella told ESPN.com. "If that day does come that they decide they want me back hopefully we can make that happen."

But they do want you back, on Sept. 1 or should an injury occur before then. The Cubs never didn't want you. You yourself said you recognize the business decision of this. And now, with a precedent you would set, you've made it incredibly difficult to come back.

Cubs manager Joe Maddon emphasized on The Spiegel and Goff Show on Tuesday that La Stella would have to go through Triple-A to get back to the big club.

"In order to ameliorate the clubhouse, you can't take him from there (in New Jersey) and bring him right back to the club," Maddon said. "He's probably going to have to settle and go back to Triple-A at some point if that's what he wants to do.

"From our perspective, like I said, we want Tommy back. I think he's really good. He's a very good hitter. He's a lot of fun to be around. But again, just doing what he's doing right now is probably going to create a little bit more strain in the sense of regarding him coming back."

So then that's it, right? La Stella won't play in Iowa. Iowa is the only way back to Chicago for La Stella (if that's even still feasible now). La Stella isn't coming back to Chicago.

But the Cubs are still leaving the door open, placing him on the temporary inactive list for now instead of releasing or trading him. Which is nice of them, I guess, but why? Can he really come back?

I respect what Tommy La Stella is grappling with, even if I can't grasp it myself. But there are still questions about all this, maybe more today than yesterday.

Tim Baffoe is a columnist for CBSChicago.com. Follow Tim on Twitter @TimBaffoe. The views expressed on this page are those of the author, not CBS Local Chicago or our affiliated television and radio stations.