Beautiful Baseball: The Author as Pitcher

Stuart Mitchner

In Buzz Bissinger's best-selling book, 3 Nights in August: Strategy, Heartbreak, and Joy, Inside the Mind of a Manager (Houghton Mifflin $25), St. Louis Cardinal skipper Tony La Russa is shown living out his own joyous exclamation, "Beautiful baseball!" When he utters those two words he isn't necessarily saying baseball itself is beautiful; his passion for the game has less to do with beautiful fielding, hitting, or baserunning, or the beauty of a beloved American summer ritual, than it does with beautiful strategy and all the split-second decisions a manager has to make in the course of a game. In particular, he's referring to the back-and-forth that takes place when seasoned baseball pros get together to talk about the dynamics and logistics of managing.

"Beautiful baseball." Do those two words go together any more? How many fans can still speak of the beauty of the game itself, our national pastime, with a straight face, in light of all the ugly press the sport has had in the past decade: greedy, misguided owners; outrageous salaries; continual violations of baseball tradition; rapacious agents; spoiled millionaire players; and now, steroids. In times like these how can we still believe in baseball?

It's easy. When spring rolls around and your team's playing again, you're a believer. Even if you don't follow a team, even if you have only a passing interest in the game, you can appreciate the way it evokes some special quality close to the heart of this country. The beauty is still there, in spite of everything, whether you grew up in New Jersey or California or in the so-called heartland, playing ball in a vacant lot, going out with your bat and mitt when the grass was still dewy, and then playing in the rain; and if the rain came down too hard, going inside to work on your baseball scrapbooks, carefully writing out stats with your leaky ballpoint to paste under the color pictures of players clipped from magazines.

The beauty's still there because baseball introduced you to the magic in the names of American cities on nights when you sat down in front of a radio to tune in KMOX, the Voice of St. Louis, not to mention the big clear-channel stations in Cincinnati, Detroit, Chicago, and Cleveland. It's still there because you've gone through life with the same team, good times, bad times, losses that still hurt, like the sixth game of the 1985 World Series with the Cardinals three outs away from winning it all when an umpire named Don Denkinger made the most infamous bad call in baseball history. Don't ever tell any of the 1985 Cardinals or their fans, "It's only a game," as Mickey Mantle's wife is said to have told him when he was crying on the plane home following the Yankees' heartbreaking loss to the Pittsburgh Pirates in the 1960 World Series. If you learn nothing else from reading 3 Nights in August, you'll know never to tell Tony LaRussa, "It's only a game."

Needless to say, longtime Cardinal fans like this reviewer are likely to have a special interest in a book about the 2003 Cards and their manager by an award-winning writer who was given special access to the clubhouse. The problem is, if you've followed the team and players closely, you're probably already familiar with some of the stories Bissinger tells. There's also a good chance you already sweated out the August 2003 Cardinal-Cub series he describes. While it's true that you may stick with the book longer than readers who have no particular stake in the subject, you may be that much more disappointed if you were looking forward to learning more about the players themselves. What you get instead are insights about Tony LaRussa's skills as a strategist. 3 Nights in August is at its best when Bissinger describes how the manager deals with the delicate issue of stolen signs and how he agonizes over the ethics of retaliation when an opposing pitcher deliberately hits one of his players with a pitch.

Anyway, if you're a Cardinal fan you would probably just as soon the book avoided personal revelations about the players. In a year when St. Louis appears to be on its way to another division championship, the last thing you want is for the manager to upset the team's chemistry by sounding off in print about this or that player's quirks or faults. That's why LaRussa was allowed to vet and, in effect, manage Bissinger's account of Cardinal life. And that's why the only critical remarks attributed to him are about players who have since joined other teams.

Readers who don't follow baseball may find 3 Nights in August heavy going at times even though it contains more than its share of human interest stories. You have the shock and heartbreak of the sudden death in 2002 of the team's beloved number one starting pitcher, Daryl Kile. The story of a wildly promising young pitcher, Rick Ankiel, is no less shocking because the death of his talent was as sudden and even more unfathomable. Bissinger tells these stories well. And in Tony LaRussa, he does justice to an intense, quirky, not particularly engaging character who has all the qualities of a good baseball man without fitting the manager stereotype. Not only is LaRussa a law school graduate, he's a vegetarian and animal rights activist (his share of the book's proceeds goes to an animal rights foundation) with the demeanor of a civics teacher who grades as hard as he looks and would not hesitate to kick an unruly student out of class.

Quoted on the back of the dust jacket, George F. Will, the author of Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball, says that while readers may be "exhilarated" by the book, they may also be "exhausted by the grinding attention to detail required for the incessant decisions that managers must make."

Whatever you think of it, 3 Nights in August seems an unlikely best-seller. Its place on the list probably has as much to do with the success of Bissinger's previous work, Friday Night Lights (now a movie), as it does with the new one's readability.

Wild Pitches

If Tony LaRussa is the manager of this book, what position does the author play? More often than not, he resembles a pitcher breezing along, pitching a solid game, with reasonably good command of his stuff, as they say in baseball – except that every now and then the pitcher-author loses his control and walks the bases full, only to pitch his way out of the jam. In fact, something like this really does happen more than once in the course of the narrative. The cliché of choice for the sort of labored, inappropriate similes and metaphors Bissinger occasionally throws at the reader would be that they "stick out like sore thumbs." In baseball terminology, these are the pitches that "got away from him," some of them so wild, an imaginary catcher would need an imaginary ladder to catch them.

Baseball has always attracted its share of out-there responses in prose. In a Saturday Night Live sketch that makes fun of George Will's intellectualization of the game, Dana Carvey, playing Will, poses pompous questions to baffled baseball men ("In 1954, Willie Mays, in an emphatic stroke of Byzantine whimsy, made his over-the-shoulder catch off of Vic Wertz. What was it not unlike?"). Roger Angell's New Yorker pieces on baseball employ a sophisticated, literary point of view to express the character of the game and the players, and the convergence of Angell's style with the rough and tumble feats of athletic prowess works because Angell never loses his composure, never violates the baseball context to the point where you could accuse him of figuratively blowing a lead or walking the bases full.

The first "wild pitch" in 3 Nights in August comes when Bissinger describes the Cardinals taking the field for batting practice "wearing bright red warm-up jerseys: cherries baking in the sun." You're reading along and all of a sudden, it's as if the wicked witch of the west waved her evil wand and turned baseball players into cherries. This is bad pitching on more than one level. First off, cherries are not bright red, certainly not Cardinal red. Second, these guys are active, alive, taking batting practice, swinging bats, hitting, making contact, not passively baking in the sun like cherries in a bowl.

There are other food metaphors. For a bench player who finds it hard to get into the rhythm of the game when he doesn't play every day, you get "a cold can of soup barely heated up." The Cardinal's general manager Walt Jocketty has "white hair as finely woven as pasta." A hitter settles into the batter's box "with just the slightest oregano of arrogance." Oregano and arrogance – please! Maybe cayenne? A touch of turmeric? The consummate food metaphor comes when Sammy Sosa hits a home run off Matt Morris. As he rounds the bases, Sammy's "adding his own tenderizer to the slab of beef that Morris just served up."

Okay, now we've got enough for a meal; cherries to start with, cold soup, braided pasta, a touch of oregano, and here comes the main course. In case you're wondering how a pitch can be a slab of beef, its metaphorical base is a much more effective baseball term, i.e. Sosa hit a fat pitch. He hit it with the fat part of the bat. A meaty pitch. He ate it up. But why the tenderizer? Maybe the meat was tough? Maybe if he ran the bases in a neutral manner you could assume he wasn't improving the taste of that home run? What did LaRussa think when Bissinger threw these pitches his way? Let the guy have fun, it's only a game? For that matter, what did he think when Bissinger described him "smiling as broadly as the kid who got the train set for Christmas and the lifetime subscription to Penthouse"?

Another instance where an existing baseball expression is more effective involves a pitcher who has to face a batter who hits him very well. The baseball term is that the hitter owns that pitcher. In Bissinger's version the hitter becomes "the psychotic ex-girlfriend who sends you creepy notes through the mail to remind you she's still around." That touch definitely sexes up the prose, but it also takes the situation literally too far afield. The same thing happens when the Cardinals celebrate a win: "High fives are tossed about like prom-night bouquets." Even if you don't know what the scene resembles (and if you watch baseball at all, you've seen it), this pitch is way wild. These are grown men, swarthy ballplayers slamming into one another, exulting in a victory. Who tosses prom night bouquets anyway? What does prom night have to do with winning a ball game in the heat of a pennant race? Such careless writing implies that, after all, maybe it is only a game.

Here's Bissinger's version of a failed fast ball: "Lacking movement or location, the fastest fastball has all the subtlety of a streaker." Okay, not too bad, stop there. But he goes on: "–little to it beyond the gainly flab of the buttocks." A fastball with flabby buttocks? We're getting close to a cartoon here. Freddy the flabby fastball. A fastball with no movement or location is like a streaker, sure – it's naked, exposed. But it doesn't want to be. The reason streakers streak is because they want to be exposed,

Finally, here's a pitcher making a lazy pitch to the opposing pitcher (something that can't happen in the American league): rushing a curve ball "as if it's a chore, the pitching equivalent of your mother's telling you to take out the garbage and you leave half of it in a paper-towel trail through the house." This one seems to have come out of the world of Friday Night Lights, which was about high school football. In that context, dragging in "your mother" might make a little more sense, but I doubt it.

To be fair, these "wild pitches" make up at most only ten percent of a generally admirable book. Bissinger finesses his way out of trouble every time. But if you're writing for readers who care about the integrity of writing as well as the integrity of the game, you can't let such sloppy, bogus work go unmentioned.