Take Me Out to the Data Field: On Evan Drellich’s “Winning Fixes Everything”
Evan Drellich | Winning Fixes Everything: How Baseball’s Brightest Minds Created Sports’ Biggest Mess | HarperCollins | February 2023 | 345 Pages
What if the most important baseball stories have become too boring to tell? This is the question that arises from Evan Drellich’s Winning Fixes Everything. The book details the Houston Astros’ 2017 sign-stealing scandal, the team’s over-reliance on data, and general culture of corruption. Drellich, a senior writer for The Athletic, broke the sign-stealing story in 2019. His expanded reporting in Winning Fixes Everything positions the book as an indirect sequel to Michael Lewis’s Moneyball (2004), which presented baseball’s analytics revolution through the innovations of Oakland Athletics’ General Manager Billy Beane and was later adapted into a movie starring Brad Pitt. Drellich’s latest charts that revolution’s bloodless denouement. The book is excruciatingly well-reported, yet the characters involved—primarily former Astros GM Jeff Luhnow—are so lacking in humanity that there is little to excavate. As such, Winning Fixes Everything reflects a game that has grown more bland as it has grown more analytical and automated.
Jeff Luhnow is arguably baseball’s most provocative change-agent since Billy Beane began drafting previously overlooked players based on deep performance analytics in 2002. If we take Luhnow’s background as a McKinsey consultant and founder of Archetype Solutions, a start-up that used an algorithm to produce better-fitting clothing, and couple this with the book’s cover image, which depicts a baseball dissolving into pixels, we get an almost total understanding of what Luhnow is all about. Before the cheating scandal, he was at the vanguard of GMs who pushed Beane’s moneyball principles to the extreme: mostly Ivy League guys like Los Angeles Dodgers’ Andrew Friedman and Theo Epstein, previously of the Chicago Cubs and Boston Red Sox; managers who came to baseball via an obsession with numbers and who have attempted, by varying degrees, to operate their real-life teams as if they were playing fantasy baseball.
Winning Fixes Everything suggests the corrosive effects of this approach. Along the way it disrupts the data narrative to lay bare the pro-management mythmaking of Lewis’s Moneyball. Though Beane is a dynamic figure who became famous as a GM after he was a monumental bust as a player, his core project was always to uncover cheap talent for a stingy owner. Two decades later, the success of Beane’s mid-2000s A’s teams is minor compared with the major shift to cost-efficiency and data-driven decision making that has captured the MLB. Where Epstein and Friedman can be viewed as Beane’s direct successors, Luhnow is Beane on steroids. He is baseball’s version of Dr. Frankenstein, a man so centered on creating the perfect team that he threatens to destroy the game itself. The few laughs available in Winning Fixes Everything are owed to his terribleness: as Astros GM he was known for gifting his subordinates the self-help book Who Moved My Cheese? to convey his mantra “adapt or die.” For many in the Astros front office, no amount of adaptation could save their jobs, and receiving the book was a precursor to a pink slip. This was the case for an Astros strength coach, who Luhnow trained with one morning before firing him that same afternoon.
Drellich portrays Luhnow not as a baseball savant, but as the world’s worst boss. One of the worst things about him is that you can never find him. This is true for Astros employees and seemingly for Drellich himself. Whereas in Moneyball Lewis brought figures such as Beane and sabermetrics guru Bill James to life using scenes that remain exemplars of stylistic longform journalism, Drellich relies on lengthy quotations from his own and other writer’s previous reporting to bring readers into “the environment that created the cheating scandal.” One of the pithiest of these comes from Sig Mejdal, Luhnow’s righthand man in Houston and current Baltimore Orioles executive, lamenting after the Astros won the 2017 World Series that “the team was winning one hundred games, but we didn’t have one hundred units of joy.”
This abundance of quotations dehydrates the book. But what is Drellich supposed to do? He collages a story about baseball’s most controversial franchise, and at the story’s center is a detached protagonist who speaks as if reading a spreadsheet. Luhnow succeeded more than any GM before him in valuing players purely as stocks. His exploits are both diabolical and uninteresting. This creates a peculiar situation in which the elements that make Luhnow an uncompelling subject are the same that make him an important figure to investigate. A reader could wish Drellich had taken a creative writing class with Lewis, but even Lewis’s talents would be wasted on a dolt like Luhnow.
Overall, the dryness afflicting Winning Fixes Everything reflects the current state of baseball itself, and Drellich’s refusal to dress up the abundant corporate-speak might therefore be to his credit. This is true especially considering how the feel-good narrative Lewis spun around Beane’s obsession with data continues to perpetuate the myth of plucky small-market franchises who succeed at playing baseball on a budget, as opposed to hoarding their money, which is what they are really doing. And while Drellich stops short of a call to action against AI’s invasion of the national pastime, he lays a foundation for the game’s future caretakers to take up and rebuild the firewall, assuming that such caretakers might one day exist.
After reading Winning Fixes Everything I went in search of baseball writing that is not only educational, but that I could actually enjoy. Soon, I’d tracked down a copy of Roger Angell’s Game Time (2003), which collects forty years of his baseball reporting for The New Yorker. It didn’t take long to find what I sought: Angell sitting in the bleachers of a spring training stadium on the west coast of Florida, describing “the whop! of the bats, the climbing white arcs of the outfield flies, and the swift flight of the ball whipped around the infield.” A few paragraphs later, Angell notices how Gil Hodges’s on-deck circle routine begins with him fiddling with his eyelashes before he sweeps his hand up the length of the bat “like a duelist wiping blood off a sword.” Angell names Hodges’s full choreography “a cup of limeflower tea,” which I take to mean something ineffable and complicated that fans can savor. This is one of the more whimsical examples of Angell’s attempts to articulate the game’s poetry. His lifelong appreciation for baseball’s minor details leads him continually to awe—a sensation that advanced data increasingly eradicates.
Re-reading Game Time was sad not only because Angell’s insights have been deemed extraneous by baseball’s current rulers, but also because the 2023 season was the first to commence since his death in May 2022, at age 101. In tributes written by David Remnick, The New Yorker’s editor, and David Roth of Defector, both mention the music Angell found simply in the names of players: “Eppa Rixey, Goose Goslin, Firpo Marberry, Jack Rothrock, Eldon Auker.” Angell’s love of human names makes for a stark contrast with the Astros’ penchant for bestowing exotic-sounding monikers on new stats technologies they implemented: CodeBreaker, TrackMan, EdgerTronics, QuantumBlack, etc. CodeBreaker used an algorithm to steal signs. TrackMan, EdgerTronics, and QuantumBlack do things like render a batter’s swing in 3-D at one thousand frames per second, or allow AI to suggest microscopic tweaks to pitcher’s wind-ups, all of which recreate ballplayers almost as holograms. These have allowed Luhnow and his contemporaries to come ever closer to producing “a total data field.” I re-read Angell intending to contrast him with Drellich—an unfair comparison for almost any writer. The more I read, however, I realized that the person who has replaced Angell isn’t Drellich, or Lewis for that matter, but Luhnow.
Way back in 1984, Angell, permitting himself to imagine the end of his own baseball reporting career, writes: “It is my secret Calvinist fear that baseball will run dry on me some day and I will find nothing fresh at the morning camps, despite my notes and numberings, or go newsless on some sun-filled afternoon, and so at last lose this sweet franchise.” One wonders how soon those days might arrive for the rest of us. If they are fast approaching, it won’t be the Astros’ sign-stealing scandal that is their harbinger. The team’s cheating is hard to get too worked up about given how other teams—including the Red Sox, Yankees, and Dodgers—attempted to steal signs in similar ways, and it remains unknown how well they succeeded. Astros players have endured years of opposing fans’ ridicule, with opposing pitchers’ fastballs thrown high and tight. Their collapse against the Washington Nationals in the 2019 World Series felt like a karmic return, if not justice.
The demise of baseball that Winning Fixes Everything brings into focus exists in all the ways Luhnow, like Beane before him, has functioned not as a pariah but as a prophet. Drellich doesn’t dilate it as much as he might, but he goes far enough to allow readers to imagine how the creep of corporate logic onto the playing field might optimize the game into something truly unwatchable. Baseball already suffers from the way analytics have pushed hitting to three inevitable outcomes—walk, strikeout, homerun—which produce games that are slow-moving, nearly actionless affairs. Beginning in 2023, the league addressed this by banning infield shifts, installing bigger bases, and adding the pitch clock, and these changes have succeeded in producing more hits and more base-stealing while reducing the average length of games. The root problem, however, is that baseball is a demonstrably more interesting product when run on less information, and while the new rules have juiced the drama in some instances, they also bring increasingly more automation to a game that for most of its existence has remained purposefully and pridefully non-automated.
It’s not surprising, though it remains depressing, that baseball’s current executives cannot advance the sport as an antidote to the forces that make our lives less lifelike—an enterprise that might actually increase fans’ attention—but instead can only imagine making it more similar to the other businesses they run. But league executives aren’t just narrow-minded in their pursuit of normalization and automation; their sights are set elsewhere. They, like their counterparts in the NBA and the NFL, have already calculated how their future profits will derive from turning fans into gamblers. Who cares about ticket sales or TV ratings when anyone with an e-wallet can win or lose a dollar with every pitch? The on-field product is secondary to this motive. This is why baseball probably cannot be rescued: the people in charge have already decided it is a more valuable asset the closer it gets to fantasy baseball. Where Billy Beane used data to uncover a different set of valuable players, Luhnow has advanced a vision of valuing players only as data. And for all the chastisement he received from baseball’s commissioner Rob Manfred, including a one-year suspension, he and Manfred have collaborated in making the game increasingly like a simulation. The logical conclusion of their approach is the slot machine. The desired consumer is not a fan, but an addict.
In the forward to Game Time, novelist Richard Ford writes, “the game’s nature doesn’t change much over a lifetime but maintains its casual, elemental sturdiness reminiscent of pastoral, patriotic origins.” He wrote those words in 2002. Winning Fixes Everything shows how, less than two decades after baseball’s invasion by Wall Street executives, that “elemental sturdiness” has all but melted away.