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Astroball
Astroball: The New Way to Win It All | Ben Reiter
3 posts | 2 read | 1 to read
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 articles 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 didnt even appear to be trying to win. The cover story, combined with the specificity of Reiters 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 winand 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 valuebut 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, Jos Altuve, and Dallas Keuchel; and showed them how veterans like Carlos Beltrn and Justin Verlander represented the last piece in the puzzle of fielding a championship team. Sitting at the nexus of sports, business, and innovationand written with years of access to the teams stars and executivesAstroball 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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blurb
Graywacke
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❤️ Houston tx - area
🧡 46
💛 interpreting salt on seismic data
💚 married
💙 him
💜 the main rock type from my master‘s thesis

#gettingtoknowyou

merelybookish Oh, born in 1973? Me too. 🙂 4y
See All 16 Comments
cathipink That sounds like a fascinating job! 4y
Tanisha_A Are you a geologist? 4y
Graywacke @cathipink the geology is really fascinating, and the geophysics. The job has its good and bad aspects, of course. 4y
Graywacke @Tanisha_A Yes, more or less. Geology-geophysics - a little of both. My degree is geology, but my life with a salary has been with geophysical companies. 4y
julesG One of my dream jobs. I'm still angry with myself for not pursuing this career. Somehow I was afraid of the physics that might come up and decided to study something totally different, I ended up getting an MA/MSc in physical chemistry and two other subjects. 4y
Graywacke @julesG that‘s really interesting. Physical chemistry sounds impressive and not a field for someone worried about physics. I don‘t have a geophysics education, so I‘m always struggling with it, intimidated by my missing fundamentals. 😬🙄 4y
julesG Strangely enough, physics is one of the most logical of the natural sciences. So, filling my educational gaps wasn't as tough as learning about organic chemistry. 4y
ValerieAndBooks My BIL has a PhD in geophysics and is a seismologist! 4y
Graywacke @julesG i like the implication that organic chemistry is not logical. I never had a class in that, just know it was all the engineers and pre-meds most challenging class. 4y
Graywacke @ValerieAndBooks 👍 that‘s cool. 4y
julesG Organic chemistry is just torture. It might be logical, but I hated those two semesters I had to spend in the lab destilling strange concoctions. 4y
Suet624 What is an example of a geophysical company? 4y
Graywacke @Suet624 hmm Well, all major oil companies have a geophysical unit within them. Also there are many little service companies that are entirely focused on it as a product. (Seismic for oil/gas is the main part of geophysical industry. There are other things too, like gravity, radar, magnetics, well logging and so on. And there are non-oil uses.) 4y
64 likes16 comments
review
Mcroft2552
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This book takes you on a journey many people don‘t get to see by only watching the games on TV. It really is more than just a loss or a win and Ben Reiter makes you feel apart of. A must read for baseball fans across the board.

Mcroft2552 @Jimbod12 thanks for suggesting! 5y
Jimbod12 No problem ! Glad you enjoyed as much as I did 5y
1 like2 comments
review
Jimbod12
Pickpick

Once I started this book, I found myself not wanting to do anything else but read it . I am a huge baseball fan so that played a large part. I love the layout of the book it provided details about key moments during a championship run but never went into great details about a meaningless game in July. I enjoyed the background it provided on key team members too!

2 likes1 comment