Astroball: The New Way to Win It All Ben Reiter Astroball: The New Way to Win It All

Ben Reiter

Astroball: The New Way to Win It All Ben Reiter The definitive account of the Houston Astros' unexpected rise to win the 2017 World Series, from the Sports Illustrated writer who predicted it three years earlier

When Sports Illustrated writer Ben Reiter declared, on the cover of the magazine in 2014, that the Houston Astros would win the World Series in 2017, people thought he was crazy. The team, which had just finished up a three-year losing streak of terrible performances--the worst the sport had seen since the early 1960s-- were widely considered underdogs, and the cover story, combined with the specificity of Reiter's claim, met instant and nearly universal derision. But three years later, the critics were proved improbably, astonishingly wrong. How had Reiter predicted it so accurately? And, more important, how had the Astros pulled off the impossible?

ASTROBALL is more than just the story of an underdog team, and more than just a baseball book. Using a character-driven narrative that follows everyone from the players to the general manager, Reiter offers a deep-dive first look into an analytics system that will soon become an industry standard: an ingenious blend of advanced statistical models (a descendant of the type famously created by Billy Beane in Moneyball) with quantified human evaluation and experience. Sitting at the nexus of sports, business, and ideas, ASTROBALL takes readers into the world of the Astros with unprecedented access, offering an inside look at a new way to think about the sport, from the mathematical to the human.

Astroball: The New Way to Win It All Details

Astroball: The New Way to Win It All

272 pages , Published July 10th 2018 by Crown Archetype

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Download and Read Free Online Astroball: The New Way to Win It All Ben Reiter Brandon Forsyth says

So here's the thing: if you start your narrative/analytic baseball book with an H.P. Lovecraft quote AND a Dr. Dre quote, I basically have no choice but to give the resulting masterpiece 5 stars.

Brina says

I had this book on my mind in light of Justin Verlander’s third career no hitter pitched 9-2-19.

The 2019 baseball is about to reach its halfway point and many usual suspects are leading their division races. Until four years ago, the who’s who of baseball did not include the Houston Astros, but in 2015 the Astros started winning, and two years later the team won it all. This came as a shock to everyone outside of Houston and this book’s author who in 2014 wrote a Sports Illustrated story correctly predicting that the Cubs would win the World Series in 2016 and the Astros won beat them to win the title in 2017. Following the Astros’ success, Ben Reiter used his article for the basis of Astroball: The New Way to Win it All, our July 2019 choice for book of the month at the baseball book club here on goodreads.

In 1962 the Houston Astros joined the National League as an expansion team. For the first few years the team, known as the Colt .45s, was atrocious. Playing outdoors, players dealt with mosquito bites and heat stroke during hot and humid Houston summers. Yet, the team’s first owner Judge Roy Hofheinz had a vision to make Houston into a city of tomorrow and the largest metropolis of the south. He foresaw Houston surpassing Atlanta and Miami in population and becoming the city where progress happened. Hofheinz started Houston’s journey toward the future by constructing a multipurpose indoor stadium on top of acres of swampland in the downtown part of the city. With a roof and, more importantly, air conditioning, players would no longer bake in the sun. Tabbing scientists from nearby NASA to produce artificial grass that could be used indoors, Judge Hofheinz named the new invention AstroTurf and his jewel of a stadium the Astrodome.

At the dawn of the 21st century, the Astros had been sold twice, both to ownership groups who did not know how to manage a ball club. The team enjoyed some quality years in the early 1980s when Texas native son Nolan Ryan joined the team as free agent and then enjoyed a renaissance in the first few years of the 2000s behind star players Craig Biggio and Jeff Bagwell. The 2005 team made it to the World Series, but was then swept by Chicago White Sox. With aging stars, the Astros knew it would be their last chance at a winner for many years and then began their tradition of fielding losing teams. Following a move to the American League in 2013 to even out the American and National Leagues at fifteen teams each, it appeared that the Astros had little hope to compete in the future. Then, the unthinkable happened: slowly but surely the Astros began to win.

Jim Crane purchased the Astros in 2007 and was invested in fielding a winning team. Moneyball had been recently been published and using data to create a winning ball club was en Vogue. The Oakland A’s team featured in Moneyball took analytics to an extreme due to their low budget. A self made man and scion of a string of successful businesses, Jim Crane was not low budget. He was behind the Astros and their modern Minute Maid Park because he believed that he could create not just a winning team but a winning organization. By 2011, although the major league Astros would field teams that would lose 100 games three years in a row, Crane had brought on a management team that knew its data and was at the forefront of analytics. This team behind new general manager Jeff Luhnow and his stats guru Sig Megdal came aboard from the winning St Louis Cardinals organization. They knew about winning and stats and were excited to turn the Astros into winners.

Losing for years to earn top draft picks that eventually turn a team into winners can take its toll on fans. I know this all too well as my Cubs are known as the Astros’ national league counterpart, preceding them in winning it all one year earlier. Watching draft picks from afar is frustrating, but that is what Luhnow and his team of stats geeks preached to the Astros fan base: have patience with the progress this team is making. That is difficult when a team loses over 100 games three years in a row, but those teams lead to three number one overall draft picks, who are now the core of the Astros winning teams. Luhnow, however, notes that stats need a human element as well, and Megdal actually created elements that take the human element into account. Spin rate, launch angle, and defensive shifts are all metrics that the Astros brought to Major League Baseball before any of the other teams, and, as a fan who at times complains about how the reliance on data is ruining baseball, it was interesting to see the root of these metrics and how human and computer intersect to produce a winning product. Although Sig Megdal is a stats geek and the creator of the Astros’ fabled Nerd Cave, he understands the game of baseball and used his knowledge in both departments to help Luhnow construct his winning roster.

Reiter predicted that the Astros would win in 2017. He saw the draft picks that they had accumulated and foreshadowed that the entire organization had bought into winning. In other sports, tanking has become en vogue, yet writers have pointed out that unless an entire organization buys into the system, the losing will not turn into winning. Astroball, and the Cubs way, are unique in that from the owners on down, the whole organization has bought into winning, even during the years when the top professional team appears to be going nowhere. Reiter goes behind the scenes and picks apart how the Astros management team transformed the Astros into a winning organization. He notes the signing of the now iconic Astros infield and uses those players as examples of how Megdal focused on metrics yet still had scouts meet these players to show how that the human element still mattered. There is still no reliable metric for team leadership, yet signing a 40 year old to do just that is a prominent reason why the Astros won. Another area where there is still no metric: using tragedy in a community to galvanize a team to win. Hurricane Harvey appears front and center; it is not the first time a team has used a natural disaster to propel it to a championship. I would love to see a metric for that. Houston Strong indeed became the Astros rallying cry.

Recently, I saw the Astros in person. In a game that has been transformed to homer or strike out, the Astros only struck out five times for the entire game. They indeed used the defensive shift more than I am used to, but their data served them well as shifting lead to outs. Their big free agent acquisition in 2017, Verlander, he pitched that night, and he is worth whatever prospects the Astros gave up to get him. Verlander has said he would like to pitch until he’s in his mid forties and I don’t doubt him. Astroball has been a fun, summer read. Ben Reiter accurately shows how a data savvy business side of baseball leads to a winning product on the field. While I saw a small sample size in person, it appears as though the Astros have finally created a winning organization.

4 stars

Gail says

I never should have read "Astroball." First off, sports, bleh. What a waste of time. Second, Ben Reiter is one of several Yalies named Ben with whom I’ve hungout over the years and not the one I hit it off with most. But I confused him with a closer acquaintance and requested an advance copy. By the time I noticed Reiter’s suave smirk on the rear dust jacket, I’d already finished the preface and the prologue (yes, it has both, and yes, you should read both), and I couldn’t have put the book down if I’d tried.

That’s because "Astroball" is about baseball the way "Remember the Titans" is about football. Sure, Reiter explains how the Astros went from being the team with the worst track record and prospects in the league to winning the 2017 World Series. But the consummate storyteller uses his unusual level of access to both players and the Astros front office to interweave dramas with much more widespread appeal: How an industry undergoes a revolution. How a parent’s fidelity to their inner compass can transform the course of a child’s life. How peeling back the layers of a professional victory almost always reveals some combination of hustle, skill, and luck, but mostly hustle. How a liability in one context becomes an asset in another. How organizational change done right looks a lot like nation-building. How a supportive romantic partner behaves in a crisis. How human instinct, though repeatedly proven fallible, remains indispensable.

In prose with just the right balance of sobriety and artistry (e.g., “If a pitcher’s arm was the most valuable and fragile asset in baseball, a pitcher’s psyche was second”) and transitions that hum, Reiter introduces his stories’ concepts and characters, sometimes dozens of pages in advance, so that even a reader who gives fewer than two shits about baseball knew Carlos Beltrán from Carlos Correa and locked herself in a bathroom to absorb the blow-by-blow of a playoff game in peace. A game I already knew the winner of. It’s seamless, really, Reiter’s melding of backstory with story to produce a narrative of a magic process that’s magical in its own right.

Take, for example, the following two vignettes about America’s pastime that teach as much about psychology and systems science as sport:

In the cage, Bonds showed Beltrán how he liked to set the pitching machine to top speed, more than 90 miles per hour, and then gradually move closer and closer to it, training himself to react to pitches that arrived quicker than any human could throw them from a mound. Even more useful, to Beltrán, was the way he described his mentality. “Sometimes you’re in an oh-for-ten slump, and you might start to doubt your ability,” Bonds said. “But you have to understand that every time you walk to the plate, the person who is in trouble isn’t you. It’s the pitcher.” A decade later, when Beltrán arrived for his first spring training with the Astros in February 2017, he knew that he appeared to his young teammates as Bonds once had to him. He was at least seven years older than almost all of them, earned 30 times more than some of them, and was by then a nine-time All-Star who had hit 421 home runs. During his first days with the Astros, he approached each one.

***

Sig Mejdal hated the World Series. He loved it, of course. It was the whole point, the simulated goal when he had spent his boyhood flicking the spinners of All-Star Baseball, the real one as he endlessly tweaked his models during all those late nights above his fraternity brother’s garage. Intellectually, though, he hated it. Baseball wasn’t a game like basketball, in which the best team—the Golden State Warriors, say—could reliably defeat almost any opponent at least 80 percent of the time. Baseball excellence could be judged only over the long term, and yet its annual champion, the club that history would remember, was decided after a series of no more than seven games. Any major league team could beat any opponent four times out of seven. “I wish it was a 162-game series, instead of seven,” Sig said. “But it’s seven. In every game, you have somewhere between a forty-two and fifty-eight percent chance of winning. Which is very close to a fifty percent chance. Which is a coin toss. The World Series is a coin toss competition.”

If you like tight writing on fascinating topics, read "Astroball"—no interest in sports or analytics required. If you already read "Moneyball," trust me, read "Astroball" too. I’m betting if you do, I won’t be the only new member of Ben Reiter’s fan club.

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