Houston Astros: Astroball is a must read for every baseball fan
Astroball recently hit the shelves. Let’s take a look why every baseball fan should give it a read, let alone every Houston Astros fan.
In 2014, Sports Illustrated writer Ben Reiter predicted that the Houston Astros would win the 2017 World Series by placing them on the cover for SI. Three years later, the prediction came true and now, Reiter has written a book called Astroball: The New Way to Win It All.
Astroball sounds like a name of a toy that might’ve been used on the Jetsons if you asked me. But in all fairness, I didn’t think much when I first saw this book. Actually, when I first saw the title of this book I thought it was just going to be Moneyball 2.0.
The movie Moneyball starring Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill that dealt with the Oakland A’s. It’s an all-time classic. The premise of the film deals with a general manager trying to build a winning baseball with a limit budget. He uses more advanced stats that many scouts don’t consider when evaluating players and it pays off well.
When you think about Astroball and Moneyball, the book written by Michael Lewis, there are similarities here. Both stories deal with an underdog organization trying to find ways to build a championship baseball team. They both look into the same advanced statistics in finding talent while dealing with other maneuvers for in-game scenarios or high-percentage situations that would play out to their favor.
But there is one major difference between the two books. Moneyball was a way to allow sabermetrics manage players through technology without much human interference. Astroball was a way to merge both sabermetrics and humans to exist as one.
My Book Review
I must be honest here. If I were a student in English class asked to write a review on a book I read, this is one I probably wouldn’t have written on. Two reasons as to why are that it took me a while to read this that I had to go over a few things to write this down. The other reason is that I’m not as tech-savvy with all the baseball technology though I have worked for a company that uses operations to determine pitch velocity and bat speed. So in advance, this entry might not make sense. But I’ll try to convince y’all to read this book if you already haven’t done so.