Astroball: The New Way to Win It All

by Ben Reiter

This is a lot like Moneyball, but it focusses on how the Astros applied both data science and human evaluation to go from being a last place ball club in 2014 to winning the World Series in 2017.

One thing they did was collect data on their scouting reports, to evaluate how well the scouts did at evaluating players. Then, they could correct for the biases of individual scouts. This reminds me of how FogBugz would use a developer’s past estimates for tasks to correct for their tendency to under/over-estimate.

When Carlos Correa was offered $4.8 million to sign with the Astros, his mother (living in Puerto Rico) said he should go to college instead. His father responded, “I need a wheelchair! Do you know how much construction I would have to do to make 4.8 million dollars? You could add up all the money I make, and my son, and my son’s son, in our entire lives, and it wouldn’t equal 4.8 million dollars!”

One of the coolest things I learned was the influence of Carlos Beltrán on the World Series win, even though he never got a hit in the series. Here are some things I remember reading about him:

• In the past, he’d been on a team with Barry Bonds, who hit a ton of home runs and seemed pretty unapproachable. CB asked BB one day if he’d be willing to share some tips about hitting, and BB lit up. They went to the batting cages. BB would set the pitching machine on the highest setting, 90 mph. Then, he would most closer and closer, trying to get his reaction time to be as good as possible. By comparison, a pitch thrown by a major league pitcher would seem slow and easier to hit once you were used to that.
• CB decided he would always be available and willing to talk to younger players. When he moved to the Astros in 2016, they were all younger players.
• He would sometimes answer English-speaking players in Spanish and vice versa, trying to make both languages feel normal to all the team members. He wanted the English and Spanish speaking players to integrate and get to know each other.
• Alex Bregman did this, too. He would talk to Yuli Guirriel in Spanish all the time. He said his Spanish was great – no it wasn’t, according to CB! But it meant a lot that he tried, and they became better friends and teammates because they were able to talk to each other, even if it ended up being in broken Spanglish.
• CB noticed that after winning a game, the players all hit the showers and went home, not really celebrating their win. So he had two belts made as awards to give out after every game. Here’s something he wrote about that:

We had two belts that we gave out after every win: one for the position player of the game and one for the pitcher of the game. We voted as a team on who would get the belts, and the player who won each belt after our last victory would present it to the new winner. And then after every game, that player had to give a motivational speech to the team.

Giving out the belts was fun and it definitely brought us together. We would go into the clubhouse, turn off all the lights and … we had these party lights and a fog machine and we would turn the music up really loud, and we would just celebrate.

I think it was something that really united us as a team. But it also, it made winning fun — which, you know, it’s supposed to be.

And we won 101 games, so we were basically celebrating every day.

During the World Series against the Dodgers, he noticed (by watching a ton of video) that one of their really good pitchers, Darvish (who I think they had traded for right before the postseason, similar to Verlander), was tipping pitches. By watching how he adjusted the ball or held his glove, you could know in advance what kind of pitch he was going to throw. CB showed the other players, and it helped them win a difficult game.

In that same game, Yuli was on camera pulling his eyes back and calling Darvish “chinito” (Chinese boy). While this is not considered racist in Cuba, it got him in pretty hot water. CB warned Yuli that he was going to be interviewed about it after the game, and Yuli was very apologetic (I think what YG meant in context was something like, “Hey, I managed to get a hit off a chinese pitcher! That’s not easy!” But since he doesn’t speak much Engish, he conveyed it in a way that seemed racist.). CB’s warning probably gave YG time to prepare an appropriate response, and in the end, he was not kept from playing in the World Series (although he got a 5 game suspension at the beginning of the next season). Diffusing that situation is another way CB contributed to the team.

So CB is a good example of the fact that stats don’t capture everything. His influence was important, even if he went 0-3 at the plate in the series.