Three Nights in August
By Buzz Bissinger
Houghton Mifflin, 280 pages, $25
Tony La Russa has been a major-league baseball manager for 26 uninterrupted seasons. A five-time manager of the year, he has taken his teams to the playoffs 10 times, won four pennants and one World Series and should finish the 2005 season ranked No. 3 on the career victories list among managers, a list that encompasses thousands of names.
Buzz Bissinger enjoys similar stature among writers. He was an award-winning journalist with the Tribune and other newspapers and later wrote “Friday Night Lights,” a thorough, revealing and all-around remarkable examination of the unique cultural phenomenon that is Texas high school football.
Theirs was a can’t-miss collaboration, so it’s no surprise that “Three Nights in August,” a richly detailed examination of the hidden game of baseball and the manager’s role in trying to solve its endless riddles, has spent much of the 2005 season on The New York Times bestseller list.
Over the years La Russa rejected several book proposals from would-be collaborators, but he had read “Friday Night Lights” and was impressed with Bissinger’s insight and the depth of his reporting. Bissinger, a lifelong baseball fan, was in turn intrigued by La Russa’s smoldering intensity and the way his ever-active mind worked. La Russa’s agent brought them together, and La Russa gave Bissinger unprecedented access throughout the 2003 season. They settled on a pivotal, late-August series between the Cardinals and the Cubs (who play this coming Friday through Sunday in St. Louis) to tell a story they believe would be applicable to any series in any season.
Ah, but Cubs-Cardinals always seems to be so much more.
“The rivalry . . . is probably the oldest and perhaps the best in baseball, no matter how the Red Sox and Yankees spit and spite at each other,” Bissinger writes. “That’s a tabloid-fueled soap opera about money and ego and sound bites. That’s a pair of bratty high-priced supermodels trying to trip each other in their stilettos on the runway. But the Cards-Cubs epic is about roots and geography and territorial rights. It’s entwined in Midwestern blood and therefore refreshing and honest and even heroic.”
La Russa became a big-league skipper with the White Sox in 1979, at the precocious age of 34, and managed the Oakland Athletics from 1986-95 before moving to the St. Louis Cardinals in 1996. He has long prided himself on being labeled a baseball man, but there are many layers to his intellect and personality.
He is a licensed attorney, for starters, having passed the Florida bar exam at a time when he wasn’t sure he’d survive the fickle nature of his chosen profession. He’s also a strict vegetarian, and his share of the proceeds from “Three Nights in August” are earmarked for ARF, the Animal Rescue Foundation for otherwise doomed strays that the La Russa family founded and runs in the San Francisco area.
Baseball man? To his toes, and sometimes at the expense of other facets of his life.
La Russa is fully vested in the Cubs-Cardinals rivalry. Because it’s the Cubs, he anticipates and agonizes over brushback pitches. He recognizes them as a pitching necessity and is not averse to employing them, but he’s fearful of the potential for serious injury when a pitcher goes head-hunting.
The Cubs’ Kerry Wood, La Russa believes, is a little too eager to use up-and-in hard stuff to establish an edge against hitters, too dismissive of the possible consequences.
He is similarly resentful of Mark Prior, believing him all too typical of today’s young stars who speak out on anything and everything before they have gained the stature born of accomplishment.
About the only thing missing is an explanation of the complicated relationship between La Russa and Cubs counterpart Dusty Baker. The two men have a history–Baker played for La Russa’s Athletics in the final stages of his career–and while Bissinger acknowledges that Baker “knows better than anyone else in baseball how to manage the space between a player’s ears,” there’s no mention of the white-hot tension between the two relentless competitors that seems to flare into an incident each time their teams meet.
I was around La Russa quite a bit when he was managing the Oakland A’s and I was a West Coast writer. I can’t say I knew him well–he wasn’t much for small talk and bonhomie–but I valued the relationship. Baseball was more than his vocation, it was his life, and if you were serious in your own approach to the game, he had time for you. Smart as he was, you could learn a lot from engaging him, and Bissinger, given virtually unlimited access, has certainly done that.
The trademark intensity that so intrigued Bissinger was more borderline hostility during La Russa’s first weeks in Oakland. He was (and is) a proud man scarred badly when his first managerial job ended with his firing in 1986, less than three years after he’d guided the White Sox to their first post-season appearance since 1959. Though he gradually came to realize that not everyone in the media was as nasty as Chicago broadcast antagonists Harry Caray and Jimmy Piersall had been, it would be a gross overstatement to suggest he ever relaxed.
Quite the contrary: If he hadn’t been before, he became single-mindedly fanatic about preparation.
More Top Picks Best Stereo Receivers
La Russa was blessed with talent in Oakland–Jose Canseco, Mark McGwire and Walt Weiss won three successive Rookie of the Year awards, Dave Stewart was a four-time 20-game winner, and Dennis Eckersley developed into a Hall of Fame reliever for a team that won three straight American League pennants and the 1989 World Series. But La Russa believed in leaving nothing to chance, even though he has always known there are variables that take the game beyond the control of the shrewdest and best-prepared tactician.
In St. Louis he has taken preparation to new levels of obsession. With his family staying behind at their home in Northern California, La Russa is left to fill his waking hours–in season there is no other kind for him–with thoughts of pitcher-batter matchups, the sequence and location of pitches, defensive positioning and the strategic advantages of a bunt versus a hit-and-run play.
Minutiae for some, a life’s work for La Russa, vital to the task of molding 25 diverse puzzle pieces into a functional, smooth-running whole. Bissinger interprets that process as his greatest challenge and the source of his greatest frustration because of the human variables involved. Some are as difficult to plan for and manage as the flukiest plays on the field.
Why is the sublimely talented J.D. Drew content to coast along on maybe 75 percent of his ability? Why can’t enigmatic outfielder Kerry Robinson accept his limitations (Hello, Corey Patterson) and do what his team needs him to do? Why won’t first baseman Tino Martinez acknowledge he’s not the player he was in his proud Yankee days and accept a lesser role?
On the flip side is a group of players who make La Russa relish coming to work each day. There’s Albert Pujols, whose myriad skills as a hitter are exceeded only by his commitment to getting better. There’s the relentless Scott Rolen, a small-town Indiana throwback who plays third base with a linebacker’s tenacity. There’s Jason Isringhausen, the cold-blooded relief pitcher who negotiates the game’s most dangerous territory–the ninth inning–with fearless equanimity.
And there was Darryl Kile, talented pitcher, bulldog competitor and ideal teammate whose fatal heart attack in 2002 cast a pall over the Cardinals organization for more than a year. The death of a world-class husband, father and athlete at age 33 devastated La Russa. The man who prides himself on coming up with answers for everything didn’t have one for that inexplicable twist of fate.
But he found a way to overcome and soldier on, which might be the best summation of Tony La Russa’s long and distinguished career. Read “Three Nights in August” and you’ll come away with a new and different appreciation of him. A complicated guy in a complicated game. Both hugely interesting and, thanks to Buzz Bissinger, equally entertaining.