The strategy paid off brilliantly, and surprisingly quickly. The numbers had value-but so did the gut. Instead, Luhnow and Sig wanted to correct for the biases inherent in human observation, and then roll their scouts' critical thoughts into their process. No longer would scouts, with all their subjective, hard-to-quantify opinions, be forced into opposition with the stats guys.
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In Houston, they had free rein to remake the club. 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. How had Reiter predicted it so accurately? And, more important, how had the Astros pulled off the impossible?Īstroball 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. But three years later, the critics were proved improbably, astonishingly wrong.
The cover story, combined with the specificity of Reiter's claim, met instant and nearly universal derision. They were an embarrassment, a club that didn't even appear to be trying to win. The Astros were the worst baseball team in half a century, but they were more than just bad.
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The cover story 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.
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.
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