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A review by bkoser
3 Nights in August: Strategy, Heartbreak, and Joy Inside the Mind of a Manager by Buzz Bissinger
5.0
I love American football: the athletic feats, the players, the storylines, all in a short 16-game season. It might be my favorite sport.
But I would never read a football book. My interest stops at the sidelines. Even fantasy football is an excuse to track the games closer, not wider.
Baseball is different. I don't have time to follow my team's 162 games every year. (Also the Phillies haven't been worth following for the past ten years). I don't know most of the players anymore, and I haven't kept up with the new statistics (are they still called "sabremetrics"?) The Astros cheating scandal has cast a pall over the sport (the commissioner should have erased their World Series win from the record books along with Altuve's MVP). (Never liked Altuve or Springer. I doubt I subconsciously knew they were cheaters, but maybe I picked up that they were slimy.)
So it's refreshing to go back to a time when I knew all the players, the managers watched film on VHS and kept their notes in filing cabinets, OPS was the most advanced metric, and the Black Sox still held the distinction of "most scandalous baseball scandal", 85 years later. Yes, the halcyon days of 2003.
Bissinger captures the appeal of baseball: the liturgical repetition of the three-game series, the strategic back-and-forth, the paradox of working so hard to play a game.
But the real draw is the characters and their stories: La Russa, the coach who sacrificed his family to become baseball's closest equivalent to Bill Belichick. Mark Prior and Rick Ankiel, apparently destined to be all-time greats but betrayed by body and mind, respectively. Cal Eldred, who was out of baseball for years due to arm trouble, but defied the odds to return and pitch in the World Series. The tragedy of Darryl Kile.
Baseball has the best stories. And so I look forward to retirement, and to the summer afternoons where I will settle down into my easy chair, peer through my bifocals at the daily newspaper, and take in a game.
But I would never read a football book. My interest stops at the sidelines. Even fantasy football is an excuse to track the games closer, not wider.
Baseball is different. I don't have time to follow my team's 162 games every year. (Also the Phillies haven't been worth following for the past ten years). I don't know most of the players anymore, and I haven't kept up with the new statistics (are they still called "sabremetrics"?) The Astros cheating scandal has cast a pall over the sport (the commissioner should have erased their World Series win from the record books along with Altuve's MVP). (Never liked Altuve or Springer. I doubt I subconsciously knew they were cheaters, but maybe I picked up that they were slimy.)
So it's refreshing to go back to a time when I knew all the players, the managers watched film on VHS and kept their notes in filing cabinets, OPS was the most advanced metric, and the Black Sox still held the distinction of "most scandalous baseball scandal", 85 years later. Yes, the halcyon days of 2003.
Bissinger captures the appeal of baseball: the liturgical repetition of the three-game series, the strategic back-and-forth, the paradox of working so hard to play a game.
But the real draw is the characters and their stories: La Russa, the coach who sacrificed his family to become baseball's closest equivalent to Bill Belichick. Mark Prior and Rick Ankiel, apparently destined to be all-time greats but betrayed by body and mind, respectively. Cal Eldred, who was out of baseball for years due to arm trouble, but defied the odds to return and pitch in the World Series. The tragedy of Darryl Kile.
Baseball has the best stories. And so I look forward to retirement, and to the summer afternoons where I will settle down into my easy chair, peer through my bifocals at the daily newspaper, and take in a game.