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3 Nights in August: Strategy, Heartbreak, and Joy Inside the Mind of a Manager Kindle Edition
A Chicago Tribune Best Book of the Year
“Plenty of books have taken us inside baseball, but August takes us directly inside players’ heads.” —Entertainment Weekly
3 Nights in August captures the strategic and emotional complexities of baseball’s quintessential form: the three-game series. As the St. Louis Cardinals battle their archrival, the Chicago Cubs, we watch from the dugout through the eyes of legendary Tony La Russa, considered by many to be the greatest manager of the modern era. In his thirty-three years of managing, La Russa won three World Series titles and was named Manager of the Year a record five times. He now stands as the third-winningest manager in the history of baseball.
A great leader, La Russa built his success on the conviction that ball games are won not only by the numbers but also by the hearts and minds of those who play. Drawing on unprecedented access to a major league skipper and his team, Buzz Bissinger portrays baseball with a revelatory intimacy that offers many surprisingly tactical insights—and furthers the debate on major league managerial style and strategy in his provocative afterword.
“Superb . . . Will be devoured by hard-core strategists.” —The New York Times Book Review
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherMariner Books
- Publication dateApril 4, 2006
- File size2834 KB
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About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The face made me do it. It left an indelible image with its eternal glower from the dark corner that it occupied. I had always admired intensity in others, but the face of Tony La Russa entered a new dimension, nothing quite like it in all of sports.
I first saw the face in the early 1980s, when La Russa came out of nowhere at the age of thirty-four to manage the Chicago White Sox and took them to a division championship in his third full year of managing. The face simply smoldered; it could have been used as a welding tool or rented out to a tanning salon. A few years later, when he managed the Oakland A’s to the World Series three times in a row, the face was a regular fixture on network television and raised even more questions in my mind. Did it ever crack a smile? Did it ever relax? Did it ever loosen up and let down the guard a little bit, even in the orgy of victory? As far I could tell, the answer was no.
I was hooked on the face. I continued to observe it as he stayed with the Oakland A’s through 1995. I followed it when he became the manager of the St. Louis Cardinals the following season. Along the way, I became aware of his reputation as a manager, with a polarity of opinion over him such that when Sports Illustrated polled players on the game’s best five managers and its worst five managers, La Russa appeared on both lists. But I liked seeing that because it meant to me that this was a manager who didn’t hold back, who ran his club with a distinct style regardless of the critics’ chorus. Had he been any different, surely the face would have broken into a smile at least once.
After La Russa came to the Cardinals, I did see moments when the face changed. I saw fatherly pride and self-effacement spread over it when Mark McGwire hit his record-breaking sixty-second home run in 1998. I also saw the face overcome with grief when he and his coaches and his players mourned the passing of the soul of the St. Louis Cardinals, broadcast announcer Jack Buck, followed four days later by the death of beloved pitcher Darryl Kile in his hotel room during a road trip in Chicago. Later that season of 2002, I saw the intensity return, all the features on a collision course to the same hard line across the lips during the National League Championship series that the Cardinals painfully lost to the Giants four games to one.
As a lifelong baseball fan, I found myself more curious about La Russa than about anybody else in the game. Which is why, when out of nowhere, I received a call from La Russa’s agent at the end of November 2002 asking whether I might be interested in collaborating on a book with La Russa, my answer was an immediate yes. I jumped at the opportunity, although I also knew that collaborations can be a tricky business. I had been offered them before by the likes of Rudy Giuliani and legendary television producer Roone Arledge, and I had turned them down. But this was different, or at least I told myself it was different, becauseat the risk of sounding like some field-of-dreams idiotmy love of baseball has been perhaps the greatest single constant of my life. I knew the game as a fan, which is a wonderful way to know it. But the opportunity to know it through the mind of La Russato excavate deep into the game and try to capture the odd and lonely corner of the dugout that he and all managers occupy by virtue of the natural isolation of their craftwas simply too good to pass up.
In the beginning, this was a typical collaboration. I brought along my little minicassette recorder to where La Russa lived in northern California. I turned it on and interviewed him at length, thinking that I would listen to the tapes and transcribe them and try to fashion what he said into his own voice. As is common in collaborations, we also have a business arrangement, a split of the proceeds, although the entirety of La Russa’s share is going to the Animal Rescue Foundation, known as Tony La Russa’s ARF, that he cofounded with his wife, Elaine, in northern California.
The more we talked about the book, the more agreement there was about trying to do something different from the typical as-told-to. La Russa’s interest in me as a writer had been on the basis of Friday Night Lights, a book I had written about high school football in Texas. He was struck by the voice and observational qualities of the book, and we wondered whether there was a way to fashion that here. We also wondered whether there was a way to write the book with a narrative structure different from tthe usual season-in-the-life trajectory, a book that would have lasting and universal application no matter what season it took place in.
It was during those conversations that we came up with the idea of crafting the book around the timeless unit ooooof baseball, the three-game series. The one we settled on, against the eternal rival Chicago Cubs, took place in the 2003 season. Had the goal of the book been differentto write about a particular seasonit would have made sense to switch gears and write about the Cardinals’ magnificent ride of 2004. But that wasn’t the goal.
It was also during those conversations that La Russa agreed to give me virtually unlimited access to the Cardinals’ clubhouse and the coaches and players and personnel who populate itnot simply for the three- game series that forms the spine of the book but also for the virtual entirety of the 2003 seasonto soak up the subculture as much as possible. La Russa understood that in granting such access, he was ceding much of the control of the book to me as its writer. In doing so, he was untying the usual constraints of a collaboration, allowing me wide latitude to report and observe and draw my own conclusions. He also knew that approaching the book in this manner required him to be revealing of not only the strategies he has come to use but also the wrenching personal compromises he has made in order to be the kind of manager he has chosen to be.
La Russa did not waver from the latitude that he promised. I was made privy to dozens of private meetings between the Cardinals coaches and their players. I was able to roam the clubhouse freely. Because of my access, I was also able to probe not only La Russa’s mind but also the minds of so many others who populate a clubhouse. La Russa has read what I have writtenthe place where collaborations can get odious. He has clarified, but in no place has he asked that anything be removed, no matter how candid.
I came into this book as an admirer of La Russa. I leave with even more admiration not simply because of the intellectual complexity with which he reaches his decisions but also because of the place that I believe he occupies in the changing world of baseball.
He seems like a vanishing breed to me, in the same way that Joe Torre of the New York Yankees and Bobby Cox of Atlanta and Lou Piniella of Tampa Bay also seem like the last of their kind. They so clearly love the game. They revel in the history of it.
They have values as fine as they are old- fashioned, and they have combined them with the belief that a manager’s role is to be shrewd and aggressive and intuitive, that the job is more about unlocking the hearts of players than the mere deciphering of their statistics.
In the fallout of Michael Lewis’s provocative book Moneyball, baseball front offices are increasingly being populated by thirtysomethings whose most salient qualifications are MBA degrees and who come equipped with a clinical ruthlessness: The skills of players don’t even have to be observed but instead can be diagnosed by adept statistical analysis through a computer. These thirtysomethings view players as pieces of an assembly line; the goal is to quantify the inefficiencies that are slowing down production and then to improve on it with cost-effective player parts.
In this new wave of baseball, managers are less managers than middle managers, functionaries whose strategic options during a game require muzzlement, there only to effect the marching orders coldly calculated and passed down by upper management. It is wrong to say that the new breed doesn’t care about baseball. But it’s not wrong to say that there is no way they could possibly love it, and so much of baseball is about love. They don’t have the sense of history, which to the thirtysomethings is largely bunk. They don’t have the bus trips or the plane trips. They don’t carry along the tradition, because they couldn’t care less about the tradition.
They have no use for the lore of the gamethe poetry of its stories because it can’t be broken down and crunched into a computer. Just as they have no interest in the human ingredients that make a player a player and make a game a game: heart, desire, passion, reactions to pressure. After all, these are emotions, and what point are emotions if they can’t be quantified?
La Russa is a baseball man, and he loves the appellation baseball man.” He loves the sound of it, although the term has become increasingly pejorative today because of the very stodginess that it suggests. But La Russa is not some hidebound manager stuck in the Dark Ages. He honors statistics and respects the studies that have been written about them. He pays meticulous attention to matchups. He thinks about slugging percentage and on-base percentage, as they have become the trendy statistics in today’s game. They have a place in baseball, but he refuses to be held captive to them, because so much else has a place in baseball. Like Torre and Cox and Piniella, his history in the game makes him powerfully influenced by the very persuasions the thirtysomethings find so pointless: heart, desire, passion, reactions to pressure. After all, these are emotions, and what point is there playing baseball, or any game, if you don’t celebrate them?
This book was not conceived as a response to Moneyball. Work began months before either La Russa or I had ever heard of Lewis’s work. Nor is this book exclusively about La Russa.
Because he is the manager, he is at the hub of the wheel of Three Nights in August. But the more time I spent in the clubhouse, the more aware I became of all the various spokes that emanate from that hub and make a team that thing called a team.
La Russa represents, to my mind, the best that baseball offers, but this book doesn’t sidestep the less noble elements that have associated themselves with the game in the past few decades: the palpable decline in team spirit, the ever-escalating salaries, the burgeoning use of steroidsall are a part of what baseball has become.
The sport has a tendency to cannibalize itself, to raise the bar of self-interest just when you thought it couldn’t go any higher. The recent scandal of steroid abuse is shocking enoughwith its lurid images of players lathering weird creams all over themselves but what’s truly shocking is that this problem has festered for at least a decade. As La Russa pointed out in one of our interviews, everybody in baseball knew for years that steroid use was taking place. But the only two powers that could have done something about itthe owners and the players’ uniondid nothing until 2002. It’s difficult morally to understand that, but not financially, since steroids helped fuel the home-run craze that many who run baseball were convinced was the only way to capture new fans who lacked an interest in the game’s subtleties.
It’s a cynical notion and it’s also wrong. Home runs are electrifying, but so are the dozens of smaller subplots that reveal themselves in every game, strategically and psychologically and emotionally. Three Nights in August tries to convey that very resonance, not with nostalgia, but because it is still the essence of this complex and layered game.
Copyright © 2005 by Tony La Russa and H.G. Bissinger. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.
From AudioFile
Product details
- ASIN : B005Y23KKG
- Publisher : Mariner Books; Reprint edition (April 4, 2006)
- Publication date : April 4, 2006
- Language : English
- File size : 2834 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 352 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #232,828 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #14 in Baseball Coaching (Kindle Store)
- #38 in Baseball Biographies (Kindle Store)
- #56 in Baseball History
- Customer Reviews:
About the authors
Buzz Bissinger is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of four books, including the New York Times bestseller 3 Nights in August and Friday Night Lights, which has sold two million copies and inspired a film and TV franchise. He is a contributing editor for Vanity Fair and a sports columnist for The Daily Beast. He has written for the New York Times, The New Republic, Time and many other publications.
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This is a lovingly crafted account of a three-game series between the Cardinals and the Cubs in the summer of 2003. It tracks the strategizing of Cards manager Tony La Russa as he fights for the crucial wins that he hopes will give his team the momentum needed to carry them into October.
The writing is exquisite. Like an ace pitcher tossing his best stuff in a big game, Bissinger seamlessly mixes in joy, heartbreak, tension, and humor. There are enough statistics and tactics and historical references to satisfy the serious fan, but the box scores and decimal points are animated by intricate personal tales and nail-biting retellings of the key events in the series. Each game is relayed as though it were a protracted military campaign in which every deed, whether heroic or dastardly, is worthy of the historian's pen.
One of the best sections is, sadly, one of the most heartwrenching. That is the story of beloved Cardinals pitcher Darryl Kine, who died of a heart attack at age 33, leaving behind a wife, three kids, and clubhouse full of brokenhearted men who suddenly ask themselves what is so important about hitting a ball around a field.
Some reviewers have slammed the book for supposedly staking out a stance diametrical to that of Michael Lewis's Moneyball, which used the example of Oakland manager Billy Beane to argue that statistical analysis was a far more powerful tool for assessing a player's ability than a scout's gut feeling. The criticism is misplaced. Bissinger mentions Moneyball in the preface, calling it "provocative", then goes on to say:
"This book was not conceived as a response to Moneyball. Work began months before La Russa or I had ever heard of Lewis's work."
Throughout the book's entire 280 pages, there are a couple -- two, maybe three -- oblique references to guys who mistakenly think that stats can tell the complete story of a player.
But of course Three Nights is not a refutation of Moneyball, if Moneyball is broadly about winning games by crunching numbers. That is readily apparent from the simple fact that La Russa and his staff rely heavily on statistics to do their jobs. They analyze the past performances of each hitter in the lineup against all the possible pitchers he will face. They agonize over tactical decisions, running through ridiculous-sounding scenarios such as: "So-and-so is only 1 for 9 facing right-handed pitchers with men on base and two outs in late innings". I exaggerate, but you get the idea.
Of course, Moneyball can be read more narrowly, with the key takeaways being that on-base percentage is the only stat that matters, and that bunting, sacrifice flies and stealing do more harm than good in the long run. But even in that case, Three Nights is less a refutation than an alternative view, one that perhaps merits as much attention. After all, La Russa has coached four teams to the World Series, winning one of them. That's something that Beane, for all his talent and managing savvy, is still dreaming of.
3NIA is a peak inside the mind of a major league manager, showing the pressures and challenges he has to deal with, and the decisions he has to make over the course of a season, a three game series with an arch-rival in a pennant race, and individual games and at bats. Baseball is a game with many layers and complexities, and 3NIA reveals many of the games within the game, the sub plots, and the background. First and foremost is the human element, in determining the composition of the team (the roster), the roles for the different players, and motivating them to perform their best (something that not even a master like La Russa is capable of doing all the time with all his players). Dealing with injuries, adversities and bruised egos is another major element of a manager's job, and 3NIA reveals many challenges in these areas that don't usually make the papers. This reminds us armchair managers that, when we criticize the decisions of the manager of our favorite team, we simply do not have access to all the information that he does.
3NIA also delves into the strategic game decisions that a manager makes. These are important, and La Russa is definitely one of the more creative, innovative MLB managers in this respect, but 3NIA shows that managing the human element is even more important. As all managers do, La Russa has to decide when to punish, encourage and reward, and how best to use these tools to extract maximum performance from his players, some of whom care deeply about being the best they can be, and some who do not.
3NIA also reveals the personal and lifestyle challenges that La Russa has faced over the course of his career as a manager. He himself is very dedicated to his job and being the best he can be, and his family has paid a significant price because of this.
While Cardinal fans will appreciate 3NIA the most, the book definitely makes worthwhile reading for baseball fans in general.
Tony La Russa is one of the most successful managers in baseball history. Every game is a lengthy epic with countless stories and numerous subplots. La Russa is meticulous, always scheming for an edge. He and his army of coaches keep detailed notes on every player and every pitcher in the league including their own.
Though the season may seem long and tedious, each game counts. A whole season can change in one game. La Russa knows this and he works tirelessly to win each day.
Bissinger's 3 Nights in August is exhaustive look into the mind of Tony La Russa. Though the game has changed significantly over the years with home runs, deep bullpens, sabermetrics, and so on; nothing can replace experience.
La Russa managed with an unmatched intensity though he remained stoic and poker-faced. With his retirement at the end of the 2011 season after the Cardinals magical comeback against the Texas Rangers, baseball lost one of its most respected managers.
Anyone who loves baseball, who loves the nuances of the game, the joys and the heartbreaks, will love this book.
Top reviews from other countries
Above all, it lays bare the mind of the major league manager. It examines his thought processes and shows how the game is all-consuming. La Russa loves it despite that fact that it more often than not completely stresses him out. It is this surprising dichotomy that is at the heart of the book.
A superb incite into the game. Highly recommended for any fan.