Book Review (sort of): Winning Fixes Everything

I finally got around to finishing “Winning Fixes Everything: How Baseball’s Brightest Minds Created Sports Biggest Mess”, by Evan Drellich. Drellich, who covered the Astros for the Houston Chronicle during the Jeff Luhnow years and during the cheating scandal, takes us behind the scenes of the Astros organization during that period – the good, the bad and the very, very ugly.

What follows isn’t so much a review as it is my takeaways from it (hence the caveat in the title of this post). There are a few mild spoilers ahead, so tread lightly if you plan on reading the book without my two cents in your pocket.

In no particular order…

I’ve lost a lot of respect for Carlos Beltrán. I was always a fan of his game, in part because he clearly was a smart player, but his role in both the cheating itself and in being the clubhouse presence that made it virtually impossible for anyone to speak out against it is hard to let go.

I learned a lot about whistleblowers in general, and why they’re so rare – in all fields of life, not just baseball. But to use baseball as an example, if you’re a 23-year-old rookie who’s trying to establish yourself as a big-league player and you don’t like what veteran players are doing – especially ones with the stature of Carlos Beltrán and Justin Verlander – you don’t have any realistic choice besides acceptance. The alternative is getting into a clubhouse spat with a future Hall of Famer, which means you’re the one who’s getting a plane ticket out of town, not the future Hall of Famer – and with a rep of not being able to get along in the clubhouse. Whistleblowing, in essences, is career suicide.

Speaking of Verlander…Of course, if you’ve made close to a half billion dollars in your career, won a Rookie of the Year, an MVP, three Cy Youngs, two World Series, and married a super model, you can laugh it off when you learn your new teammates lit you up earlier in the season because they were cheating. But disregarding that some of your former, and not yet established teammates, got lit up and sent down to the minors through no fault of their own, casts you in an unflattering light. (MBP writes, understatedly…)

Jeff Luhnow and Jim Crane, who always seemed detestable from the outside looking in, are even easier to dislike after reading this book. Their ability to consistently depart from what would be considered normative behavior is only surpassed by their ability to avoid taking responsibility for it.

(Somewhat coincidentally, I also just finished “When McKinsey Comes to Town” about the infamous consulting firm where Luhnow got his start and who Luhnow hired to work with the Astros. Turns out McKinsey’s suggestions of “Scruples? What Scruples?” and “Laws are meant to be broken” unsurprisingly spread to far more important aspects of our society than a baseball team.)

Unsurprisingly, the behavior of Alex Cora was even worse than Beltrán’s. Needless to say, Cora doesn’t have the tiniest little fraction of Beltrán’s resume, which makes him even more annoying than I already find him.

The fact that Joe Girardi may have inadvertently alerted MLB to his own team’s cheating in 2017 when the Yankees and Red Sox threw official allegations of cheating at each other is hysterical to me in hindsight. It also makes me wonder if that were an issue in his dismissal at season’s end.

The book is a good read for the modern baseball fan. There was a stretch or two in which the in fighting and drama in the Houston front office dragged a little but since it’s central to the story I understand why Drellich needed to comprehensively cover it. That said, the division between technology and “eye tests”, between data and intangibles, and maybe more importantly – what exactly is cheating and what isn’t in baseball circles – definitely kept my interest. You can get a closer look at the book HERE.

If you’ve read it and I missed something, let me know. Leave a comment below or yell at me @mybaseballpage1 on Twitter and/or the “My Baseball Page” on Facebook.