Extreme Moneyball: The Houston Astros Go All In on Data Analysis

Professional baseball is an insular business, so when Jeff Luhnow showed up for his first day of work as the St. Louis Cardinals’ vice president for baseball development, he already had two strikes against him: He was a former management consultant at McKinsey, brought in to shake up the organization. And the sum total of his baseball experience was the McKinsey fantasy league and a business school paper he’d written on how the Chicago Cubs could win the World Series.

It was the fall of 2003. Michael Lewis’s book Moneyball, about the statistics-driven approach of Billy Beane’s Oakland A’s, sat atop the bestseller list. It caused a number of owners to rethink their own approach, which provided Luhnow entry into a game that otherwise wouldn’t have had a place for him. “I wanted to make sure we were cutting-edge on all fronts and thought having someone from the outside would give us a fresh look,” says Bill DeWitt Jr., the Cardinals’ owner.