Before I get into this review I want to make one thing clear: I enjoyed 3 Days in August. It was a good read and had some great anecdotes. But I could see so much potential in the book that the fact that it lived up to the very smallest bit of that potential was frustrating.

Other people have noted that the ghost of Moneyball hangs over this book and I agree. So before I tell you about this book I guess I need to tell you what I thought about Moneyball.

But before I can tell you what I thought about Moneyball I need to tell you what I thought about another Micheal Lewis book: The new new thing. The new new thing is about Jim Clark the founder of Silicon Graphics and Netscape (and Healtheon!). I will summarize it for you in one sentence "Jim Clark is the greatest mind in history and his ideas will crush his stodgy blundering competition like desiccated bird skeletons." If you've read Moneyball this should sound familiar.

My day job is writing software, and it was my great fortune to come into this field in 1998. So I have personal experience with the great internet bubble (not unfortunately with the part of it that made people filthy rich on well timed stock options, but the part about watching a company die before your very eyes. Got that in spades). Jim Clark made his money by being at the right time at the right place, but the market has clearly proven he was not a visionary. Silicon Graphics workstations had a brief blip of popularity before commodity x86 hardware ate them alive. Netscape was somebody else's idea that was choked down as a content delivery platform until it was opensourced as a application platform (offtopic: If Clark was a visionary he would have pushed XUL from the start and had a chance against microsoft. Instead he went for a content play and got his ass kicked). Healtheon is now WebMD. That's three companies that lived for a brief time because they were in the right place at the right time. But read the new new thing and you'll come away thinking Clark invented the internet and had every good idea in the place.

So when I read Moneyball I was leary. Lewis doesn't write objectivly. He picks a subject and exalts it to the heavens, ignoring the downsides, the ugly warts, and the flat out failures. In the case of Moneyball there was a built in audience of new school baseball fans whose self image (as baseball fans) was built around being more informed and smarter than the average fan and troglodyte baseball executive. Moneyball was a hit with this audience. When somebody writes a book that says people who think like you are brilliant and avante guard and the wave of the future, it's hard not to agree with the guy. But I can't help remember that Lewis writes out of his ass sometimes.

3 Nights in August is a clear answering shot to Moneyball, filled with odes to Baseball Men who are like other men only better. It's ironic that this ode to the old school is centered around Tony Larussa of the four man rotation, total reinvention of the bullpen, pitcher batting 8th, and world renown numbers fetishist. And in the cases where 3 nights answers Moneyball it does it in the same style as Moneyball: Unquestioned loyalty to this the one true path to baseball perfection. Where Moneyball ridicules scouts, 3 Nights ridicules computers. Moneyball exalts OBP, 3 Nights exalts character and grit. And on and on and on.

3 nights suffers from the same fault as moneyball: Bissinger is clearly partisan and clearly not well versed in his subject matter. And that is a disapointment of the book. If Bissinger had delved into sabermetrics and offered a Larussa funneled critique and counterpoint that would have been exceptionally interesting. Instead its all boosterism and rhetoric. I think this book was meant as a capstone on Larussas career. A final statement and testament to his greatness. And with one eye on history Larussa wanted to secure the good graces of baseball men. He does this by constantly extolling the virtues of those great men, ignoring his career based on tweaking the game to work better. Bissinger doesn't help: I can't think of a single critical thing he said about Larussa except for "He loves baseball too much" or "He works too hard".

Another place the book fell short is its treatment of players. Besides superficial bios and stock characterizations (JD Drew is sulky, Albert Pujols is good, etc) theres no attempt to get into the lives of the players. This is where Bissingers other book (Friday Night Lights) was so good: each player was explored as an individual and their personality and motivations were exposed. The three games from the title include the "Kerry Robinson game" in which K-Rob won the game with a home run in the bottom of the ninth (This is one of my favorite baseball moments ever). And throughout the game Robinson is alluded to as a problem, but explored only briefly. If Bissinger had given Robinson some time and really gone into the relationship between Kerry and Tony it could have been a fascinating book. Even worse Bissinger mentions several times that the personel manegement is the hardest part of Tonys job. And then he mostly ignores the managment issues Tony has with Kerry. It would have been perfect. But nothing, instead you read about Tony's cheat cards.

The cheat cards.... Jeez. It's 2005 and Larussa writes numbers out on index cards. Somebody buy the guy an Ipaq. That aside it's comical and sad the weight Larussa puts on those cards. At one point he's relieved because he checks his sheets and the batters comming up against Izzy havn't had success against him in the past. And it's 0-3 1-4 and 0-3 (Or something like that). 10 at bats and he's taking it to have great meaning. It's brutal to read. But because Larussa does it it's obviously brilliant. An attention to detail that confirms his status as a master tactician.

I could go on and on but I'll wrap it up: This is the People Magazine version of Tony Larussa, superficial and congratulatory but still interesting if you're interested in the topic, or waiting for the dentist. Because I'm a Cardinals fan I enjoyed it, if it had been about the Twins I probably wouldn't have finished it. There was a lot of potential there, but the book didn't live up to it.