Buzz Bissinger: 3 Nights In August: Strategy, Heartbreak, And Joy Inside The Mind Of A Manager

By Scott Tobias  |  April 19, 2005 | 5:00am
Aux Features Books
Buzz Bissinger: 3 Nights In August: Strategy, Heartbreak, And Joy Inside The Mind Of A Manager

When Michael Lewis' essential baseball book Moneyball was released two years ago, it described a shift in thinking about the game that was as dramatic as the Weight Watchers crowd's recent rediscovery of the Atkins diet. Preaching the gospel of Oakland A's general manager Billy Beane, who consistently produces winning teams for a small-market franchise, Lewis finds a new environment where "Sabermetricians," the stathounds who measure the game by the numbers, were replacing an old guard that relied more on instinct and experience. Suddenly, front offices around the league were filled with twentysomething Ivy League MBAs, a movement that was officially validated last year when Boston Red Sox GM Theo Epstein, a 30-year-old Yale graduate, brought the team its first World Series victory in 87 years. Yet if Buzz Bissinger's feisty 3 Nights In August is any indication, the game's old dinosaurs are not quite ready for extinction.

The book's central dinosaur is St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony La Russa, an obsessive baseball mind who has occupied one dugout "foxhole" or another for almost 30 years and through more than 2,000 victories. Inspired in no small part by Daniel Okrent's Nine Innings, which covers a single game, Bissinger (Friday Night Lights) focuses on a crucial three-game series against the Chicago Cubs in August 2003, when the Cards, Cubs, and Astros were duking it out for Central Division supremacy. The format allows Bissinger to reveal the countless tactical decisions that get made in every inning of every game, while still finding natural segues into expansive portraits of La Russa and his players. The book's message is clear: No matter what the bean-counters upstairs have to say about it, the game is still played on the field, and that requires strategies that the numbers can't fully explain. La Russa and his staff don't throw statistics out the window but a manager's intimate understanding of his personnel plays just as crucial a role.

Like many baseball biographies, 3 Nights originally started as a collaboration between Bissinger and La Russa, until it was reconceived with La Russa's blessing. Perhaps as a consequence, La Russa comes away an enigma, so consumed with the minutiae of running a ballclub that he's inaccessible even to family members. Bissinger also mischaracterizes the Moneyball acolytes by saying they couldn't possibly love baseball as much as old hands like La Russa, which is precisely the sort of sentimental nonsense that Sabermatricians like Bill James (who unquestionably loves the game) have been working to quash. Fortunately, 3 Nights In August excels in the many passages dealing with the ins and outs of managing a ballgame—when to call a hit-and-run, when to tinker with the lineup, and, most agonizingly of all for La Russa, when to order a retaliatory beanball on an opposing hitter. Bissinger doesn't quite get inside La Russa's mind, as the title promises, but does get deep enough into his process to see the game from a rare and often exhilarating vantage.

 
Join the discussion...