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Astroball

The New Way to Win It All

Ben Reiter
Crown, 2018
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Editorial Rating

8

Qualities

  • Comprehensive
  • Concrete Examples
  • Insider's Take

Recommendation

Ben Reiter, host of The Edge podcast and former Sports Illustrated senior writer, shows the Houston Astros’ arduous evolution from perennial losers to World Series champs. He tracks how general manager Jeff Luhnow and “director of decision sciences” Sig Mejdal used a then-unprecedented combination of traditional gut scouting and cutting-edge stats and data analysis to calculate each player’s value in money and performance. Writing in 2018, Reiter vividly recounts insider financial deals and on-field dramatics. Though he focuses more on players’ fortunes than specific analyses, baseball fans and anyone curious about how business analytics became so powerful in professional sports will enjoy this home run.

 

Summary

Baseball’s Houston Astros used data analytics to turn a losing team into champions.

The Houston Astros major league professional baseball team had been terrible for years. But its leaders had reputations as intelligent men, and they’d been in charge of scouting for the routinely successful St. Louis Cardinals. They believed the Astros would lose a lot of games in 2014, as they had in 2012 and 2013. But they predicted that their new methods – which combined traditional baseball scouting with modern data analytics – would soon bring victories. They were right. On November 1, 2017, the Astros won the World Series to become baseball’s champions

As a mechanical and aeronautical engineering undergraduate at the University of California, Davis, Sig Mejdal had worked as a dealer at a gambling house in Lake Tahoe, California. He noted that people seldom made choices in “their own long-term self-interest.” He later earned two master's degrees and worked at NASA. But Mejdal’s true passion was baseball.

He sought to apply modern data analysis methods to this statistics...

About the Author

Ben Reiter hosts The Edge podcast and was a long time senior writer at Sports Illustrated, where he wrote 27 cover stories and won the 2018 Deadline Award. He is a member of the board of directors of The Marshall Project. 

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