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Three Nights in August

By Dr. John D. Eigenauer
June 16, 2006

Some years ago, a friend of mine who was the general manager of a minor league baseball team led me into the bullpen to watch that night’s starter warm up. He was perhaps 6’ 4” and 220 pounds, left handed, shaggy, and mean. As I walked carefully along the edge of the pen, I didn’t see the first pitch, but I heard it whistle by and explode into the catcher’s mitt. I was startled, my curiosity was up, and I could hardly wait to see the second pitch. The next fastball made the same sublime noise, located perfectly on the black. I thought to myself, “Geez, if this is warm-ups…” The pitcher got more into his routine and started breaking off sliders in the same fashion, each one biting hard at the last moment and grabbing the edge of the plate. There was no doubt in my mind that this guy was headed to The Show.

As we walked back to my friend’s office, I told him that I had never seen anything like what I had just seen and that this kid was going to be a star. “He’ll never make it,” he replied.
“You’re nuts,” I said.
“Nope,” he replied calmly, “he’s a head case. He falls apart at the first error and he has no guts.” My friend was right—he never made it out of A ball.

I tell this story because it is part of the long debate about what matters most in baseball, which is what Three Nights in August is about. Does heart matter when you are trying to win games? Or is every game statistically reducible? Is there some rule—such as the sabermetrician’s that nothing is worth more than an out—that needs to be lashed to the mast of strategy? Or do intangibles matter? Should strategies be employed at times that defy the predictions of numerical analysis? Will the desire to win carry teams and players beyond their standard capabilities? Does chemistry matter? Does the squeeze bunt ever make sense in the third inning?

LaRussa Tony LaRussa, seen here in his days as the White Sox skipper, is the star of this book. Photo by Michael Ponzini, ©2006 Super70s.com

Buzz Bissinger narrates a three game series in August of 2003 between the Cubs and the Cardinals after extensive access to the Cardinals’ players, coaches, clubhouse, and manager Tony LaRussa. The result is a detailed account without equal in baseball writing. Every pitch comes alive with a tension born of the incessant rhythm of what to do next. Possibilities arise as LaRussa weighs each one, accepts, rejects, and anticipates. We see inside a manager’s mind in the way that Bouton took us inside the major league clubhouse. It is revealing, interesting, and it makes you a little uneasy to know that so much is going on.

Bissinger hopes that it makes Moneyball devotees uneasy as well. He openly derides the sterility with which sabermetricians seek to remove all emphasis on intangibles by rejecting all things non-quantifiable. If there is no reason to squeeze early in a game or hit and run ever, why does one of the game’s greatest managers constantly weigh those options? Why doesn’t he stock his lineup with OPS machines and sit back and watch the wins roll in? Is LaRussa really just old school? Bissinger thinks not. After watching him manage a team through a season and a series, after understanding the unfathomable contingency that weighs on every play, Bissinger decides that LaRussa has a leg up on the deconstructionist statheads like DePodesta and Beane. He argues this by placing enormously complex situations in front of the reader and showing how LaRussa has sweated every statistical and emotional detail; he claims that LaRussa’s mind houses far greater capacity for understanding the complexity of the moment than any database ever could. In the end, we understand that if LaRussa loses, it is because even his prodigal understanding cannot overcome the frailty of divination in an art so subtle as a simple game of baseball.

Lest these comments scare the reader into thinking that the book is a prolonged debate, I should add that it is full of great stories. While I hate to spoil even one for a potential reader, one is too good to resist and I tell it in the hopes that it will whet your appetite for more. Bissinger recounts LaRussa’s visit to the mound to talk to Tom Seaver when Seaver was pitching for the White Sox. Seaver was out of gas, admitted it, yet needed to get Lloyd Moseby out. He calmly told LaRussa not to worry because he would run the count to 3-and-1 and throw a deceitfully enticing changeup to get him. Seaver did exactly that, Moseby popped out, and the inning was over. That never makes it to the sports page.

[Note: Retrosheet game logs do not corroborate LaRussa’s memory about this story. I checked all of the games from 1984-1986 in which Seaver pitched against the Blue Jays and LaRussa managed and could not find the instance referred to in the book].¹

Three Nights in August is a wonderful tribute to a season, to contingency in baseball, to one of its greatest managers, and to the detail of the game that escapes even the greatest fan. It will go down as one of the game’s unforgettable books, alongside Ball Four, The Long Season, and The Boys of Summer.

Notes: 1. Here are the three appearances Seaver had against the Jays in '84: May 19, August 19, and August 30.

John Eigenauer can be contacted at jeigenauer@yahoo.com. A complete list of his reviews and more about him can be found here.