Three Nights In August: Strategy, Heartbreak, and Joy Inside the Mind of a Manager

3 Nights in August is an awesome look at baseball and why it is such a great game. Buzz Bissinger follows Tony LaRussa around and chronicles a 3 game series with the Cubs. There are plenty of asides - histories of players, coaches, strategy think sessions, etc. It really brought baseball to life for me. For too many years I have lived through "fantasy" baseball, numbers flying at me through the internet. That is no way to enjoy baseball. To enjoy it through the eyes of a manager and a team that love the game - that was something very fun. However, if you don't like baseball, you probably will be bored silly throughout this book. But you never know - give it a chance and you may appreciate the game a little bit more.

It's hard to believe the Tony LaRussa in 3 Nights in August is the same expressionless man I see in the dugout every Cardinals game. I'm a huge baseball fan and a coach, and I recommend this book to every ball player before he begins playing in high school. The book was educational for me as a coach, and I wish I'd have read it when I was playing. As a fan, it's easy for me disagree with a manager's decisions when he puts in a .230 average utility infielder in a close game, but two of my favorite topics in the book are the importance of bench management and developing younger players. My only complaint about the book is Buzz Bissinger's vocabulary. I read because I enjoy it and it keeps my mind sharp. I have reasonable intelligence and a decent vocabulary. But I think Bissinger, like too many authors, sacrifices the flow of the story to boast his own vocabulary, and, in the process, he makes the reader feel intellectually-inferior. Any word that isn't used at least rarely in a conversation should be equally absent in a book. It's frustrating when I'm reading about baseball and I have to stop to figure out or look up the meaning of words like leitmotif. Aside from the abundance of unnecessary foreign words, I loved the book. Bissinger did a great job of showing the different personalities of the Cardinals players, coaches, and behind-the-scenes workers.

Bissinger's book isn't as inspiring as FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS, but he's a careful stylist, and the depth of his take on manager Tony LaRussa may never be equalled. Tony's fights and reconciliations with his wife, Elaine, over family issues and how to work out a long distance marriage are part of the book, a big part, and any honest reader will see both sides to the story and will come away with admiration for both LaRussa's for trying to handle a difficult issue in public. Darryl Kile's death, which ironically occurred in Chicago, the city with which St Louis has such a great rivalry, is presented here in moving detail. I feel sorry for Flynn, Kile's lovely wife, and their children. Their little boy is maybe three or four now and yet he will never know his father. The story of Rick Ankiel is treated more lightly, and will keep you in stitches. Ankiel, the pride of Fort Pierce, comes off in Bissinger's aphoristic prose as a bit of a flake. The three games Bissinger writes about are thrillingly presented, but when I closed the book it all seemed to have happened so long ago, particularly because only in the past year or so has the issue really been broached about steroid use. LaRussa seems honest about this, but it's hard to tell how much he's covering his own ass about rampant steroid use on his team and what he knew about it. After Jose Canseco's book and congressional hearings into the matter, maybe the real story will have to wait until a few more players die brutal and unexpected deaths. Or perhaps, as Canseco implies, you're not really a man if you can't handle the drugs that go with baseball. I must also add a word in favor of LaRussa's work with the Animal Rescue people. No matter what people say about Tony, you know his heart is in the right place, and this animal work is nothing new for him, he's been into it for eons. Good for him. If St Louis ever tires of T, there's a place for him reserved at Rainbow Bridge.

This is another wonderful book by Buzz Bissinger. It is not only entertaining, but also enlightening. But what else would we expect from a collaboration between a top writer and one of baseball's best managers? "Three Nights in August" rates as one of my three favorite reads this 2005 season -- with "Hank Aaron and the Home Run That Changed America" and "The Luckiest Man Alive." All three are superb.

Buzz Bissinger's Three Nights in August is his best effort yet -which says much, given the Pulitzer Prize winner's achievements with Friday Night Lights and A Prayer for the City. Three Nights in August is a marvelous blend of insights into baseball technique and strategy (information that will intrigue even the most knowledgeable of the sport) and revelations about the human condition, particularly in the context of teamwork, role-palying and leadership. This tightly written book, which uses as its setting a three-game series between the St. Louis Cardinals and the Chicago Cubs in the heat of a division race, is one of substance. Anyone who has not read the book and might believe it to be just another cookie-cutter, pedestrian "as told to" vanity piece is sorely mistaken. Like Bissinger's previous works, this is a must-read.