Astroball: The New Way to Win It All

by Ben Reiter

The Astros, though, had developed a method of integrating a recently overlooked source of information back into their decision-making: humans. They synthesized human observations into their probabilistic models, and made humans responsible for triaging—and sometimes rejecting—the results. And they realized those results were rarely indisputable, relating, as they did, to human beings, with their mutability and unpredictability. They sought to identify players who were unsatisfied with their lot, who possessed an uncommon drive and ability to improve. A growth mindset, they called it.

man plus machine—as long as man remains in charge.

“We’ll build a stadium that will make Emperor Titus’s playhouse look like an abandoned brickyard.”

Mickey Mantle hit the stadium’s first home run.

“the Biggest Blister in Texas,”

He learned that human beings do not always make decisions that serve their own long-term self-interest, even when they are equipped with a wealth of experience and knowledge of the mathematical probabilities that ought to guide their choices.

“Just because it feels right,” he told himself, “doesn’t mean it is right.”

Luhnow believed in Sig, but he also believed in something he had learned at McKinsey: the benefits of introducing cultural change gradually, especially into a successful organization like the Cardinals.

STOUT—half stats, half scouts.

If, as Mozeliak said, each draft is like Christmas for a baseball team, then the vast majority of the gifts it receives will prove to be scratchy sweaters.

In Houston, they were asked to figure out how to defibrillate a club that was dying.

Director of Decision Sciences.

modern behavioral economics,

The idea was, essentially, to systematically scout the scouts in order to determine which of their judgments had real predictive value and which were the product of cognitive biases—and then to properly weight them along with the performance data by comparing that universe of attributes against those of players who had once performed or been judged similarly.

“If a human being can sense it, a human being can quantify it,” said Sig. “If he can quantify it, he can learn about it.”

scientific advancement is not gradual but instead a “series of peaceful interludes punctuated by intellectually violent revolutions.”

“Innovation, by definition, suggests change will be taking place,” Sig said. “If there’s change taking place, it’s not likely going to feel right. If it felt right, it would have been done a long time ago.”

If the Astros didn’t pick Correa because it felt risky, then they would have been standing on a 16 against a 7.

A superlative analytics department might get you halfway up the mountain. It was an intangible—the elusive but discoverable qualities of persistence and adaptability—that got you to the top.

Instead of indicating whether a player should be drafted, the Nerd Cave’s algorithms suggested when he was ready to be promoted to a higher level of play, or to be cut.

One of the problems with regression analysis was that it had trouble identifying outliers, such as a sui generis pitcher who could consistently outperform the sum of his measurable parts.

Just because you can hit everything doesn’t mean you should, unless you’re Vladimir Guerrero.

“What drives Altuve,” Luhnow said, “is what’s inside.” Altuve couldn’t grow physically, but no player had more eagerly consumed what the club was feeding him to grow anyway.

Sig helped Ross realize that people who focus on processes over outcomes, and who have a growth mindset, don’t allow one setback to derail them.

THE ASTROS ARE TRYING TO DICK DRAFT PICKS OUT OF THEIR MONEY,

He didn’t give a shit about anything but playing.

before she the 2014 draft

not to overreact to even humiliating setbacks, but to use them to evolve.

“Baseball would be quite a remarkable activity if it was the one place in the world where your co-workers didn’t have any impact on how productive you were.”

“If you divide the world into shit that you know and shit that you don’t know, and you study the stuff that you know, then you’re not going to learn very much,”

“In Search of David Ross,” which found that the concept of chemistry as something that could cause a club to consistently outperform the individual contributions of its players was real.

the David Ross Effect. “Players such as David Ross are true ‘diamonds-in-the-rough’ according to our analysis, with their full impact on team performance likely to fly under the radar according to traditional performance metrics,” the authors wrote.

Beltrán, then 37, began lobbying the league and the players’ union to require each club to hire a full-time Spanish translator. Two years later, thanks largely to his efforts, they did.

Deactivated fault lines could prevent poor results from snowballing.

“The reality is that any economic modeling which includes projections is not going to like a deadline deal, where you’re trading what could be an enormous amount of future value for a decent amount of present value,”

In the end, he had relied on what would always be the ultimate tiebreaker: his gut.

At 8:57 p.m. in Los Angeles—10:57 p.m. in Houston—on November 1, 2017, Seager hit the ground ball for which Luhnow and Sig had been planning for six years, for which Correa had been hoping for 23, and for which Houston had been waiting for 56.

To reach it required figuring out how to exploit their information to enable players to attain a level of success that their past performances suggested was beyond them, to give each small slap hitter with a growth mindset the best chance of becoming José Altuve, and each soft-tossing control artist the greatest odds of becoming Dallas Keuchel.

That José Altuve and Carlos Correa were using the same tools did much more to convince young players to buy into them than the promises of dorks in khakis and polos.

Data could help guide best practices, but it was unwise to confuse those with perfect practices.

There would, in other words, always be a place for human intelligence alongside the artificial kind, and not just in baseball. There would always be a role for gut feels.