Cardinal sin.

In August 2003, the St. Louis Cardinals hosted the Chicago Cubs for a three-game series at Busch Stadium. The Cardinals and Cubs are historic rivals--over the years, in fact, they've had arguably the best rivalry in baseball--and they were battling each other for first place in the National League's Central Division, so the series was a little more interesting than your average Devil Rays-Rangers clash. But fundamentally those three games were indistinguishable, in the way they were played and in the way they turned out, from the vast majority of the thousand-plus major-league games of 2003. The only reason we'll remember their specifics in the future is that the journalist Buzz Bissinger decided to write a book about them called 3 Nights in August: Strategy, Heartbreak, and Joy: Inside the Mind of a Manager. And that tension--between the essential interchangeability of the games on the one hand and Bissinger's quest to make them resoundingly dramatic on the other--is what makes 3 Nights in August a profoundly flawed book that still also manages, almost in spite of itself, to say something important about the nature of baseball.

From a narrative point of view, there is no way to quarrel with Bissinger's book. Its structure is pleasingly Aristotelian, bounded in space and time and guaranteed a cathartic resolution (one team, after all, will have to take the series). And Bissinger does a nice job of capturing the rhythms of baseball-from the leisurely pregame preparations to the mild pep talks (so different from the rah-rah exhortations of football or basketball) to the way the game itself seems to come in and out of focus as the action unfolds. As Daniel Okrent did years ago in Nine Innings: The Anatomy of a Baseball Game-a wonderful book-length dissection of a single game--Bissinger deftly uses the action on the field to set up a series of riffs on strategy and tactics and individual players, moving smoothly back and forth between them. Most important, Bissinger's narrative has a hero--Tony La Russa, the manager of the Cardinals--which gives the book a coherence it would otherwise have missed. In the end, the games are seen for the most part through La Russa's eyes, and it is his thinking that Bissinger is interested in understanding.

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La Russa is a good choice. He's not quite out of central casting, since he was never much of a ballplayer and has always had a tinge of the intellectual about him (traditionally not a good thing in the dugout), being among other things the only manager in baseball with a law degree. But he's an obsessive. He lives alone during the baseball season-his family is apparently happier not to have to deal with him while he's working. He's a thinker, perpetually analyzing and reanalyzing situations and statistics, convinced that a little more work will give him the angle he needs. And, at least on the surface, he's a control freak, a man convinced that "when we suck it's mostly because I suck." All this makes him an ideal character for Bissinger, who likes to write about "heart, desire, passion" and who is a little too fond of overwrought prose and purple similes. La Russa's ferocious intensity is a perfect match for Bissinger's desire to make those three nights in August seem like a mix of Ali-Foreman and Fischer-Spassky. It allows Bissinger to craft a story about a farseeing manager who's always trying to stay two steps ahead of his opponent, who obsesses over his players and does his best to keep them in line and keep their heads straight; a manager whose tactical genius has a profound effect on the outcome of games he manages, and whose random thoughts on the game are as valuable and accurate as the most rigorous statistical studies. This is unquestionably an entertaining story. The problem is that it's also a deeply confused one. Bissinger seems to have done an excellent job of capturing the way the game feels--at least to those who manage and play it. But in the process, he's offered up a deceptive picture of the way the game actually is.

Take, for instance, La Russa's role as manager. Because the book is structured, in some sense, around his decisions, it inevitably makes those decisions seem crucial--La Russa decides to hit-and-run or pinch-hit or leave a pitcher on the mound, and therefore important things happen. But the reality is that most of the decisions La Russa makes, in terms of their effect on the outcome, are ambiguous in their effect at best, and irrelevant at worst. At one point, for instance, the Cubs put a man on third base with no one out, and La Russa has to decide whether or not to play the infield in (playing the infield in makes it harder for a runner to score from third on a ground ball, but also improves the batter's chances of getting a base hit). Bissinger takes us through the myriad permutations that La Russa considers--infield in, infield back, third baseman and first baseman in at the corners, infield back but charging, etc.--before he finally settles on bringing all the infielders in. The first batter, as planned, grounds out, and the runner on third has to hold. But the next hitter singles to left, and the runner scores--as he would have had La Russa left the infielders back. In other words, lots of mental work for no reward.

More important, the outcomes of most games are shaped by factors over which La Russa has little or no control: namely, how well the Cardinals hitters hit and how well the Cardinals pitchers pitch. In the book's epilogue, for instance, Bissinger talks about the 2004 season, when the St. Louis Cardinals, after winning the division and the pennant, lost four straight games to the Boston Red Sox in the World Series. La Russa, of course, blames himself for doing a bad job of managing. But as Bissinger notes parenthetically, the heart of the Cardinals' batting order had exactly one hit in thirty-nine at bats during the Series. That is the reason St. Louis was swept, not anything La Russa did or didn't do. And while Bissinger tries, over the course of the book, to show how La Russa influences the performance of his players, his case is never convincing. It's undoubtedly true that some players thrive in certain environments and not in others (although most players appear to play as well as they can, regardless of where they are), but there's not much evidence that anyone's figured out how to systematically make players better. Picking the right players for the team, of course, matters a lot, but that decision belongs much less to the manager than to the front office.

The point is not that what La Russa does is irrelevant. In any game, the choices he makes do have an effect. The point is that most of the time those effects are small, and inconsistent. He makes some good decisions, some bad ones, and in any given game it probably doesn't matter that much. La Russa may be at the center of Bissinger's book, but in most games he's peripheral to the outcome (this is in stark contrast, by the way, to football, which Bissinger wrote about so well in his 1990 book Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream). It's not clear if Bissinger understands this. But what's interesting is that La Russa does. Early on in the book, he says that a manager can only change the outcome of four or five games a year. That means change for better or worse, which means there may only be three or four games a year that even the best manager can actually win. In other words, of all the games La Russa manages, he only makes a real difference in one out of every forty or fifty.

The trick, though, is that a manager doesn't know in advance when he'll be able to make a difference, and so he has to prepare equally hard for every game. The key to successful baseball is to keep making the right decisions again and again, even though you know sometimes they'll turn out wrong, because you trust that over time they will pay off. That's why La Russa says the crucial thing is to "focus on the process and not the result": If you get the process right, eventually the results will come. Baseball is, in the end, all about percentages, which means that's it's all about time, because it's only as time passes that luck and randomness drop away and the truth of those percentages emerges. And this is the paradox of 3 Nights in August. It wants to make a three-game series a microcosm of baseball. But what it ultimately shows is that a microscope is the wrong instrument with which to see the game, and drama is the wrong genre to describe it.

James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies. Societies and Nations will be published in paperback by Anchor in August.

A Fan's Notes examines the genre of sportswriting.