This Ain't Brain Surgery: How to Win the Pennant Without Losing Your Mind

Nearly everyone in major-league baseball was surprised when longtime Houston Astros player and then broadcaster Larry Dierker was hired to manage the Astros following the 1996 season without previous managerial experience at any level of the game. In the five years that followed, however, Dierker confounded the experts and led the team to four National League Central division titles and four playoff appearances, and was named the National League Manager of the Year in 1998. Adroitly handling every sort of distraction and disaster than can befall a team—including suffering a nearly catastrophic seizure during a game—Dierker excelled like no other manager in Astros history, until resigning at the end of the 2001 season. In This Ain’t Brain Surgery, Larry Dierker draws on his vast experience of nearly four decades in baseball to reflect on his tenure as Astros manager, telling the reader along the way that the game isn’t so simple, that personalities clash, and that intuition isn’t everything. Woven into the narrative of this book are thoughtful and humorous anecdotes from his playing days.

Publishers Weekly

Two things set career baseballer Dierker apart: he went from broadcaster to manager with zero managing experience, and he suffered a brain seizure in the Astrodome dugout during a game. The first item gets ample coverage in the book, but surprisingly, the second does not. An accomplished major league pitcher with a no-hitter and a few all-star appearances to his credit, Dierker foreshadows his impending tragedy from the beginning, as he strikes out Willie Mays in his major league debut (also Dierker's 18th birthday), right up until the fateful day in 1999. Yet the actual event warrants barely six pages. A Hawaiian shirt-wearing party guy, Dierker clearly had no interest in writing a mawkish memoir, but the reader will nonetheless hunger for a bit more on how his horrific flirtation with death shaped his life. Dierker's prose is witty and easy-reading it is like hearing stories over a beer from the guy sitting next to you at the ballpark. But the yarns often come up short: old teammates trumpeted as "characters" come across as flat, and the book could use sharper focus: it's alternately a pitching book, a managing book, and a book about old-time baseball, when players drank beer and raised hell. After 37 years in major league baseball, Dierker undoubtedly has stories to tell, such as his teammates' first glimpse at the surreal new Astrodome in 1965. That his book isn't chock-full of them is somewhat disappointing. (July) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Larry Dierker pitched for the Houston Astros from 1964 to 1976. He made his debut on his eighteenth birthday and in his first inning struck out Willie Mays. In 1969 he became the Astros' first 20-game winner. He was named to the National League All-Star team in 1969 and 1971. As a pitcher he remains the franchise career leader in innings pitched and complete games, and is second in wins. After doing color commentary on Astros' radio and television broadcasts, Dierker managed the team from 1997 to 2001. He led Houston to a first-place finish in four of these five seasons. In 2004 he returned to color commentary. He is the author of This Ain't Brain Surgery: How to Win the Pennant Without Losing Your Mind.