This Ain't Brain Surgery

Book excerpt: 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.