Three Nights in August: Strategy, Heartbreak, and Joy Inside the Mind of a Manager » (Bargain)

In nonfiction bestsellers like Friday Night Lights, A Prayer for the City, and Three Nights in August, author/journalist Buzz Bissinger has demonstrated an undeniable knack for capturing the rhythms of life in big cities and small towns alike.

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.

The New York Times - John Grisham

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.

CONTENTS Preface xi Foreword by Tony La Russa xvii Prologue 1 GAME ONE 1 Fear Factor 17 2 Locked In 26 3 “I’m Gonna Kill You!” 41 4 The Peeker 53 5 The Pitcher’s Tale 67 6 Praying for Change 85 GAME TWO 7 Gonzalez Must Pay 105 8 Light My Fire 121 9 Whodunit 138 10 Being There 156 11 Under Pressure 175 GAME THREE 12 D.K. 199 13 Thing of Beauty 216 14 Kiss My Ass 224 15 Three Nights in August 240 Epilogue 254 Postscript 264 A Note on Sources 269 Acknowledgments 271 Index 273