PREFACE
The face made me do it. It left an
indelible image with its eternal glower
from
the dark corner that it occupied. I had
always admired intensity in others, but
the face of Tony La Russa entered a new
dimension, nothing quite like it in
all of sports.
I first saw the face in the early
1980s, when La Russa came out of
nowhere at the age of thirty-four to
manage the Chicago White Sox and took
them to a division championship in his
third full year of managing. The face
simply smoldered; it could have been
used as a welding tool or rented out to
a tanning salon. A few years later, when
he managed the Oakland As to the
World Series three times in a row, the
face was a regular fixture on network
television and raised even more
questions in my mind. Did it ever crack a
smile? Did it ever relax? Did it ever
loosen up and let down the guard a little
bit, even in the orgy of victory? As far
I could tell, the answer was no.
I was hooked on the face. I continued
to observe it as he stayed
with the Oakland As through 1995. I
followed it when he became the
manager of the St. Louis Cardinals the
following season. Along the way, I
became aware of his reputation as a
manager, with a polarity of opinion over
him such that when Sports Illustrated
polled players on the games best five
managers and its worst five managers, La
Russa appeared on both lists. But
I liked seeing that because it meant to
me that this was a manager who
didnt hold back, who ran his club with
a distinct style regardless of the
critics chorus. Had he been any
different, surely the face would have
broken
into a smile at least once.
After La Russa came to the Cardinals, I
did see moments when
the face changed. I saw fatherly pride
and self-effacement spread over it when
Mark McGwire hit his record-breaking
sixty-second home run in 1998. I also
saw the face overcome with grief when he
and his coaches and his players
mourned the passing of the soul of the
St. Louis Cardinals, broadcast
announcer Jack Buck, followed four days
later by the death of beloved pitcher
Darryl Kile in his hotel room during a
road trip in Chicago. Later that season
of 2002, I saw the intensity return, all
the features on a collision course to the
same hard line across the lips during
the National League Championship
series that the Cardinals painfully lost
to the Giants four games to one.
As a lifelong baseball fan, I found
myself more curious about La
Russa than about anybody else in the
game. Which is why, when out of
nowhere, I received a call from La
Russas agent at the end of November
2002 asking whether I might be
interested in collaborating on a book
with La
Russa, my answer was an immediate yes. I
jumped at the opportunity,
although I also knew that collaborations
can be a tricky business. I had been
offered them before by the likes of Rudy
Giuliani and legendary television
producer Roone Arledge, and I had turned
them down. But this was different,
or at least I told myself it was
different, becauseat the risk of
sounding like
some field-of-dreams idiotmy love of
baseball has been perhaps the
greatest single constant of my life. I
knew the game as a fan, which is a
wonderful way to know it. But the
opportunity to know it through the mind of
La Russato excavate deep into the game
and try to capture the odd and
lonely corner of the dugout that he and
all managers occupy by virtue of the
natural isolation of their craftwas
simply too good to pass up.
In the beginning, this was a typical
collaboration. I brought along
my little minicassette recorder to
where La Russa lived in northern
California. I turned it on and
interviewed him at length, thinking that
I would
listen to the tapes and transcribe them
and try to fashion what he said into
his own voice. As is common in
collaborations, we also have a business
arrangement, a split of the proceeds,
although the entirety of La Russas
share is going to the Animal Rescue
Foundation, known as Tony La Russas
ARF, that he cofounded with his wife,
Elaine, in northern California.
The more we talked about the book, the
more agreement there
was about trying to do something
different from the typical as-told-to. La
Russas interest in me as a writer had
been on the basis of Friday Night
Lights, a book I had written about high
school football in Texas. He was
struck by the voice and observational
qualities of the book, and we wondered
whether there was a way to fashion that
here. We also wondered whether
there was a way to write the book with a
narrative structure different from the
usual season-in-the-life trajectory, a
book that would have lasting and
universal application no matter what
season it took place in.
It was during those conversations that
we came up with the idea
of crafting the book around the timeless
unit of baseball, the three-game
series. The one we settled on, against
the eternal rival Chicago Cubs, took
place in the 2003 season. Had the goal
of the book been differentto write
about a particular seasonit would have
made sense to switch gears and
write about the Cardinals magnificent
ride of 2004. But that wasnt the goal.
It was also during those conversations
that La Russa agreed to
give me virtually unlimited access to
the Cardinals clubhouse and the
coaches and players and personnel who
populate itnot simply for the three-
game series that forms the spine of the
book but also for the virtual entirety of
the 2003 seasonto soak up the
subculture as much as possible. La Russa
understood that in granting such access,
he was ceding much of the control
of the book to me as its writer. In
doing so, he was untying the usual
constraints of a collaboration, allowing
me wide latitude to report and observe
and draw my own conclusions. He also
knew that approaching the book in
this manner required him to be revealing
of not only the strategies he has
come to use but also the wrenching
personal compromises he has made in
order to be the kind of manager he has
chosen to be.
La Russa did not waver from the
latitude that he promised. I was
made privy to dozens of private meetings
between the Cardinals coaches and
their players. I was able to roam the
clubhouse freely. Because of my
access, I was also able to probe not
only La Russas mind but also the
minds of so many others who populate a
clubhouse. La Russa has read what
I have writtenthe place where
collaborations can get odious. He has
clarified, but in no place has he asked
that anything be removed, no matter
how candid.
I came into this book as an admirer of
La Russa. I leave with even
more admiration not simply because of
the intellectual complexity with which
he reaches his decisions but also
because of the place that I believe he
occupies in the changing world of baseball.
He seems like a vanishing breed to me,
in the same way that Joe
Torre of the New York Yankees and Bobby
Cox of Atlanta and Lou Piniella of
Tampa Bay also seem like the last of
their kind. They so clearly love the
game. They revel in the history of it.
They have values as fine as they are old-
fashioned, and they have combined them
with the belief that a managers role
is to be shrewd and aggressive and
intuitive, that the job is more about
unlocking the hearts of players than the
mere deciphering of their statistics.
In the fallout of Michael Lewiss
provocative book Moneyball,
baseball front offices are increasingly
being populated by thirtysomethings
whose most salient qualifications are
MBA degrees and who come equipped
with a clinical ruthlessness: The skills
of players dont even have to be
observed but instead can be diagnosed by
adept statistical analysis through
a computer. These thirtysomethings view
players as pieces of an assembly
line; the goal is to quantify the
inefficiencies that are slowing down
production
and then to improve on it with
cost-effective player parts.
In this new wave of baseball, managers
are less managers than
middle managers, functionaries whose
strategic options during a game
require muzzlement, there only to effect
the marching orders coldly
calculated and passed down by upper
management. It is wrong to say that
the new breed doesnt care about
baseball. But its not wrong to say that
there is no way they could possibly love
it, and so much of baseball is about
love. They dont have the sense of
history, which to the thirtysomethings is
largely bunk. They dont have the bus
trips or the plane trips. They dont carry
along the tradition, because they
couldnt care less about the tradition.
They
have no use for the lore of the gamethe
poetry of its stories because it
cant be broken down and crunched into a
computer. Just as they have no
interest in the human ingredients that
make a player a player and make a
game a game: heart, desire, passion,
reactions to pressure. After all, these
are emotions, and what point are
emotions if they cant be quantified?
La Russa is a baseball man, and he
loves the
appellation baseball man. He loves the
sound of it, although the term has
become increasingly pejorative today
because of the very stodginess that it
suggests. But La Russa is not some
hidebound manager stuck in the Dark
Ages. He honors statistics and respects
the studies that have been written
about them. He pays meticulous attention
to matchups. He thinks about
slugging percentage and on-base
percentage, as they have become the
trendy statistics in todays game. They
have a place in baseball, but he
refuses to be held captive to them,
because so much else has a place in
baseball. Like Torre and Cox and
Piniella, his history in the game makes him
powerfully influenced by the very
persuasions the thirtysomethings find so
pointless: heart, desire, passion,
reactions to pressure. After all, these are
emotions, and what point is there
playing baseball, or any game, if you dont
celebrate them?
This book was not conceived as a
response to Moneyball. Work
began months before either La Russa or I
had ever heard of Lewiss work. Nor
is this book exclusively about La Russa.
Because he is the manager, he is
at the hub of the wheel of Three Nights
in August. But the more time I spent
in the clubhouse, the more aware I
became of all the various spokes that
emanate from that hub and make a team
that thing called a team.
La Russa represents, to my mind, the
best that baseball offers,
but this book doesnt sidestep the less
noble elements that have associated
themselves with the game in the past few
decades: the palpable decline in
team spirit, the ever-escalating
salaries, the burgeoning use of
steroidsall
are a part of what baseball has become.
The sport has a tendency to
cannibalize itself, to raise the bar of
self-interest just when you thought it
couldnt go any higher. The recent
scandal of steroid abuse is shocking
enoughwith its lurid images of players
lathering weird creams all over
themselves but whats truly shocking is
that this problem has festered for
at least a decade. As La Russa pointed
out in one of our interviews,
everybody in baseball knew for years
that steroid use was taking place. But
the only two powers that could have done
something about itthe owners
and the players uniondid nothing until
2002. Its difficult morally to
understand that, but not financially,
since steroids helped fuel the home-run
craze that many who run baseball were
convinced was the only way to
capture new fans who lacked an interest
in the games subtleties.
Its a cynical notion and its also
wrong. Home runs are
electrifying, but so are the dozens of
smaller subplots that reveal themselves
in every game, strategically and
psychologically and emotionally. Three
Nights in August tries to convey that
very resonance, not with nostalgia, but
because it is still the essence of this
complex and layered game.
Copyright © 2005 by Tony La Russa and
H.G. Bissinger. Reprinted by
permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.