Just when I thought I couldn't learn anything new about the 2017 Houston Astros and the cheating scandal, along comes this book on my suggested reads. So I try it, and like Mikey in the Life commercials, I liked it! Here's my review.
Title/Author:
“Winning Fixes Everything: How Baseball’s Brightest Minds Created Sports’ Biggest Mess” by Evan Drellich
Rating:
5 of 5 stars (excellent)
Review:
Anyone with even a passing or casual knowledge of recent baseball history knows about the scandal involving the 2017 Houston Astros. Using television monitors and banging on trash cans, Houston batters were able to know what type of pitch was coming to them and used that advantage on their way to the championship. However, there is much more about this scandal both before and after that World Series. Evan Drellich, the reporter who first broke the story of the cheating by the Astros, has written an excellent book on the entire background of the club.
There isn’t a lot about the actual cheating by the Astros during the games in the book. Instead, Drellich helps the reader understand why the Astros got to that point by examining the culture in both the locker room and the front office. It really started when owner Jim Crane hired Jeff Luhnow away from the St. Louis Cardinals as the general manager. Luhnow also brought with him Sig Mejdal and together they built an extensive analytics department. That was considered cutting edge at the time, despite the poor on-field record by the Astros.
Cutting also describes the economic principles of Luhnow as he brought in
consultants from his former employer McKinsey.
The team operated on a shoestring budget but grew in analytics to the
point of tanking 3 seasons to eventually win a championship. It all worked, but as Drellich shows, it came
at a huge cost.
What really struck me in this book was not so much the on-field records, play
or even cheating by the Astros. The
entire culture around the team, while some of it was well-known, still was
quite a shock to me while reading this. The most egregious of these was the
treatment of women by Crane, Luhnow and assistant GM Brandon Taubman, who went
so far to glorify the Astros signing a pitcher who had been charged with
domestic violence. Taubman did this in
front of three female reporters, including one who wrote critical articles about
the team signing that player.
Drellich’s reporting and writing about this aspect of the team, as well as the fallout in future seasons for the Astros even as they continued to be a dominant force in the American League, is excellent. He leaves nothing uncovered – even the controversy surrounding the penalties given to the Astros by baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred and the reasons why he acted as he did are well covered and explained. This book is an excellent one on top of other good books on this team that have already been published. What set this one above the others for me is the in-depth description of the entire culture inside the team, which was certainly NOT pretty.
No comments:
Post a Comment