Winning Fixes Everything: How Baseball's Brightest Minds Created Sports' Biggest Mess

by Evan Drellich

The reporter who broke the Houston Astros' cheating scandal reveals how a baseball team could so dramatically descend into corruption, with never-before-told details of a broken management culture, the once-revered leaders who enabled it and the scandal itself. Baseball, that old romantic game, has been defaced and consumed by corporate America. As Moneyball -thinking and Ivy League graduates grabbed hold of the sport, the Astros set out to build a cost-efficient winning machine on the principles of the outside business world, squeezing every dollar out of every transaction, player and employee. In less than a decade, ex-Astros general manager Jeff Luhnow helped revolutionize the game. He created an environment that led to one of the worst cheating scandals in baseball history, a Shakespearean tragedy of innovation and failed change management. Through years of extensive interviews, former Houston Chronicle beat writer Evan Drellich, now a national writer for The Athletic, delivers the definitive account of baseball’s most controversial franchise and how a modern baseball team truly works—without the usual myth-spinning. Drellich reveals the rise and fall of the Astros to be a collision of subcultures. The team’s top boss was a former McKinsey consultant who lived on the bleeding edge with no guardrails. He hired outsider after outsider to change the organization as quickly and cheaply as possible. The wins piled up, and so did the cash for the billionaire owner with a checkered business past. But not even a World Series title could cover up the rot. All of it came at a cost to fans, employees, and the sport on a whole. But as Winning Fixes Everything makes clear, “The Astros Way” isn’t going anywhere. Drellich uses the saga of the Astros’ scandal to detail the evolution of baseball itself.

Genres: Baseball, Sports, Nonfiction, Audiobook, History, True Crime, Contemporary

368 pages, Hardcover

Published February 14, 2023

Reviews

[Heather V ~The Other Heather~ · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a read this was. I didn't know if I would get as much out of it as I hoped, only because I'd read (and loved) Andy Martino's earlier book on the same subject, CHEATED. Fortunately, while Evan Drellich obviously had to tread much of the same ground, his approach is different and he brings newer information to the table. He and Martino also seem to have had access to different people while writing their respective tell-alls, which -- to me -- means these two books should be read almost as companions to each other.



Yes, there's a spring training game on in the background.


So, for those who aren't baseball or sports fans, here's what happened: The Houston Astros, easily one of the most likable teams in 2017, won the World Series and brought hope to a state that had been devastated by natural disasters. It was the ultimate feel-good story. Until, that is, some rumours started swirling about things people had seen and heard surrounding that team...like the loud banging of a trash can every time their best hitters were at the plate. Could that banging have been a signal to the hitters indicating what pitch they were about to face? And if so, how the hell were the Astros so adept at figuring out what the opposing pitcher was going to throw every single time? Once the truth came out, the franchise was disgraced, the players were targets of the ire of every other team and fanbase, and faith in how the game was being played had been shaken to its core.


Drellich covers not only how the Astros went about their cheating in great detail, but he also talks about what other teams were doing around the same time, and how those teams somehow justified it to themselves while still acting righteously indignant about Houston's championship run. (We're looking at you, Yankees and Red Sox.) It examines a franchise that was rotten to its core from the very top -- owners, management, staffers, players. The interviews are fascinating, and the anonymous sources had a lot to say. It's also intriguing to me that Drellich seems to have arrived at a few different conclusions than what Martino did, not least of which being whether the once beloved and now (unfairly? deservedly?) reviled Jose Altuve took things further by wearing a wired buzzer inside his jersey so as to avoid detection while receiving information on pitches. It gave me food for thought after I'd thought Martino's account was definitive.




I both read the hardcover and listened to the audiobook in shifts, and I'd recommend both/either. I came away with zero complaints or any feeling that I needed more, although if in five years Drellich wants to write a follow-up with any new gems he's unearthed I wouldn't say no to that. This feels like a story that could very well keep on giving.


(Full disclosure, though: After my deep existential crisis about ex-Astro George Springer now being on my beloved Blue Jays...I broke and bought his shirsey last year. When I tell you there's never been a pro shop cashier witness to a bigger back and forth with some random woman holding two players' shirts, I'm not exaggerating. But I guess everyone deserves forgiveness eventually...?)



----
Original thoughts, April 2023: 4.5 stars rounded up - full RTC but a hearty recommendation in the meantime.

[X]

Objectively I would say this is very compelling and well-written.

I am encountering the same issue I encounter in so many books like this, which is that I find the focus on the bad guys - their motivations, their backgrounds, their choices - so infuriating to read. I know what they did is bad! Why not write a book about the people who are at least trying to do good instead?? Look, that does happen in the Introduction, which starts with the author’s experience struggling to get by as a sports writer while looking for opportunities to further investigate the Astros’ cheating, but by Chapter 1 the book is focusing fully on bad guy #1. And I just don’t want to read about that!

So basically I think read this book if you don’t have this particular frustration, avoid it if you do. DNF @ 5%.

[Bobby Montano · Rating 4 out of 5]

very good, interesting book packed with new info. the book offers good insight into how "modern" front offices work and advances a really coherent, believable narrative about how they got from point a to point b.

[Faith · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very detailed look at the Luhnow years in MLB, first with the Cardinals and then, most notoriously, with the Astros. Drellich does a fine job explaining all the technological advances the Astros used to improve the team, as well as the human cost of the ever-present search for economic efficiencies in the organization. But there are a couple of issues I couldn't quite shake as I read the book.

First, it's not entirely clear who the intended audience is. The book goes into incredible detail about new technologies like TrackMan and Edgertronic cameras and the various nerdy "data points" the front office was forever chasing to improve on-field performance. So, is this book for the baseball geeks? If so, Drellich did not need to describe what a slider is or who Carlos Correa is. Only the most casual fan would find that information useful. But would those folks really want to read so much "inside baseball" detail? Unlikely, I think.

Second, the way Drellich wrote this book, it's clear that he set out to make Jeff Luhnow the villain of the story. But he went way overboard in doing so. Drellich goes out of his way to show grace to many people in MLB, but he gives none at all to Luhnow. At one point, when talking about the trash-can system, Drellich notes that players who said they didn't like the system after the fact may be trying to rewrite their history. And that's fair. But would that not also be true for some who told him after the fact that Luhnow was universally disliked and everything was his fault? Certainly, the team culture under Luhnow was terrible and Luhnow a flawed corporate a-hole (like thousands of others in many American corporations). But how is it that someone like Brandon Taubman, a man who screamed at female reporters that he was thrilled to have DV abuser Roberto Osuna on the team, gets a redemption arc in which we are told that, actually, he didn't want to sign Osuna (only Luhnow did) and he was just under a lot of stress to impress Luhnow? But Drellich cannot find a single positive thing to say about Luhnow as GM? C'mon, now.

I don't doubt that Luhnow was a villain, but Drellich's attempt to paint him as a mustache-twirling, tie-the-damsel-to-the-tracks cartoon villain with no redeeming qualities just doesn't ring true ultimately. The problems with the Astros' corporate and baseball culture don't come down to just one man (or two, if we're counting Crane). It seems rather naive of Drellich to believe so.

[Alex Yurcaba · Rating 4 out of 5]

MONEYBALL II: THE REVENGE

I came away from this book with a couple different takeaways. For starters, the Houston Astros are an evil institution that should be completely reconstructed. More broadly, this book is an indictment of the fetishization of tech and analytics that has enveloped baseball in the last 25 years, and has also consumed the entire economy.

The dogged reporting here makes clear that so much of the often valorized cultures of disruption and innovation ultimately redound to finding creative ways to pay fewer people less money. It’s been surreal reading this in tandem with the news cycle about MLB’s new uniforms being cheap and hideous. The writing here makes clear that both of these phenomena (along with countless other similar anecdotes) derive from the fanatical willingness of large institutions to deliver 80% of the output at 20% of the cost.

As much as this is an indictment of the Astros and MLB, it is an indictment of the charlatans that have foisted crypto, NFTs, web3, and all other manner of technological commodification on the altar of disruption. It’s a very clear look at what happens to institutions when you scrape everything out of them but the ability to make as much profit as possible.

I think that even non-baseball fans will find a lot to enjoy here. Drellich’s prose is a bit clunky and hard to follow sometimes (hence the 4-star rating) but he does a very good job of clearly providing context and background information that make this accessible for all readers. I would definitely recommend it!

[Ric · Rating 4 out of 5]

Evan Drellich is possibly the most qualified to write about the Astros cheating scandal considering he’s the one who broke the story, so this was a fantastic read. I really liked how it dove into the management and front office and how they got to the point where they started cheating. And it’s also not surprising that Jeff Luhnow started at McKinsey considering they’re one of the more evil corporations out there, so him having no issue with cheating completely makes sense.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

A granular and utterly sordid story that is reported very well. The Astros are joined by the Red Sox, Dodgers, Yankees, and possibly Cleveland as teams reported to have used video and other methods to steal signs. The rancid culture of the Astros brass, with Jeff Luhnow at its head, seeped into the frame of the franchise like a 3rd floor overflowing toilet. Cubs first baseman Mark Grace once remarked “If you’re not cheating, you’re not trying hard enough” and Earl Weaver once told a struggling starter "If you know how to cheat, start now." Since the '90s, baseball has taken these maxims to extremes, and the heads of MLB have turned their heads as long as possible to it. From collusion, to steroids and PEDs, to sign stealing, to sticky stuff, baseball has reaped the rewards of cheating and then acted shocked SHOCKED to discover it's been going on.

[Matthew Sartor · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book did a great job documenting the rise of the Houston Astros. The discussion of how a workplace built on cost effectiveness, analytics, poor communication, and trying to innovate like a business can lead to cheating. I wish they were able to get more information on McKinsey’s role, but the insight into operations was really interesting. Only marks against is that the author came off as overtly negative, due to his poor relationship as team journalist with them, and that the wider scale of cheating could have been expounded upon.

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read for the 2023 PopSugar reading challenge. It's "A book about an athlete or sport."

Kind of a necessary corrective to Astroball: The New Way to Win It All, which, it turns out, was a hilariously credulous account that left out a whole lot of instances of assholes building a championship-winning baseball team in spite of years worth of short-sighted, counterproductive stuff, and oh yeah, let's not forget that the Reiter book left out that the Astros players were engaged in a brazen scheme of on-field cheating that involved illegally tipping batters about pitches by banging on a trash can.

Drellich, who was one of the two reporters who broke the story about that Astros cheating scandal, does not spend a ton of time in this book dunking on Reiter for being used for friendly press, though surprisingly to me it's not without the occasional shot at other baseball media figures. These people don't usually criticize one another, but there are a couple of instances he documents where he observes that the fact that the Astros hired a bunch of people from baseball media led to some of those people's friends giving the Astros undeserved friendly coverage.

The trash can banging is the sensational capper that probably got the book advance into Drellich's bank account, but what this really is, is a deeper look into the several years of a front office culture that ultimately led to the environment where players were cheating and no one within the organization had the inclination to make it stop. It's a story of consultant-molded and finance goons run amok, stripping away institutional memory in a short period of time (apparently against the best practices "change management" that gets taught by a Harvard professor), about how their outside-the-box thinking did bring them a lot of success over time until it ended up with everybody getting fired, except for the owner, who made his money in a logistics company that was possibly racist and also employed possible war criminal enablers.

I would not recommend this for someone who's not already got enough baseball awareness to know about the cheating scandal. It's pretty, well, inside baseball. That's right up my alley as a person who has some professional involvement adjacent to baseball journalism, and it more specifically cuts closer to home because one of the central figures, a former NASA math guru and blackjack dealer named Sig Mejdal, now works for my favorite baseball team, along with a more periphery figure, scouting executive Mike Elias, who's now the general manager of the Baltimore Orioles.

It is the hopeful delusion of Orioles fans that Elias and Mejdal will be able to bring the successful parts of the Astros championship-building without all of the toxic stuff. (They have definitely brought the "lose a lot of games for multiple years before eventually assembling anything resembling a quality roster" part, which fortunately started to turn around in the second half of last year and seems to be continuing in a positive direction as of my writing this in 2023.) Whether the Orioles will ever win a championship to make it interesting to write a book about them, or whether there are currently a whole lot of anecdotes to fill the early parts of such a book, is not something I am in a position know. It won't be me that writes that book, if it ever exists. Elias, as far as I could tell, is not directly quoted by name one time in this book. This made me curious whether he appeared in an anonymous quotation, or if his current job simply precluded him from either the interest in or opportunity to even speaking to the book-writing journalist. There's no allegation that Elias was one of the people in the inner circle for the awareness of the trash can cheating, nor is he central to any of the big "Wow, these people are all huge assholes" reporting. At least there's that.

Drellich's fire is not limited to the Astros with regards to the cheating scandal. He never quite uses the word "feckless" to describe the commissioner of baseball, Rob Manfred, but he thoroughly documents how Manfred seemed to allow the electronics-based cheating to flourish by nearly ignoring when two of baseball's marquee franchises, the Yankees and Red Sox, were engaged in an earlier form of cheating than what the Astros later did. There seems to have been a lot of favorite-playing. I don't like Manfred for a variety of reasons, most of which boil down to that he doesn't actually seem to like baseball in and of itself. A lot of people (mostly bitter Yankees and Dodgers fans, who lost to the 2017 Astros in the playoffs) seem to feel that Manfred should have somehow stripped the Astros of their 2017 World Series win in the official baseball records. Based on the reporting of this book, the Astros cheating was not ongoing in that postseason, so it's really tough to make that case. When it comes to sports, I am a big proponent that what happened is what happened and you can't take that away. It's the one thing I agreed with Manfred about regarding the whole affair.

The breaking of this news story was really earth-shattering in baseball. This book did not disappoint my expectations of finding out more about just what happened to get all of that started. It is NOT a "here's how I broke the story" book - other than a bit in the epilogue, Drellich does not get into the nitty gritty of the journalism process that was involved. The book builds on the breaking news but it is about a bigger picture with a rotten Astros culture, of which the cheating turned out to be just the most obvious public part. Not all rules are made to be broken.

[Harold Kasselman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Evan Drellich has done a fine job as an historian of one of baseball's major scandals-the 2017 Astors Code breaker debacle. His research and source material are first rate. So why am I giving him a four star rating? Simply because I found much of it to be tedious reading. I enjoyed it, but didn't love it. Most of the book focuses on the years leading up to the scandal, and centers on the main player Jeff Luhnow the GM, his assistants Brandon Taubman, Sig Mejdal, Mike Elias, and several other key players. I had difficulty following the names and their murky job titles, but much time is spent on it-too much. The story begins in 2011 with owner Jim Crane hiring Luhnow from the Cardinals to inculpate a new culture of analytics in the mode of the A's and Billy Beane. Luhnow's plan was a six year one which included deliberately tanking, roster manipulation for rookies, not spending on big money free agents, and concentrating on the draft selection and using analytics to measure the best picks. (Although he had at least two debacles in Mark Appel and Brady Aiken. The emphasis was on innovative technology, cutting costs, and winning at almost any cost (not monetary)-morally and unfairly according to Drellich and his sources. The culture created by Crane and his henchmen (Although Crane did get a pass from Manfred-owners of course often do) can be summed up in two paragraphs from the book: "The rules seemed to be an afterthought in Houston, if they were a thought at all. Innovation, improvements, data efficacy, that was the mindset Luhnow always fostered." And then, perhaps more importantly, this: "The Astros were run on conflict said one executive. That was Jeff's management style all over the organization." His style of management is reminiscent of the current Elon Musk cost cutting of personnel with indifference to the human empathy factor. For instance, he fostered what he termed "technology scouting" which meant a reliance on the latest technological innovations like Trackman for pitching and Blast Motion for hitting to appraise the players in high school and college. The result was chainsaw cutting of professional career scouts. Luhnow, brough in consultants from McKinsey and company-his old job-to evaluate players for the draft. He put the eyes and ears scout on a shelf with little to no input. His motivation? They could be scapegoats if the draftees were failures. So, the culture that Luhnow created was a team run on fear and paranoia. They got to the promised land and won two World Championships, but they cheated, obtained Robert Osuna, one of the worst DV abusers in baseball history regardless of public perception, humiliated a female reporter in the clubhouse on the eve of clinching the division in 2018, innovated and executed ways to add spin rates to balls with sticky substances, and of course illegally used electronic sign stealing with accompanying trash cans. (Bregman once tried to use a massage gun to generate noise. There is a lot more, but I have already taken up too much time. For those unaware of the depths of the corrupt culture and backstabbing, you may enjoy this more than I.

[Tyler Hoffman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating account of the Astros cheating scandal and the years leading up to it.

Most interesting parts:
- The culture they created was totally toxic. The toxicity flew under the radar while they were winning, but quickly came out once the cheating was exposed
- it wasn’t just the Astros. The Yankees, Red Sox, dodgers and others also had sign stealing operations. It was a gray zone in 2016-2017. What made the Astros different is that they continued with they’d sign stealing program in 2018 after the commissioner established a hard line
- McKinsey was involved with the Astros around the time the cheating started

The book was especially interesting in contrast to The Astros Way, which came out when they were on top of the world

[Jake Parker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Offers way more insight into the day to day activities of a modern day front office than I anticipated.

[Cole · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you like baseball it is a must read. If you lead people at all, this is a must read on building culture.

As a Houstonian it is a tough read but worth learning.

[Matt DiBari · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was sort of expecting a book documenting the 2017 season, a version of Cheated: The Inside Story of the Astros Scandal and a Colorful History of Sign Stealing from a Texas based writer.

I was pleasantly surprised to see that it was more of an expose on Jeff Luhnow's entire career. After the fallout of the scandal, when Luhnow, Hinch, Cora, and Beltran were all fired, I was intrigued by the general consensus that the other three would eventually be hired again in baseball (which they were) but that Luhnow probably never would be hired again (which, to this point, he has not.) I wasn't necessarily aware of Luhnow's personality and reputation until I read this book, and boy howdy does Drellich not hold back.

Very few people involved with the mid-to-late-aughts Astros come off well in this book, but no one, not even Jim Crane seems like the total anti-social ass that Luhnow does. It sort of answers a lot of the questions you may have had, and some you probably didn't.

I'd say my only real issue with the book is that its a niche book that sort of doesn't want to be a niche book. Baseball fans will read this book. And not particularly casual baseball fans at that. But way too much time is spent explaining the intricacies of baseball as if to someone whose never watched a game. A non baseball fan isn't picking up this book, so you don't need to waste paragraphs explaining how an average game works, ya know?

On the whole though, huge thumbs up.

[Meg · Rating 4 out of 5]

You may know me as a hockey fan, but I've been a baseball fan even longer. I grew up listening to Orioles games on the radio and keeping score while listening. That was the steroid era. There's no era of baseball (of sports generally) where there's not some cheating to win. But this book is about how far an organization is willing to push the boundaries to get an edge. I've been an Astros hater since they joined the AL, and this book breaks down the number of scandals where they sacrificed a lot of things to get to the top. It's absolutely fascinating for baseball fans. It ranges from the hacking incident with the Astros and Cardinals to sign stealing trash can banging to the extra sticky balls to the cutthroat front office culture.

[Jake · Rating 5 out of 5]

The genius of this book isn’t so much in how it exposes the Houston Astro’s’ cheating schemes from 6 years ago, which they employed to great success, but in how it exposes that behind the facade of their ostensibly fully-optimized, data-driven, modern management guru-speak front office bluster, lay very simple stinginess, lies, sexism, and abuse of power. It would be very accurate to assume that the same story holds true for similarly-branded businesses in far less heavily-covered industries than professional baseball.

[Lance · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anyone with even a passing or casual knowledge of recent baseball history knows about the scandal involving the 2017 Houston Astros. Using television monitors and banging on trash cans, Houston batters were able to know what type of pitch was coming to them and used that advantage on their way to the championship. However, there is much more about this scandal both before and after that World Series. Evan Drellich, the reporter who first broke the story of the cheating by the Astros, has written an excellent book on the entire background of the club.

There isn’t a lot about the actual cheating by the Astros during the games in the book. Instead, Drellich helps the reader understand why the Astros got to that point by examining the culture in both the locker room and the front office. It really started when owner Jim Crane hired Jeff Luhnow away from the St. Louis Cardinals as the general manager. Luhnow also brought with him Sig Mejdal and together they built an extensive analytics department. That was considered cutting edge at the time, despite the poor on-field record by the Astros.

Cutting also describes the economic principles of Luhnow as he brought in consultants from his former employer McKinsey. The team operated on a shoestring budget but grew in analytics to the point of tanking 3 seasons to eventually win a championship. It all worked, but as Drellich shows, it came at a huge cost.

What really struck me in this book was not so much the on-field records, play or even cheating by the Astros. The entire culture around the team, while some of it was well-known, still was quite a shock to me while reading this. The most egregious of these was the treatment of women by Crane, Luhnow and assistant GM Brandon Taubman, who went so far to glorify the Astros signing a pitcher who had been charged with domestic violence. Taubman did this in front of three female reporters, including one who wrote critical articles about the team signing that player.

Drellich’s reporting and writing about this aspect of the team, as well as the fallout in future seasons for the Astros even as they continued to be a dominant force in the American League, is excellent. He leaves nothing uncovered – even the controversy surrounding the penalties given to the Astros by baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred and the reasons why he acted as he did are well covered and explained. This book is an excellent one on top of other good books on this team that have already been published. What set this one above the others for me is the in-depth description of the entire culture inside the team, which was certainly NOT pretty.

https://sportsbookguy.blogspot.com/20...

[Jesse · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's a weird day when we have corporate-sociology books being written about sports. Probably appropriate as well, given the dominance of quants and hedge-fund types in creating a new culture so focused on squeezing out efficiencies and, in the case of the Astros, nickel-and-diming people everywhere they could to wring a few more millions in profit. The portrait that emerges here is of a grotesquely adversarial and competitive corporate culture where everyone involved was treated as instrumental and eventually cast aside, save for owner Jim Crane, whose own companies' misdeeds (a long track record of bigotry and, oh yeah, war profiteering) have somehow, magically, consistently failed to stain him. Also, just to make us feel bad, strong intimations that not everyone, but a bunch of other teams, were also cheating as energetically as they could. Feels like I'd knock it down a little just for the intimation that old-time baseball practices were a model of fairness and connection, which by implication highlights just how aggressive, awful, and aggressively awful the Astros' methods were.

[Johnnie Teng · Rating 3 out of 5]

finally got around to reading this, thanks ricketts for getting me a copy.

not the most compelling page-turner i’ve ever read but that’s maybe because i remember following all these events as they happened in real time so it wasn’t particularly new. as someone who worked for an mlb fo towards the tail end of this book i was able to see firsthand the fallout of the astros cheating scandal.

have a lot of respect for drellich’s work, but def not hard to see his personal experiences/biases seeping into his descriptions of the people in the book. does do a great job of retelling the events into an interesting story, especially for non-baseball audiences if they were to ever pick up this book.

[Chris Brook · Rating 3 out of 5]

Between reading this and Astroball: The New Way to Win It All a few years ago, I think I'm good on all the behind-the-scenes stuff re: the Astros for a bit. Good background here on all the sign stealing stuff that connects the dots as far as who was involved.

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Many people know the story of the Astros' sign-stealing scandal through, in no small part, Evan's reporting. What I enjoyed most about his book is how far back he goes in setting the events of 2017 up by documenting the way the Astros worked, for better and worse, under Jim Crane and Jeff Luhnow throughout the 2010s. There's an incredible payoff for all that groundwork in the final 100 pages. This was the best baseball book I'd read in years.

[Natalee Jobert · Rating 5 out of 5]

“It’s what happens when corporate America meets America’s past time.”

Between his years with the Houston Chronicle and in-depth research and investigation for The Athletic, Drellich is an Astros expert. Drellich not only details their 2017 cheating scandal but the front office culture and MLB policies, or lack thereof, which encouraged it.

[Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

2017 and 2018 world series have *’s just as I thought before reading this. Awesome deep dive on Houston’s toxicity dating back to long before the baseball world hated them. Hopefully the Yankees catch up to them soon.

[Lindsay Crosby · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not only a thorough look into the Astros sign-stealing scandal of 2017, but a FASCINATING discussion into how a baseball front office iterates and creates new processes to combine data with traditional scouting for player development purposes.

[Jibraun · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.75 stars

[Harrison · Rating 5 out of 5]

10/10 Great book. Great reporting. Much more than just the cheating scandal. This book is everything I want out of a sports book.

[Tim Blackburn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Astros Were Total Scumbags

Man, the Astros in the Jim Crane ownership era are the epitome of scum. The author does a great job of presenting facts and providing sources for his revelations. Interesting but sickening book to read.

[Anna Kim · Rating 4 out of 5]

*bangs on trashcan* revoke the chip

[Niklas Bergljung · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fantastic look behind the curtains of a modern front office in MLB. I'm not so delusional that I don't think similar things are happening in other front offices. Maybe not to this extreme but fear and paranoia seem to be a highly motivational tool. That is until it all breaks down. But that's ok as long as you're winning. Right?

[John Busby · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.25