La Russa Wants Special Icing on Birthday Cake

Tony La Russa celebrated his 52nd birthday Friday. Will he have his cake and eat it too?

His St. Louis Cardinals, leading the San Diego Padres, 2-0, in their best-of-five National League division playoff series, could make it possible today.

“That would be a great birthday present,” La Russa said, but added with characteristic caution: “We’ve got to be very realistic about knowing where the rainbow is. The payoff is on three [wins], not two.”

Focus. Intensity. Preparation. General Manager Walt Jocketty, the former Oakland Athletic executive, said those are the attributes that La Russa, the former A’s manager, brought to the Cardinals, who produced a 27-game improvement in vaulting from the National League Central cellar to the championship, a sixth division title for La Russa.

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Using intuition and past performance, La Russa continues to display a hot hand in his choice of shortstops.

Royce Clayton singled and walked in four plate appearances in Game 1. Ozzie Smith singled and walked twice in Game 2. Each appearance could be the last for the retiring Smith, but he and Clayton have long since come to grips with what might have been a volatile situation.

“We really came together as a team from June on,” La Russa said. “Everybody deserves credit, but maybe those two deserve the most.”

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If left-hander Donovan Osborne (13-9) pitches the Cardinals to a champagne shower tonight, he’ll celebrate carefully.

Reaching into a tub for a champagne bottle after the division clinching, he gashed his left thumb on a broken bottle.

“There was blood everywhere,” he said. “I thought I was through.”

The gashed thumb was hardly his most serious hurdle this year.

Osborne suffered broken ribs in a late spring car accident and didn’t make his first start until mid-April. He also was arrested Aug. 26 in Houston on charges of public intoxication and criminal trespass for refusing to leave a night club. “It’s been a good year on the field and a bad one off the field,” he said.

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The Cardinals are 10-4 against the Padres, including 4-2 at Jack Murphy Stadium, where they had lost 15 in a row coming into this year.

History is fickle, but San Diego right fielder Tony Gwynn hopes 1984 repeats.

In what was then the best-of-five league championship series, the Padres lost the first two games to the Chicago Cubs at Wrigley Field, then won three in a row at home, highlighting their only previous postseason appearance.

“I’d love to see a flashback to ‘84,” Gwynn said. “But [the Cardinals] do a lot of things right, and they’re going to be tough to beat.