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. The Astros were the worst baseball team in half a century. The cover story, combined with the specificity of Reiter's claim, met instant and nearly universal derision. But three years later, the Astros won the World Series for the first time in their history. How had Reiter predicted it so accurately? And, more importantly, how had the Astros pulled off the impossible? Astroball is the inside story of how a gang of outsiders went beyond Moneyball's data revolution to find a new way to win. They did so by combining hard data with the human judgment of the scouts who had been marginalised by the modernisation of their sport. The lessons they learned stretch far beyond baseball into big business and other professional sports. Astroball is a ground-breaking look at the cutting edge of evaluating and optimising human potential.
