Read Online Astroball The New Way to Win It All Ben Reiter 9780525576655 Books
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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
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?
Astroball 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.
Read Online Astroball The New Way to Win It All Ben Reiter 9780525576655 Books
"I bought this because I am an Astros fan from Colt .45 day 1. I bought unseen and with some trepidation that it was going heavy into the mathmatical, statistical side, which is fine for folks with sharper minds than mine, but I am all about people. This book has all my favorite people!! It was a facinating account of the underbelly of winning Astros baseball that I would never of seen otherwise. I hope Jim Crane gave Ben Reiter a WS ring too!"
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Astroball The New Way to Win It All Ben Reiter 9780525576655 Books Reviews :
Astroball The New Way to Win It All Ben Reiter 9780525576655 Books Reviews
- 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 secondâ€) 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.â€
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. - Astroball is a fantastic read. Reiter hooks the reader from the very first pages of this vibrant narrative, which weaves together compelling personal stories, fascinating characters, and just the right amount of inside baseball details. Whether you are a baseball fan or not, I'm confident you will love Astroball as much as I did.
- What a fun read! I enjoy baseball as much as the next person, but I really love characters and problem-solving, which are the real heart of this book. And it's incredible that the author predicted the 2017 World Series years before! In the book, you get to know the guys behind the scenes at the Astros, and how they used their various smarts (like poker skills, ivy league education, etc) to build a better team than the statistics would predict. Really enjoyable for baseball fans, critical thinkers, and anyone who loves an underdog story.
- As a long-time baseball fan of the Chicago Cubs and the Houston Astros I devoured Sports Illustrated’s Ben Reiter’s book “Astroball†- and loved it! I highly recommend it to any baseball fan regardless of your team loyalty.
The book provides a fascinating account of the Astros’ amazing turnaround from the Sports Illustrated’s initially considered joke June 30, 2014 cover story predicting the Astros 2017 World Series win. Today, with the Astros considered a super team (with the Red Sox and Yankees) it is a bit difficult to remember how in 2014 the team had just concluded three years in a row at the BOTTOM of their division! Ben Reiter provides the fascinating backstory to the Astros’ owner, Jim Crane, and his selection as GM of Jeff Luhnow. Astroball well explains the data driven decision making approach, which, while the many successes are discussed at length, the stellar selection of Springer, Verlander and Bregman being discussed at great length, it also admits to the mega-mistake the Astros had made - the biggest being the release of J.D. Martinez - and what Luhnow had learned from it.
Most interesting to me was the unbelievable two contributions to winning the World Series by an Astros player who had no at-bats during those seven games, Carlos Beltran.
Bottom line, Astroball is an incredible story of modern day baseball. It clearly explains how data analytics synthesized with experience-based scouting have resulted in league beating baseball. - This is a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at so many and varied decision making processes. The author does a great job of following good and poor decisions, explaining the processes and the people. I love George Springer, Jose Altuve and Alex Bregman, but thought Carlos Correa was a little too polished (maybe calculating) in his demeanor. (To me, the wedding proposal took away from George and his series MVP performance.) There may be some truth to that, but it is because he has been planning this, in a mature, thoughtful manner, against great odds for a long time. More power to him! And I too wanted to understand Carlos Beltran's and Brian McCann's locker room contributions. I do wish there was more dugout and locker room conversations and exchanges - maybe that's for another book. "Astroball" still gets 5 stars from me!
- I bought this because I am an Astros fan from Colt .45 day 1. I bought unseen and with some trepidation that it was going heavy into the mathmatical, statistical side, which is fine for folks with sharper minds than mine, but I am all about people. This book has all my favorite people!! It was a facinating account of the underbelly of winning Astros baseball that I would never of seen otherwise. I hope Jim Crane gave Ben Reiter a WS ring too!
