From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Bissinger eschews the usual method of writing about baseball in the context of a season or a career, choosing instead to dissect the game by carefully watching one three-game series between the Cardinals and Cubs in late 2003. The Pulitzer-winning journalist and author of Friday Night Lights had unprecedented access to Cardinals manager Tony La Russa, as well as his staff and team, and he used that entrée to pick La Russa's formidable baseball brain about everything from how he assembles a lineup to why he uses certain relievers. As the series unfolds, Bissinger reveals La Russa's history and personality, conveying the manager's intensity and his compulsive need to be prepared for any situation that might arise during " 'the war' of each at-bat." Typical characters—the gamer, the natural, the headcase, the crafty old timer—are present, but Bissinger gives new life to their familiar stories with his insider's view and cheeky descriptions (e.g., "Martinez's response to pressure has been like a 45-rpm record, a timeless hit on one side, and the flip side maybe best forgotten"). Bissinger analyzes each team's pitch-by-pitch strategy and gets the dirt on numerous enduring baseball questions: What does it feel like to have to close your first game in Yankee Stadium? Who knew about players using steroids before the current scandal hit? Do managers tell their pitchers to throw at hitters? Mixing classic baseball stories with little-known details and an exclusive perspective, this work should appeal to any baseball fan. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From Booklist
What began as a conventional as-told-to bio of St. Louis Cardinal manager Tony La Russa evolved into this enthralling account of the Cardinals' 2003 season, specifically a critical late-summer home series versus their eternal division rival, the Chicago Cubs. Bissinger was granted complete access to the clubhouse during not just the series but also the entire season--and it shows. His narrative has genuine suspense, but there is also a wealth of relevant detail on La Russa's relationships with his players and coaches, on the highly nuanced strategies (many of them interpersonal) that La Russa must employ in the course of a game and a season, and on the steep price La Russa has paid these past 25 years to see his teams play what he simply calls "beautiful baseball." Coming off his popular account of high-school football (Friday Night Lights, 1990), Bissinger seems completely at ease in the baseball world, telling a story that seems to unfold all on its own, if aided by his own charm: "Arm troubles are to pitchers," he writes, "what girl troubles are to country singers." Expect high demand for what could become the baseball book of the spring. Alan Moores
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Book Description
A Pulitzer Prize-winning author captures baseball"s strategic and emotional essences through a point-blank account of one three-game series viewed through the keen eyes of legendary manager Tony La Russa. Drawing on unprecedented access to a manager and his team, Bissinger brings the same revelatory intimacy to major-league baseball that he did to high school football in his classic besteller, Friday Night Lights. Three Nights in August shows thrillingly that human nature -- not statistics -- can often dictate the outcome of a ballgame. We watch from the dugout as the St. Louis Cardinals battle their archrival Chicago Cubs for first place, and we uncover delicious surprises about the psychology of the clutch, the eccentricities of pitchers, the rise of video, and the complex art of retaliation when a batter is hit by a pitch. Through the lens of these games, Bissinger examines the dramatic changes that have overtaken baseball: from the decline of base stealing to the difficulty of motivating players to the rise of steroid use. More tellingly, he distills from these twenty-seven innings baseball's constants -- its tactical nuances, its emotional pull. During his twenty-six years of managing, La Russa won more games than any other current manager and ranks sixth all-time. He has been named Manager of the Year a record five times and is considered by many to be the shrewdest mind in the game today. For all his intellectual attainments, he"s also an antidote to the number-crunching mentality that has become so modish in baseball. As this book proves, he's built his success on the conviction that ballgames are won not only by the numbers but also by the hearts and minds of those who play.


Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
PREFACEThe face made me do it. It left anindelible image with its eternal glowerfrom the dark corner that it occupied. I hadalways admired intensity in others, but the face of Tony La Russa entered a newdimension, nothing quite like it in all of sports. I first saw the face in the early1980s, when La Russa came out of nowhere at the age of thirty-four tomanage the Chicago White Sox and took them to a division championship in histhird full year of managing. The face simply smoldered; it could have beenused as a welding tool or rented out to a tanning salon. A few years later, whenhe managed the Oakland A"s to the World Series three times in a row, theface was a regular fixture on network television and raised even morequestions in my mind. Did it ever crack a smile? Did it ever relax? Did it everloosen up and let down the guard a little bit, even in the orgy of victory? As farI could tell, the answer was no. I was hooked on the face. I continuedto observe it as he stayed with the Oakland A"s through 1995. Ifollowed it when he became the manager of the St. Louis Cardinals thefollowing season. Along the way, I became aware of his reputation as amanager, with a polarity of opinion over him such that when Sports Illustratedpolled players on the game"s best five managers and its worst five managers, LaRussa appeared on both lists. But I liked seeing that because it meant tome that this was a manager who didn"t hold back, who ran his club witha distinct style regardless of the critics" chorus. Had he been anydifferent, surely the face would havebroken into a smile at least once. After La Russa came to the Cardinals, Idid see moments when the face changed. I saw fatherly prideand self-effacement spread over it when Mark McGwire hit his record-breakingsixty-second home run in 1998. I also saw the face overcome with grief when heand his coaches and his players mourned the passing of the soul of theSt. Louis Cardinals, broadcast announcer Jack Buck, followed four dayslater by the death of beloved pitcher Darryl Kile in his hotel room during aroad trip in Chicago. Later that season of 2002, I saw the intensity return, allthe features on a collision course to the same hard line across the lips duringthe National League Championship series that the Cardinals painfully lostto the Giants four games to one. As a lifelong baseball fan, I foundmyself more curious about La Russa than about anybody else in thegame. Which is why, when out of nowhere, I received a call from LaRussa"s agent at the end of November 2002 asking whether I might beinterested in collaborating on a bookwith La Russa, my answer was an immediate yes. Ijumped at the opportunity, although I also knew that collaborationscan be a tricky business. I had been offered them before by the likes of RudyGiuliani and legendary television producer Roone Arledge, and I had turnedthem down. But this was different, or at least I told myself it wasdifferent, because—at the risk ofsounding like some field-of-dreams idiot—my love ofbaseball has been perhaps the greatest single constant of my life. Iknew the game as a fan, which is a wonderful way to know it. But theopportunity to know it through the mind of La Russa—to excavate deep into the gameand try to capture the odd and lonely corner of the dugout that he andall managers occupy by virtue of the natural isolation of their craft—wassimply too good to pass up. In the beginning, this was a typicalcollaboration. I brought along my little mini–cassette recorder towhere La Russa lived in northern California. I turned it on andinterviewed him at length, thinking thatI would listen to the tapes and transcribe themand try to fashion what he said into his own voice. As is common incollaborations, we also have a business arrangement, a split of the proceeds,although the entirety of La Russa"s share is going to the Animal RescueFoundation, known as Tony La Russa"s ARF, that he cofounded with his wife,Elaine, in northern California. The more we talked about the book, themore agreement there was about trying to do somethingdifferent from the typical as-told-to. La Russa"s interest in me as a writer hadbeen on the basis of Friday Night Lights, a book I had written about highschool football in Texas. He was struck by the voice and observationalqualities of the book, and we wondered whether there was a way to fashion thathere. We also wondered whether there was a way to write the book with anarrative structure different from the usual season-in-the-life trajectory, abook that would have lasting and universal application no matter whatseason it took place in. It was during those conversations thatwe came up with the idea of crafting the book around the timelessunit of baseball, the three-game series. The one we settled on, againstthe eternal rival Chicago Cubs, took place in the 2003 season. Had the goalof the book been different—to write about a particular season—it would havemade sense to switch gears and write about the Cardinals" magnificentride of 2004. But that wasn"t the goal. It was also during those conversationsthat La Russa agreed to give me virtually unlimited access tothe Cardinals" clubhouse and the coaches and players and personnel whopopulate it—not simply for the three-game series that forms the spine of thebook but also for the virtual entirety of the 2003 season—to soak up thesubculture 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. Indoing so, he was untying the usual constraints of a collaboration, allowingme wide latitude to report and observe and draw my own conclusions. He alsoknew that approaching the book in this manner required him to be revealingof not only the strategies he has come to use but also the wrenchingpersonal compromises he has made in order to be the kind of manager he haschosen to be. La Russa did not waver from thelatitude that he promised. I was made privy to dozens of private meetingsbetween the Cardinals coaches and their players. I was able to roam theclubhouse freely. Because of my access, I was also able to probe notonly La Russa"s mind but also the minds of so many others who populate aclubhouse. La Russa has read what I have written—the place wherecollaborations can get odious. He has clarified, but in no place has he askedthat anything be removed, no matter how candid. I came into this book as an admirer ofLa Russa. I leave with even more admiration not simply because ofthe intellectual complexity with which he reaches his decisions but alsobecause 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 BobbyCox of Atlanta and Lou Piniella of Tampa Bay also seem like the last oftheir 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 themwith the belief that a manager"s role is to be shrewd and aggressive andintuitive, that the job is more about unlocking the hearts of players than themere deciphering of their statistics. In the fallout of Michael Lewis"sprovocative book Moneyball, baseball front offices are increasinglybeing populated by thirtysomethings whose most salient qualifications areMBA degrees and who come equipped with a clinical ruthlessness: The skillsof players don"t even have to be observed but instead can be diagnosed byadept statistical analysis through a computer. These thirtysomethings viewplayers as pieces of an assembly line; the goal is to quantify theinefficiencies that are slowing downproduction and then to improve on it withcost-effective player parts. In this new wave of baseball, managersare less managers than middle managers, functionaries whosestrategic options during a game require muzzlement, there only to effectthe marching orders coldly calculated and passed down by uppermanagement. It is wrong to say that the new breed doesn"t care aboutbaseball. But it"s not wrong to say that there is no way they could possibly loveit, and so much of baseball is about love. They don"t have the sense ofhistory, which to the thirtysomethings is largely bunk. They don"t have the bustrips or the plane trips. They don"t carry along the tradition, because theycouldn"t care less about the tradition.They have no use for the lore of the game—thepoetry of its stories— because it can"t be broken down and crunched into acomputer. Just as they have no interest in the human ingredients thatmake a player a player and make a game a game: heart, desire, passion,reactions to pressure. After all, these are emotions, and what point areemotions if they can"t be quantified? La Russa is a baseball man, and heloves the appellation "baseball man." He loves thesound of it, although the term has become increasingly pejorative todaybecause of the very stodginess that it suggests. But La Russa is not somehidebound manager stuck in the Dark Ages. He honors statistics and respectsthe studies that have been written about them. He pays meticulous attentionto matchups. He thinks about slugging percentage and on-basepercentage, as they have become the trendy statistics in today"s game. Theyhave 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 andPiniella, his history in the game makes him powerfully influenced by the verypersuasions the thirtysomethings find so pointless: heart, desire, passion,reactions to pressure. After all, these are emotions, and what point is thereplaying baseball, or any game, if you don"t celebrate them? This book was not conceived as aresponse to Moneyball. Work began months before either La Russa or Ihad 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 Nightsin August. But the more time I spent in the clubhouse, the more aware Ibecame of all the various spokes that emanate from that hub and make a teamthat thing called a team. La Russa represents, to my mind, thebest that baseball offers, but this book doesn"t sidestep the lessnoble elements that have associated themselves with the game in the past fewdecades: the palpable decline in team spirit, the ever-escalatingsalaries, the burgeoning use ofsteroids—all are a part of what baseball has become.The sport has a tendency to cannibalize itself, to raise the bar ofself-interest just when you thought it couldn"t go any higher. The recentscandal of steroid abuse is shocking enough—with its lurid images of playerslathering weird creams all over themselves —but what"s truly shocking isthat this problem has festered for at least a decade. As La Russa pointedout in one of our interviews, everybody in baseball knew for yearsthat steroid use was taking place. But the only two powers that could have donesomething about it—the owners and the players" union—did nothing until2002. It"s difficult morally to understand that, but not financially,since steroids helped fuel the home-run craze that many who run baseball wereconvinced was the only way to capture new fans who lacked an interestin the game"s subtleties. It"s a cynical notion and it"s alsowrong. Home runs are electrifying, but so are the dozens ofsmaller subplots that reveal themselves in every game, strategically andpsychologically and emotionally. Three Nights in August tries to convey thatvery resonance, not with nostalgia, but because it is still the essence of thiscomplex and layered game.Copyright © 2005 by Tony La Russa andH.G. Bissinger. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"A Pulitzer Prize-winning author captures baseball's strategic and emotional essences through a point-blank account of one three-game series viewed through the keen eyes of legendary manager Tony La Russa. Drawing on unmatched access to a manager and his team, Buzz Bissinger brings the same revelatory intimacy to major league baseball that he did to high school football in his classic bestseller, Friday Night Lights." Three Nights in August shows thrillingly that human nature - not statistics - can often dictate the outcome of a ball game. We watch from the dugout as the St. Louis Cardinals battle their archrivals, the Chicago Cubs, for first place, and we uncover delicious surprises about the psychology of the clutch, the eccentricities of pitchers, the rise of video, and the complex art of retaliation when a batter is hit by a pitch. Through the lens of these games, Bissinger examines the dramatic changes that have overtaken baseball: from the decline of base stealing to the difficulty of motivating players to the rise of steroid use. More tellingly, he distills from these twenty-seven innings baseball's constants - its tactical nuances, its emotional pull.

FROM THE CRITICS

John Grisham - The New York Times

Three Nights in August will be devoured by hard-core strategists who enjoy nothing more than arguing for hours over why a hit-and-run was not called. Yet it is immediately accessible to any fan curious about the more complicated elements of the game. This is because Bissinger does much more than simply dissect 27 innings of baseball. He has the wonderful ability to stop the action in midpitch to talk about the people involved … Many of the book's compelling off-the-field digressions are about La Russa: his long and colorful career -- his teams have won four pennants and one World Series -- his love of the game and its history and traditions, his brilliance and self-doubt, his daily challenges in handling the fragile egos of his rich young players. At times, the frustrations with the modern game -- free agency, spoiled players, steroids, multiyear contracts, agents -- seem overwhelming.

Publishers Weekly

Bissinger eschews the usual method of writing about baseball in the context of a season or a career, choosing instead to dissect the game by carefully watching one three-game series between the Cardinals and Cubs in late 2003. The Pulitzer-winning journalist and author of Friday Night Lights had unprecedented access to Cardinals manager Tony La Russa, as well as his staff and team, and he used that entr e to pick La Russa's formidable baseball brain about everything from how he assembles a lineup to why he uses certain relievers. As the series unfolds, Bissinger reveals La Russa's history and personality, conveying the manager's intensity and his compulsive need to be prepared for any situation that might arise during " `the war' of each at-bat." Typical characters-the gamer, the natural, the headcase, the crafty old timer-are present, but Bissinger gives new life to their familiar stories with his insider's view and cheeky descriptions (e.g., "Martinez's response to pressure has been like a 45-rpm record, a timeless hit on one side, and the flip side maybe best forgotten"). Bissinger analyzes each team's pitch-by-pitch strategy and gets the dirt on numerous enduring baseball questions: What does it feel like to have to close your first game in Yankee Stadium? Who knew about players using steroids before the current scandal hit? Do managers tell their pitchers to throw at hitters? Mixing classic baseball stories with little-known details and an exclusive perspective, this work should appeal to any baseball fan. Agent, David Gernert. (Apr. 5) Forecast: La Russa will make appearances tied in to the book's promo, and there will be a press conference for the book at spring training. Both should help this book rise to the top of this season's baseball book flood. Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Baseball writing at its best should not be merely about championship games and record-setting feats. Bissinger (Friday Night Lights) takes in a three-game series between the rival Cubs and Cardinals, with enviable access to the baseball mind of St. Louis manager Tony LaRussa, once a wonder boy among the generation of old-style "gut" managers and now an elder statesman to whiz-kid sabermatricians. For all fans of Bissinger's work and of pure baseball. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 12/04.] Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews