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33 reviews for:
The Extra 2%: How Wall Street Strategies Took a Major League Baseball Team from Worst to First
Jonah Keri
3.61 AVERAGE
33 reviews for:
The Extra 2%: How Wall Street Strategies Took a Major League Baseball Team from Worst to First
Jonah Keri
3.61 AVERAGE
This is a an interesting and improbable turnaround story. Only die-hard baseball fans should read this. It is more about the history of the Tampa Bay Rays franchise then it is about wall street strategies turning around a team. There is not nearly as much emphasis on the wall street strategies aspect as I anticipated. Instead the turnaround had multiple factors including luck and the normal ebb and flow of baseball teams. it is truly a great accomplishment considering the competition the Rays have in their own division, but still they have yet to win a world series and the success seems vulnerable to being short lived.
I've always thought that most of what baseball fans and writers think they know about the game is unsupported, to say the least. This book tells how the Rays jettisoned all that "common knowledge" to build a winning team through canny statistical analysis techniques. It also tells a few ... interesting stories about the Vince Naimoli era that I had never heard before (no team email accounts for front-office employees as late as 2003? Really?). If you liked "Moneyball," or if you like baseball in general, I recommend this.
This book reads like a series of feature articles suitable for the Sunday sports pages of a newspaper. On the upside, that means it's a quick and accessible read. On the downside, the chapters are poorly connected to one another, jumping from one aspect of the Rays' history and transition to another without any through line (or even connective tissue).
Some of the chapters work - the biographical profile of manager Joe Maddon is, for my money, the most engrossing and entertaining section of the book. In fact, this chapter is so good that it made me acutely aware of how slim the biographical profiles of the other main figures are. (The Snidley Whiplash portrayal of owner Vince Naimoli, which takes up a lot of space early in the book, is entertaining at first but grows repetitive.)
For the baseball stathead, there's not enough explanation of the new Rays' methods to be instructive. For business fans, the ownership group is treated with such kid gloves that we don't get to see inside their heads very well. (I nearly laughed out loud at the end of the book, when Twins owner Carl Pohlad was lambasted for "launch[ing] his career ... by foreclosing on family farms during the Great Depression", after Keri had so carefully danced around the Rays' owners' prior careers at Goldman Sachs and Bear Sterns.) But it did serve as a fair introduction to a franchise which I didn't know anything about.
Some of the chapters work - the biographical profile of manager Joe Maddon is, for my money, the most engrossing and entertaining section of the book. In fact, this chapter is so good that it made me acutely aware of how slim the biographical profiles of the other main figures are. (The Snidley Whiplash portrayal of owner Vince Naimoli, which takes up a lot of space early in the book, is entertaining at first but grows repetitive.)
For the baseball stathead, there's not enough explanation of the new Rays' methods to be instructive. For business fans, the ownership group is treated with such kid gloves that we don't get to see inside their heads very well. (I nearly laughed out loud at the end of the book, when Twins owner Carl Pohlad was lambasted for "launch[ing] his career ... by foreclosing on family farms during the Great Depression", after Keri had so carefully danced around the Rays' owners' prior careers at Goldman Sachs and Bear Sterns.) But it did serve as a fair introduction to a franchise which I didn't know anything about.