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 enlarge | Author: Buzz Bissinger
Publisher: Highbridge Audio
Category: Book
List Price: $34.95
Buy New: $5.19
You Save: $29.76 (85%)
New (18) Used (10) from $4.44
Avg. Customer Rating:  96 reviews
Sales Rank: 340483
Format: Audiobook, Unabridged
Media: Audio CD
Edition: Unabridged
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 5.8 x 4.9 x 1.1
ISBN: 1565119762
Dewey Decimal Number: 796.3570977866
EAN: 9781565119765
ASIN: 1565119762
Publication Date: April 7, 2005
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
Three Nights In August August 23, 2006
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
Great baseball book. Very well written. Speaks to the hardship of coaching and the sacrifices that Tony LaRussa has made. Contains some interesting stories.
Quick read but has staying power August 14, 2006
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
I bought this book in an airport and read it over several days on airplanes. It held my interest pretty well. It compares well to some of the best baseball writers and is a mix of story-line and analysis. Basically it covers a 3 game series between the Cubs and Cards in August 2003. There are several excursions into timelines of various players and events, but mostly the book is an analysis of the players and the games in this series.
One strength of this book is how it portrays the character of the teams involved. Teams and stadiums have very distinct characters. For example, when I lived in Chicago the Cubs games at Wrigley field were fairly laid back. They were almost always day games because the community restricts how often the lights can be on. This meant you had to take a day off work to see them. Tickets were easy to come by, and you parked on some guys lawn for 5 bucks. On the other hand, I never came home from a game at Old Comiskey Park without being drenched with beer. The gestalt of a game at Wrigley vs. a game at Comiskey was completely different.
But the funny thing about this book is that I keep remembering parts of it as I watch games and the insights in it are incredibly useful. I live between a rookie league team (Ogden Raptors - Dodgers) and an AAA team (Salt Lake - Angels). Over and over some insight in this book will come to mind as I watch some future major-leaguer. Ex-manager Tommy Lasorda is at the Ogden games fairly frequently and after reading this book I can more often figure out just what it is in some minor-leaguers play that gets Lasorda swearing. And as I see the bonus babies from Ben Sheets to Prince Fielder come through the rookie league I can better evaluate the players and see what their managers are looking for. The net result: the game is more enjoyable.
I'm not into fantasy leagues. I don't pay attention to the new esoteric stats. I just love to spend summer evenings watching baseball with my sons with the Rocky Mountains as a backdrop to some awesome minor league stadiums. In the book, the author uses a phrase - "Beautiful. Just beautful baseball." And after reading this book, I find myself muttering this to myself as I watch a well-executed bunt or a heads-up base-running play that brings in a run.
This book is not a statistical primer. It does almost have a little too much hero worship of Cardinals manager Tony LaRussa. But you don't have to be a fanatic to enjoy this book which has the pacing of a good ball game - sometimes up, sometimes down but just right in the end.
 He manages the Cards -- and he should be dealt with August 14, 2006
11 out of 11 found this review helpful
First question: Did we really need another profile of Tony LaRussa, already the most over-exposed manager in major league baseball? Ever since he popped up in the early 80s, the media has fawned over his every move, evidently impressed by his ability to pull a double-switch and glower at the same time. Dude gets more ink than Brad and Angelina -- maybe they share the same publicist.
But if you're as big a baseball fan as I, it's only a matter of time before you succumb to the hype and purchase this universally praised account of (as the title suggests) three nights in August ... i.e., a feeble re-make of 'Nine Innings' spread out over three games so the writer won't have to concentrate as hard. I finished the book in two sittings, so I can't honestly sit here and say that it stank.
Or can I?
The central premise of the book is as obnoxious as its subject, namely the aforementioned manager of the St. Louis Cardinals, one Tony LaRussa -- attorney at law, in case you needed reminding. According to one Buzz Bissinger, LaRussa's an old-school throwback, a balls-out 'real man' in a baseball universe increasingly lorded over by timid 'thirtysomething' geeks who wouldn't know a jock strap from an iPod nano. Yeah man, those guys just sit in front of their computers all day, crunching numbers, but me, Tony L, I go by my gut! I've got 25 years of experience ovah heah, and I make my decisions the old-fashioned way! If the stats tell me to pull my starting pitcher, maybe I will, maybe I won't -- I'm going to walk to the mound and SMELL him first. Think those MBA Moneyball twerps know what a pitcher smells like? They don't even chew tobacco, mang.
Yeah, well, interesting theory. Trouble is, after taking cheap shots at such stat-head losers as Bill James and Theo Epstein, our man LaRussa gets praised for obsessively analyzing pitcher-hitter matchups. That's right -- the guy that every baseball writer hypes as a genius is making out his lineup cards based on some guy going 3-for-7 against Kerry Wood. What the *&^%? Per Bissinger, we shouldn't rely on statistics -- unless they're based on impossibly small sample sizes.
Another flaw in this anti-number, pro-intangibles screed is that we never actually see LaRussa go *against* his statistics. Seriously. I mean, if the whole purpose of the book is to illustrate that you have to look beyond the numbers and size up the player himself, shouldn't there be some instances where Big Tony plays a hunch that goes against all logic and pays off huge? or where T straightens out a player with a bad attitude, or picks up a guy in a slump? You'd think so, wouldn't you? Yet such instances are strangely absent.
Why? Because LaRussa's an arrogant jerk who doesn't relate to his players. Hell, he doesn't relate to his *family* either, as one of the book's better storylines makes plain. The book confirms the prejudices held against LaRussa by his detractors: namely, that he's a paranoid madman who micromanages his teams to defeat. This negative nutcase appears deathly afraid of *not* making a move, of being second-guessed by the press... or by himself, perhaps? Bissinger relates his relentless fretting about the #8 hitter on the opposing team possibly getting a hit, thereby allowing them to have their #1 hitter lead off the following inning. It's a mildly instructive bit of insider baseball, but LaRussa treats the issue as if he's launching the Market Garden offensive. Dude, it's the fifth inning and there's still fifty games to go! Pop a Paxil or bolt down some Jim Beam -- you're begging for this guy to relax!
But Big Tony never relaxes -- and his players never will either. Bissinger notes approvingly that LaRussa routinely expects his guys to play as if it's the seventh game of the World Series throughout the 162-game season. As such, his players are forever under the gun, terrified their manager's going to freak out when they fail to advance the runner to third, even if they're playing the Pirates in June. His players will always press, and ultimately, they'll always lose. That's another major flaw in the book: The author presents LaRussa as the ultimate authority on all things baseball, while side-stepping the little matter of his failing to win the big one. He's managed for 25 years and has won the World Series exactly once; he's also lost it on three occasions, getting swept twice. Fittingly, he lost the 2004 series to a team that famously embraced the very stat-conscious maxims that Bissinger aims to debunk. Chew on that, Buzz. (Blaming the loss on a late flight into Boston? Sell it somewhere else, bub.)
The writing, you ask? Let's just say that Boswell and Angell can rest easy. Bissinger's swinging for the fences (!) on this one, desperately throwing in highbrow references regardless of whether they fit. A spate of ill-placed phrases ranging from the Maginot Line to the Hammurabi Code culminates in the downright bizarre description of a blooper as "the kind of existentialist hit that would keep Camus or Sartre in the money." Overwrought much? I half expected to spot Vladimir Lenin Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers behind home plate. Add in a surprisingly irritating decision to italicize the phrase HIT-AND-RUN each and every time it appears -- imagine a Neil Young biography that wrote about all his FOLK ROCK BALLADS or a book on Bush that discussed the WAR ON TERROR -- and you have a sad case of a writer getting in the way of his own story. Bad Buzz, Bad.
What was that story again? Oh right, here it is: Tony LaRussa's a genius because he doesn't rely on statistics like those other guys, except when he does, and you can tell he's sharp because he wins, except when he doesn't.
Did I mention the author gives LaRussa a pass on the issue of steroids, even though Tony's teams benefited disproportionately from turning a blind eye to the problem? It just goes to show you: Never read a book recommended by Tim Russert, the man who ate Mario Cuomo.
 A Great Baseball Book August 8, 2006
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
You should buy this book for what it is, and not for what many of these reviews say it is. It is not anti-Moneyball, it is an insiders look at a baseball game in the context of the baseball world and the career of one man, Tony LaRussa. Sabermaniacs have brought a deeper understanding of baseball to the layperson, and have challenged conventional thinking about our great game. This book does not set out to refute ther tenets of sabermetrics, in fact, Moneyball is mentioned only three times in 279 (paperback) pages. Any anti-sabermetric review is probably motivated by an almost zealous subscription to the central teachings of Moneyball.
Take the book for what it is: an intelligent, thought-provoking, entertaining, insiders look at the baseball world broken down into three games. There is a great deal of context given here for what is happening on the field and in the mind of the manager. As Mr. LaRussa points out in his Foreward, the book is not about three games, and that most of what you will read "should really be about baseball in general."
As far as recent books, the excellent Moneyball's contribution to the avid baseball fan is thinking differently about the assumptions you make about the game, and that different business models can be adopted that offer advantages that can be observed as teams take the field. The contribution of this book is an insiders look at how the game is tactically executed and how the eyes, ears, and experiences of a quarter century affect the minute decisions that affect the whole.
Entertainingly written, any baseball fan will enjoy this book.
 Remake of "Men at Work" July 10, 2006
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
I was a bit disappointed because I read "Men at Work" 15 years ago and much of this reads the same as the LaRussa chapter did in that book. The chapters herein that divert from the finer details of Larussa's internal thought process with strategy are the most interesting parts of the book. The Kile, Robinson, Ainkiel chapters are where Bissinger does his best. However, Bissinger fails to deliver on communicating the passion of this rivalry the way he so masterfully delivered on attacking that angle of the passionate fans in "Friday Night Lights." Cardinal fans will love it because they love everything Cardinals. Bissinger fans will like it. Regular baseball fans of other teams will see this book as average.
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