La Russa's quick hook has been working

MILWAUKEE -- The Cardinals' four-man rotation has pitched a total of 221/3 innings in the first five games of the National League Championship Series.

Chris Carpenter, as one might expect, is responsible for the longest outing. He survived five innings. Barely. That makes him the staff's iron man.

The others haven't been as fortunate. In Friday night's Game 5, Jaime Garcia had a 4-1 lead when Tony La Russa pulled him with two on and two outs in the fifth. As disappointed as Garcia was to hand over the baseball, his replacement, Octavio Dotel, later admitted that he was even more surprised that La Russa wanted to make the change.

The message? Either keep the bases clean or don't get too comfortable.

For Edwin Jackson, who takes the mound Sunday in what could be a clinching Game 6 for the Cardinals, he'd better make sure his friends and family get settled in their Miller Park seats early.

"I'm not looking over my shoulder," said Jackson, who had a 7-2 cushion when La Russa yanked him with one out in the fifth inning of Game 2. "I can't really speak for anyone else when I'm out on the field. I'm too busy worrying about what hitter is coming up next to be looking over my shoulder.

"Obviously, there's points in the game where there's times that you could be out. But as a pitcher, you kind of get to know when your time is running down."

The Cardinals' staff seems to be clocked with an egg timer. But it's difficult to find fault with La Russa now that his team is on the brink of a third World Series appearance in eight years. He's used his bullpen for 212/3 innings of this series, roughly 48 percent of the time, and the relief corps has responded by allowing only four earned runs in that period.

"Tony is the most prepared person I've ever been around," Carpenter said. "He lives and dies by numbers, by matchups, by lineups. He puts work in -- he puts his time into knowing when to push the right buttons.

"There's a reason why his teams continue to win. There's a reason why he's a Hall of Fame manager, and that's because he's prepared more than any person I've ever seen. And when he does push those buttons, he has no fear whatsoever."

Friday's decision to call on Dotel was the latest coup for La Russa, who maneuvered St. Louis to the 2006 World Series title with a team that won only 83 games during the regular season. With Dotel, the numbers didn't lie. Ryan Braun entered that matchup 2-for-9 with seven strikeouts against Dotel -- and Braun whiffed again. The Brewers missed their chance to tie the score on one swing and the Cardinals wound up taking a 3-2 edge back to Milwaukee.

In talking about his early-and-often bullpen strategy, La Russa credited Charley Lau, the renowned hitting guru, for planting one important seed of advice. La Russa said he first crossed paths with Lau as an 18-year-old and later had him on his coaching staff with the White Sox.

"He would tell me, the thing that would worry him most as a hitting coach is when a manager on the other side had a bullpen that made it as tough as he could to score the inning that you were playing," La Russa said. "That's the basis of the philosophy that I was taught. The No. 1 thing I try to do, and I believe it after all these years, is to make it as hard for the other team to score the inning that you're playing to the extent that you can."

Seeing La Russa wear out the grass between the dugout and mound can be tedious to watch. But it's worked for him, and Jackson should just consider himself on notice from the first warmup pitch.