Astroball: The New Way to Win It All
Written by Ben Reiter
Narrated by Ben Reiter
4.5/5
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About this audiobook
When Sports Illustrated declared on the cover of a June 2014 issue that the Houston Astros would win the World Series in 2017, people thought Ben Reiter, the article's author, was crazy. The Astros were the worst baseball team in half a century, but they were more than just bad. They were an embarrassment, a club that didn't even appear to be trying to win. 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?
vaAstroball is the inside story of how a gang of outsiders went beyond the stats to find a new way to win—and not just in baseball. When new Astros general manager Jeff Luhnow and his top analyst, the former rocket scientist Sig Mejdal, arrived in Houston in 2011, they had already spent more than half a decade trying to understand how human instinct and expertise could be blended with hard numbers such as on-base percentage and strikeout rate to guide their decision-making. In Houston, they had free rein to remake the club. No longer would scouts, with all their subjective, hard-to-quantify opinions, be forced into opposition with the stats guys. Instead, Luhnow and Sig wanted to correct for the biases inherent in human observation, and then roll their scouts' critical thoughts into their process. The numbers had value—but so did the gut.
The strategy paid off brilliantly, and surprisingly quickly. It pointed the Astros toward key draft picks like Carlos Correa and Alex Bregman; offered a path for developing George Springer, José Altuve, and Dallas Keuchel; and showed them how veterans like Carlos Beltrán and Justin Verlander represented the last piece in the puzzle of fielding a championship team.
Sitting at the nexus of sports, business, and innovation—and written with years of access to the team's stars and executives—Astroball is the story of the next wave of thinking in baseball and beyond, at once a remarkable underdog story and a fascinating look at the cutting edge of evaluating and optimizing human potential.
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Reviews for Astroball
68 ratings8 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Moneyball but newer and better! Would recommend to casual fans as well
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Really enjoyed this book. I think it is a must read for sports fans and even casual fans
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Really about a 2.5. It's a perfectly decent story, but utterly lacking in detail about what made the Astros the Astros. Does the whole thing come down to process-oriented decision-making over outcome-focused decisions? Eighty percent of the teams in the league were thinking that way by 2017, as Reiter even expressly says at one point.
There are two to four good anecdotes, and it's a quick read. The Hurricane Harvey section is almost a caricature of sportswriters clumsily making use of natural disasters to talk about sports, though. - Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This is a great story told very well! Great book for baseball fans or stat geeks.
1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5"Astroball" is the most fascinating baseball book I've read in the last decade or two because of how clearly it points out the pros and cons of all the technological innovations that rule baseball decisions today. Baseball fans who have been following the game since the fifties and sixties barely recognize the sport today. These days its all about defensive shifts, video studying, launch angles, bat speed measurements, and spin rates. Baseball is still, in my opinion, more of a thinking-fan's sport than any of the others, but it is getting harder and harder to appreciate the game if you are a hardcore traditionalist fan.No one does it better, even today, than the Houston Astros. Other teams are still trying to catch up with all of the tools used by the Astros and how to use them, but the gap is quickly closing. Baseball is now a never ending race to stay one technological step ahead of the competition and will be so for a long time into the future.Astros fans will particularly enjoy the book because of the way that author Ben Reiter, step-by-step, details the several-year process that transformed the Astros from one of the worst teams in baseball history into one of the most dominant teams in either league today.This one is for all kinds of baseball fans: young, old, stat-nuts, and even traditionalists wondering what in the heck has happened to their favorite sport.
1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I read this based on the reviews that it would be interesting even for those who are not into baseball at all. I can't agree with this. Reiter goes into far too much detail on player biographies, and random statistics and game details without any context. The characters aren't very memorable, and the central thesis—that the Astros managed to integrate human judgement with statistics, and that this will be a model for all sorts of organizations in the future—is largely unproved, and hardly even seriously investigated. Michael Lewis's "Moneyball" was much better. This was, however, interesting as a sequel to "Moneyball," showing how quickly baseball teams reacted to that story.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5In my mind, this is a pretty compelling sports read. I think if you're coming in looking for Moneyball 2 you might be a little disappointed, as the style and aims of the book are fundamentally different. Whereas Moneyball is a book sure of it's thesis, sure that what Beane does is fundamental and provable, Astroball rests on a much more tenuous task of trying to integrate "data" and "human insight". Reading with an eye towards this tension, especially as it dovetails with surveillance, workplace dynamics, and organizational behavior was the reason it was so enjoyable to me. That being said, Reiter does miss the chance to dig into some fundamental questions of this text. Whether that's because (possibly?) lack of access/willingness for the Astros to answer questions, or because Reiter spends too much time sweeping the whole arc of the Astros existence -- maybe both. In other words, it asks, usually implicitly, more than it answers. Overall enjoyable, if a little confused about its own operation.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The first half of this book is fascinating. We get an in-depth look at the decision making and analysis used to build a winning baseball from the ground up.The second half drags as Reiter gives us a more traditional look at how people in the clubhouse interacted with one another.By trying to serve both masters, Reiter doesn't totally please either. There isn't enough analysis of the Astros on field data driven techniques (probably a good thing since we found out about the possible sign stealing in the 2017 season). The discussion of the data driven elements of their approach may turn off the less analytically minded reader.This is still better than most baseball books, so I still recommend it.