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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.
Houghton Mifflin
April 2005
Featuring: Tony La Russa
256 pages
ISBN: 0618405445
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Biography
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.
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