Astroball: The New Way to Win It All

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.

It was a dream coming true. Being a fan for over three decades, I was finally going to see a World Series game in person. My brother (somehow) scored some tickets and he invited me to come along. We arrived early and entered as soon as the gates opened. It was a surreal experience.This was Game 2 of the 2017 World Series. The Los Angeles Dodgers easily took game one from the Houston Astros. Game 2 was going to be a great match up. Rich Hill and Justin Verlander were starting.Going into the top of the ninth, the Dodgers were up by a run. In comes the most dominant closer in baseball at the time, Kenly Jansen. Everything was going smoothly. The Dodgers were 2 outs away from leading the series 2-0.And then Jansen gave a home run to tie the game. The stadium went silent. In the top of the 10th, the Astros scored two. The stadium wasn’t just silent, it felt like a black hole of noise. In the bottom of the 10th, the Dodgers miraculously tied it up with 2 runs. The Dodger faithful, such as I, were ecstatic. In the top of 11th, the Astros put another 2 runs on the board. My body could not tolerate the chemical imbalance of such sudden highs and lows. Unfortunately, the Dodgers couldn’t pull off the magic again and they lost Game 2.This was the end of the World Series for me. I knew this game was the turning point. There was no recovery. Though the series went to game seven, I knew the Astros were in the driver’s seat the whole time.Astroball is the story of the Houston Astros from the embarrassing laughingstock of an organization to the one of the best teams ever. I am a deep blue Dodger fan, but I respect the Houston Astros. They are a great team put together by some of the brightest brains in the business.The subtitle for this book, “The New Way to Win It All” is rather misleading. This book is just another chapter in the sabermetrics story. The Astros finally hired smart people to run the organization and now they have built a champion and contending powerhouse. There is nothing unique to the story, it is just another story. The characters are interesting and the stories are great, but nothing here is novel.

Personally, I did not like this book as much as anticipated. Given the supposed meat of an analytics based discovery of a "new way to win it all". It really is not, its a pom pom recount of what went down and frankly does a rather poor job articulating anything new and insightful about the Astro's approach.More of a revisionist mapping of the past than a tool kit to recreate the Astro's success. Subsequently, a huge amount of the credibility associated with culture and unique Astro's mojo (articulated as foundational to success in the book), was submarined by the GM trading for Osuna.The author, in his defence of said trade, came off as a shill.If you are a die hard Astros fan, this is a good book. If you read with a measure of intellectual cynicism, you may find this book under whelms.

Cracking read with many good insights. Of course, we now know a lot more about why the Astros won but that’s not a knock on a lot of the process

This book has so many great little stories about the players and managers’ backgrounds, and it almost makes it seem like everyone was the MVP of the World Series to some degree.It starts a little slow when it reviews he history of the franchise, but once it picks up it is so hard to put down. Highly recommended!

The book was enjoyable (as a baseball fan), but it certainly didn't deliver the 'dingers' I expected.No insight into the manager's working with the players in keeping a team together, no deep insight into the players' relationships, just continued down the same rabbit hole of sticking to the 'process' of the algorithms. Even then, 'the new way to win it all' wasn't able to identify Mike Trout, and they still relied on the good old fashioned 'gut' instinct (aka as luck).Reading about the input, the class and humanity of Carlos Beltran was very enjoyable. We need more of that in this World.The back-stories of the big name players was ok, albeit if you are an Astro's fan you would already know those stories (and if you are an Astro's fan you are buying the book anyway!).

A must read for any sports fan looking to take a peak at the furture of sport