Drellich's Book Focuses on Front Office Culture, But, Oddly, Not on Results

The new book Winning Fixes Everything shows the depth of Jeff Luhnow's amorality. But that doesn't mean that baseball itself is crippled, or that it can't reform itself.

In the introduction to his book Winning Fixes Everything: How Baseball’s Brightest Minds Created Sports’ Biggest Mess, Evan Drellich writes that the “full-steam-ahead worship of innovation in [baseball] that arose two decades ago when Moneyball was published” designed to push teams toward victories raises “questions too few people were asking in the throes of massive change.”

Among these questions, Drellich asks “what attention should be paid to…the impact on key stakeholders, like the fans or the players themselves, or even the average workers who make average salaries in the industry, like scouts and coaches and back-office staff.” Drellich believes the push toward analytics "came without full context in the press.”

In short, one of the themes of Winning Fixes Everything is that the collective baseball public should focus more on “not just the result, but the means.”

Drellich’s focus on the “culture” of baseball is hard to me to latch onto, especially as an Astros fan. The shift of the Astros toward an analytically-focused and bleeding edge innovator in the sport is something I personally desired for years. I’ve been a proponent of analytics since I first read a Bill James book in 1987. I want my team to win and the way to win is to analyze baseball better than the other 29 franchises so you can make the best decisions. The Astros have a checkered history—at best—of doing this.

In many ways, Drellich’s book serves as a rejoinder (he might think of it as a corrective) to Astroball, Ben Reiter’s book that was published in the wake of franchise’s first World Series title. Reiter did extensive reporting on the Astros front office, its analytical innovations, and decision making process with the purpose of explaining “the new way to win it all,” as the book’s subtitle says.

Drellich’s book is more deeply reported than Reiter’s book, thanks to a wider variety of perspectives from Drellich’s more numerous sources. But Drellich is not interested in leveraging his sources to examine the effectiveness of the various data gathering, player development, or scouting experiments that the Astros front office tried throughout Jeff Luhnow’s tenure as general manager.

Instead, he is interested primarily in the effect of the front office on a wide variety of human relationships, with Drellich being quite negative about the culture that had developed in the Astros front office.

Drellich’s argument is that I should care as a baseball fan about the effect a broad set of changes in the game have had on the product on the field. But I can’t get there. And the fact that my team not only embraced these many changes, but also succeeded because they embraced these changes, I favor a balance toward more analytical and value-focused thought in baseball decision making.

Can analytical attitudes dehumanize players, managers, coaches, scouts, and other team staffers? Absolutely, and Drellich provides detailed reporting on how this occurred with the Astros while Jeff Luhnow served as GM.

But the question becomes how to change such behaviors? On this, Drellich is a pessimist, attributing a wide variety of front office efforts to optimize the game—some of which have been constants for years—to a diminished product on the field.

I disagree about the diminished product on the field, in part because watching my team succeed makes me think that the product of analytical thinking can be really fun to watch.

And the implication of Drellich’s negativity on the way modern baseball is played and the fact that rule changes were needed to fight against analytical optimization is that the way to fight it is through shame and moral suasion.

But I’m skeptical that the behavior can change because people are hectored into changing by moral suasion, especially when their incentives are aligned against the more ethical choice. Instead, I think it’s more effective to change structures and rules to try to shift people’s incentives.

Little New Information on Sign Stealing

Drellich is of course a former Astros beat writer for the Houston Chronicle and the reporter—along with Ken Rosenthal—who broke the story of the Astros sign stealing and trash can “banging scheme” at The Athletic.

But there is almost no new information in this book about the Astros efforts to steal signs from other teams and communicate them to their batters. This probably says more about how thorough the reporting has been about the sign stealing in 2017, with much of that coming from Drellich and Rosenthal and other parts from the public portions of Commissioner Rob Manfred’s public report on MLB’s investigation into the Astros.

There are some new details in the book about the possibility that that the Dodgers stole signs, and further confirmation that the Red Sox did. But none of these efforts--or those conducted by other MLB teams--were as extensive as what the Astros did. And surprisingly, Drellich thinks while sign stealing may have been rampant among a handful of playoff teams, it was not a widespread league practice.¹

The reporting in Winning Fixes Everything leaves us in the same place we were previously with sign stealing. We know that a number of teams were using video cameras to steal signs and decode sign sequences, but there is no evidence that any went as far as the Astros in the depth of the system.

A Focus on Front Office Culture, But Not on Winning

While the sign stealing scandal provides the raison d’etre for publishing the book, it is not the focus of most of the book itself. Instead, the book focuses on the culture and personalities that made up the Astros front office in the 2010s, centered on general manager Jeff Luhnow.

In many ways, the book is a personality study into Luhnow, focusing on how an outsider—Luhnow’s background is in the business world—managed himself inside the insular world of baseball. Luhnow thus serves as a case study for how front offices are changing in modern baseball and using insights from the business world and analytic and mathematical skills to change how front offices make decisions.

Drellich is skeptical of the effects of these efforts, emphasizing how modern front office decision making can serve as a front to reduce player salaries and discussing how Luhnow considers most employees of the front office disposable and acts on that belief.

I look at the changes in front office thinking as long overdue and, in the Astros case, a key element of how the team was able to rise from the ashes of three straight 100 loss seasons to six straight ALCS appearances.

The “Sign Stealing Book” is really a personality study of former Astros GM Jeff Luhnow

Jeff Luhnow’s Amorality

But where Drellich and I most agree is in our assessment of Luhnow as a human being. He’s not trustworthy and he lacks a basic understanding of how other people will react to him and to the changes he pushes. Luhnow’s inability to understand others helped to create a number of public relations snafus for the Astros over the course of his term.

Many of these were things that were already well reported previously—Mark Appel’s infamous bullpen session at Minute Maid Park, the attempts of Luhnow to sign minor leaguers to low-ball major league contracts, the Brady Aiken contretemps.

But Drellich does have a new piece of reporting in the book²—that Luhnow deleted information from his phone when he learned that MLB would be investigating sign stealing. Luhnow claimed then and now that he only deleted personal information from his phone. In general, Luhnow is not a credible figure, but Drellich provides detailed evidence about the times and the amount of data wiped from Luhnow's phone. It should remove any reasonable doubt that Luhnow is lying.

For a guy whose goal was to determine the value of everything, Luhnow never figured out that good personal relations is a way to create value. His failure to do so complicates his relationship with his players, his owners, other general managers, and, most notably, other members of the front office. The Astros front office was a less well-oiled machine and instead riven with infighting and factions.

A Factional Front Office

As an Astros fan, I found the most important new information in Drellich’s book focuses on the infighting and discontent within the Astros front office while Luhnow was in charge. Luhnow has a looser hand in the front office than has been presented in other media accounts.

Evidence for the Luhnow’s loose hand is provided when Drellich reports that on the final day of negotiations to acquire Justin Verlander in 2017, Luhnow was—according to an Astros employee—”largely unavailable on vacation” and “hard to get in touch with.” Instead, these sources give great credit to manager AJ Hinch for the Verlander deal. “The deal was dead and A.J. basically reinvigorated that deal by back-channelling conversations” with his contacts in the Tigers front office.

The account of the Verlander deal in Astroball centers on Luhnow, making the deal searching for good wifi and interrupting a dinner party at his in-law’s house in Los Angeles, where Luhnow and his family had decamped in the wake of Hurricane Harvey.

Luhnow being hard to get a hold of—and leaving underlings to deal with key situations while out of town—is a recurring theme of Drellich’s reporting.

Though there is a time when Luhnow is clearly in charge and active—and going it along in both his choice to pursue a player and in negotiating the deal to get him. And unsurprisingly, it is the trade for Roberto Osuna, who, you will recall, was serving a 75-game suspension for domestic violence when the Astros acquired him at the trade deadline in 2018.

Drellich quotes an Astros executive saying that among other members of the front office “everyone was a no or a soft no.” According to another executive “Jeff had agreed to a trade where Jeff ousted his whole decision-making group because he didn’t like what they had to say.”

These details may be new, but they were completely expected.

Is the Problem Bigger Than Luhnow’s Personality?

The focus on Luhnow and his amorality leads me to a question that is not addressed in the book—how much of the problem that Drellich identifies—”this is what happens when corporate American meets America’s pastime”—is Luhnow himself?

Or to put it another way, there a number of teams run by the analytic principles and value-laden calculations that the Astros have under Luhnow. None have had the number of PR snafus that the Astros did under Luhnow. The Dodgers don’t have this many. The Braves don’t. Theo Epstein’s teams didn’t. I’m not sure what errors the Rays baseball operations department has ever made in valuing humans.

Heck, the Astros had a ton fewer PR issues under James Click’s regime than it did under Luhnow. And I’ve chosen a list of very successful franchises to show that Luhnow’s method is not necessary to win. He didn’t have to push as hard as he did or ignore human feelings as much as he did. It hurt him personally—it’s a key reason no one is interested in hiring him in baseball since Jim Crane fired him, and it hurt the Astros as a franchise.

Optimizations Require New Rules

Of course, many of the issues that Drellich raises are serious ones that broadly affect the game as whole.

In his epilogue, Drellich quotes an anonymous “GM in the sport” as saying “Optimizations come at a cost…The fans have suffered and the game has suffered when this shit started creeping directly onto the field. Whether it was sticky stuff, or sign-stealing, or just three true outcomes [strikeouts, walks, and home runs]. In the next paragraph, Drellich mentions “tanking and service-time manipulation.”

And maybe this gets to why Drellich’s thesis strike me as odd. Shouldn’t I want my team to optimize? Why should I be mad that my team figured out how to strike more players out? Or to shift their infielders to prevent more base hits?

There is an obvious and constant tension between doing what’s right for my team and doing what’s right for the sport. But it’s not the job of teams in their effort to win games to make the game best for everyone.

That optimizations lead to rule changes make sense to me. People don’t change their attitudes and behaviors out of the goodness of their hearts. They change them because incentives change how they go about their business.

Take service-time manipulation, an issue which Drellich mentions in the quote above. A classic example of service time manipulation is George Springer. The Astros held Springeer out of the majors until their 15th game of the 2014 season. By doing that, they were able to hold on to Springer for an extra season before he became a free agent after the 2020 season.

This manipulation cost Springer playing time in 2014 and money later when he became a free agent one year older than he should have. The Astros behavior in 2013 and 2014 is not admirable, and they cost us as baseball fans—we didn’t get to see the best possible product on the field.

But the choice was easy for the Astros in 2014. They traded 14 games of a weaker team in 2014³ for a full season of Springer in 2020. In 2014, the Astros were destined to finish well out of the playoff chase. In 2020, Springer was the best player on a team that scratched out a playoff spot before going on a big playoff run.

The new Collective Bargaining Agreement signed in March 2022 addressed service time manipulation by awarding draft picks to teams if their players receive a full year of service time and who win a Rookie of the Year award get an additional first round draft pick. That helped urge the Mariners to promote Julio Rodriguez for opening day in 2022, and prompted teams with high ranking prospects to promote them at the end of 2022 to get them acclimated to the majors so they could try to win the ROY in 2023.

One of those top prospects is Gunner Henderson of the Orioles who had a 123 OPS+ in 132 plate appearances in August and September 2022. He will be in the Orioles opening day lineup this year and is a top contender for the AL Rookie of the Year Award. And his general manager is Mike Elias, who served as Scouting Director in Luhnow’s front office.

I don’t think Elias became a better person when he left the Luhnow fold. But I do believe he has changed because his incentives have.

I Still Stan the Analytics Revolution

The reporting in Winning Fixes Everything is impressive and well-done. There are a wide variety of sources both anonymous and on record that Drellich uses to paint a detailed picture of the culture of the Astros front office.

Reading the book taught me a lot more about how the Astros front office worked (or didn’t) while Luhnow was GM and give me a lot more context on the decisions the front office made.

But I part from Drellich in his analysis of what this all means. Drellich dislikes the corporate takeover of baseball in the last generation because it has led to a product that is less aesthetically pleasing to him on the field and which prioritizes value off the field (this part is not new in baseball history; the owners have always been cheapskates).

I find the the analytical revolution in baseball overdue, especially since it took our team so long to embrace it. Teams should optimize their operations on the field, in player development, and in the front office. They’re competing to win the World Series after all.

1. Drellich contrasts this to the use of “sticky stuff” by pitchers, which was used by nearly every single team in baseball, if not every single pitcher.

2. This information actually came out in August 2022 when The Athletic published an excerpt of Drellich’s book.

3. The corresponding move to calling up Springer was DFA’ing Lucas Harrell, who had gave up 14 runs in 3 starts in April 2014. In 2013, Harrell led the American League in walks. God, the nadir of this franchise was so bad.