YouSaid · the spoken record

Ben Reiter

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73
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2018-08-13
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2018-08-13
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  1. “You know, the Astros had a long term goal, but they knew they would not get there without the day-to-day decisions that they made, that each decision they made, everything they did each day would pile up and perhaps the outcome would be good, maybe it wouldn't, but that was not in their control. It was in control of what they did every day. So when I was writing this book, that's what I focused on. I didn't think about, oh, the hardcover is going to feel so great when I held it in my hands. It's going to be fun doing all these book events, although it certainly has been. I just thought, you know, I gave myself a goal of thirteen hundred words each day. I'm going to make these 1,300 words as good as I possibly can, and then I'm going to move on to the next day. And that's kind of what the Astros did. So I have to give them credit for inspiring my process in that way as well.”

    2018-08-13 · Capital Allocators · Ben Reiter – Moneyball 2.0 (Capital Allocators, EP.64) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “It's funny. I swear I'm not trying to bring this full circle or be cheesy, but it is from the Astros, and I applied it to writing the book, and it is applying process over outcome or focusing on process over outcome. I think a lot of us, Tad, as we grow up, are maybe overly achievement focused, you know, focused on the grade that's going to come at the end of the course or even how much money we're going to make at the end of the year. I know I probably was to some degree, at least the grade thing. I'm a journalist, so maybe not the letter.”

    2018-08-13 · Capital Allocators · Ben Reiter – Moneyball 2.0 (Capital Allocators, EP.64) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “You know, I tried to read academic journals when I come across, you know, they're often cited in news reports like, oh, a news study says this, new study says that. It's kind of quickly summarized in maybe 300 words or something like that. Usually that's not all there is to it. So if there's one that I might think and apply to my work or one that I'm just interested in, I'll try and get a hold of the full article. And it is true they're hard to find. Like you can't find them on the internet. You usually have to subscribe to journals that are very expensive unless you happen to be like a member of university or something and have that access. But what I found is if you just email the professors a lot of times, they'll sell it to you. And they'll talk to you about it because, you know, they're interested that somebody's interested in their work who's on their usual field. So that's actually in the Beltron chapter, I cite this study that these organizational psychologists did on organizational chemistry and things like that. And I establish a correspondence.”

    2018-08-13 · Capital Allocators · Ben Reiter – Moneyball 2.0 (Capital Allocators, EP.64) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “I mean, it's not like an aphorism or anything, but really is just, you know, I'm trying to say it in a way that's not like a catchphrase, but just, you know, kind of treat other people as you would want to be treated yourself, perhaps no great insight there. But I think it's very easy, especially in our current environment, our current political environment, to not use that as the golden rule. But, you know, for me, I try to.”

    2018-08-13 · Capital Allocators · Ben Reiter – Moneyball 2.0 (Capital Allocators, EP.64) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “It's not like personal risk, but I think in some ways writing this book as I did was a significant risk because I'd never written a book before. And here I am signing on to write something that, you know, is going to do really my professional reputation is going to depend on a lot. And I'm going to have to trust myself to be able to write this book and make it good in essentially three months. And I'm going to contractually agree to do this. And it was really a new world for me. Professionally anyway, you know, writing this book is certainly the biggest risk I've taken, even though in some ways it was kind of, I had no choice because fate seemed to command it.”

    2018-08-13 · Capital Allocators · Ben Reiter – Moneyball 2.0 (Capital Allocators, EP.64) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “As a baseball writer, I tend to travel the northeast corridor quite a lot, which means I tend to take Amtrak quite a lot. Well, I wouldn't say I'm a quiet car enforcer on Amtrak. I kind of leave that to usually older ladies to tell people to shut up or move to another car. But talking in the quiet car is like one of the most annoying things you can do to me.”

    2018-08-13 · Capital Allocators · Ben Reiter – Moneyball 2.0 (Capital Allocators, EP.64) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “You know, I'm not going to say the one you think. It was actually waiting for this for so long, but when Yale played Baylor in the NCA basketball tournament a couple years ago, we'd been waiting for them to make the tournament for like ever because it's always Princeton Penn more or less. So we went up to Providence where they happened to play. We probably wouldn't have gone if it had not been anywhere farther than that. And they beat Baylor and we were there in person, the Tory and Prince, who's not on the Hawks was the Star Bailer. He was furious afterwards. But I don't know. You know, I don't want to say I'm jaded, but I go to a lot of sports games and I don't tend to have like emotional reactions to them too much, but that one I don't.”

    2018-08-13 · Capital Allocators · Ben Reiter – Moneyball 2.0 (Capital Allocators, EP.64) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “He's been in exile for a long time from Chicago. He seems happy. I mean, he's also kind of as happy as somebody can be when they've not been to the city where they made their fame in like over a decade. So it's this kind of like strange saga and he looks very different, as anybody knows who's seen him recently, and he's kind of living this international life where he can go anywhere but Chicago. I always look for stories, always look for stories that are grounded in sports but for which sports is almost an excuse to tell a broader story that has implications for people in the world, you know, outside the lines, as they say.”

    2018-08-13 · Capital Allocators · Ben Reiter – Moneyball 2.0 (Capital Allocators, EP.64) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “As Kenneth Freed, like the backup now, I guess power for it on the Nets, that's probably something they should try to fix.”

    2018-08-13 · Capital Allocators · Ben Reiter – Moneyball 2.0 (Capital Allocators, EP.64) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “I don't know. It's hard to predict. I think that they don't have to make drastic changes right now. I do think perhaps Manfred, Rob Manfred, the Commissioner, is onto something about the need to develop stars, which is harder because it doesn't have this national international profile that the NBA has. But somebody told me the other day that Mike Trout has the same Q rating as Kenneth Farid, right? Like he's like the same fame level.”

    2018-08-13 · Capital Allocators · Ben Reiter – Moneyball 2.0 (Capital Allocators, EP.64) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “I'm somebody who thinks that reports of baseball's demise are kind of exaggerated. It is a different sort of business from the NFL and the NBA to which it's always compared. It's a much more local business. It's a much more like steady business. It's on 162 nights a year in every bar in the city. It's not like these big Super Bowl, you know, like football Sunday. It's just kind of always there. It's like a cumulative sort of thing. So business-wise, it's doing very well, you know, if you look at the numbers. I'm also not somebody who believes that, you know, like the commissioner seems to, like, you know, if the games are two hours and fifty-seven minutes on average instead of three hours and eight minutes, like that's going to be the savior for this. The kids are going to love it because it's like 11 minutes shorter or whatever I said.”

    2018-08-13 · Capital Allocators · Ben Reiter – Moneyball 2.0 (Capital Allocators, EP.64) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “But it seems like attendance is down, and the parallels in my world with active and passive management are almost uncanny. This paradox of skill that Michael Movison talks about, that because both sides are getting better and better and better, there's just hard to differentiate. What happens to baseball?”

    2018-08-13 · Capital Allocators · Ben Reiter – Moneyball 2.0 (Capital Allocators, EP.64) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Do you think the future of baseball is? I have young kids who find baseball too boring to watch. And it seems like in the last couple years, the more you have infield shifts, the more it becomes a game of home runs and strikeouts. Maybe I'm just biased because I watch the Yankees.”

    2018-08-13 · Capital Allocators · Ben Reiter – Moneyball 2.0 (Capital Allocators, EP.64) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Look, I talked to an analyst from the Indiana Pacers actually the other day who reached out to me after having read the book, and he was specifically interested in the chapter on Beltron and Team Chemistry because he said, you know, for us, like team chemistry right now is like the holy grill in the NBA, just what sets some teams apart in that way from others. Team chemistry, I guess, the best way to describe it is what factors lead a team to be more than the sum of its parts, right? Like when you take basketball players, you take one plus two plus three plus four plus five, like why are some teams much better than that sum?”

    2018-08-13 · Capital Allocators · Ben Reiter – Moneyball 2.0 (Capital Allocators, EP.64) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Improvement. And that means for the first time since Little League, he's been putting on minor league uniforms, traveling around to their minor league affiliates and sitting on the bench and actually like observing how these analytical techniques are being applied on the field where there are gaps. You know, it's funny you think like really are they accepting an analyst like this data guy on the bench in a baseball clubhouse? That's one reason why SIG is a good guy to do it because as you'll learn from the book there are a few more likable people in the world so even baseball players have to have to be fond of him.”

    2018-08-13 · Capital Allocators · Ben Reiter – Moneyball 2.0 (Capital Allocators, EP.64) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “The growth mindset. Like they do certainly select four players who they believe have that growth mindset. And in fact, one of the things they look for is good grades, funny enough for baseball players. I think good grades are a real indicator of a willingness to learn, which I guess makes some sense. But they've developed all sorts of techniques now to maximize a player's potential, really. Some of those are technology-based. You know, they've invested this thing called blast motion, which is a disc that you can attach to a bat with a gyroscope in it and an accelerometer and can instantly kind of record the precise shape of a player's swing every time. And you can go back and see it. You can see which swings are your best and try to replicate those as much as you can. Things like that. But one of the people leading the charge is actually Sig Midell, who's no longer their director of decision sciences. He's now been elevated to the position of special assistant to the GM process.”

    2018-08-13 · Capital Allocators · Ben Reiter – Moneyball 2.0 (Capital Allocators, EP.64) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “The data advantage is narrowing. I do. I mean, you don't hear very much anymore about, oh, this team's on to some new kind of way of analyzing data or discovered some new sorts of data. Of course, they're not going to tell you if they are, but it doesn't seem as if that's a way to differentiate yourself going forward. I think the way to differentiate yourself going forward is to, first of all, maintain your command of cutting edge data. You need it to underpin everything you do, but to focus your work on trying to understand and quantify as best you can these softer factors that we discussed earlier. And also one thing that the astros are really focused on right now is not necessarily improving how they select players or how they analyze players' past performances, but how they're going to improve the future performances of the players that they have. Now part of that is what we were talking about as far as”

    2018-08-13 · Capital Allocators · Ben Reiter – Moneyball 2.0 (Capital Allocators, EP.64) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “I took some leave. SI give me some leave. I mean, obviously the story reflects well on everybody there as well. So they gave me some leave to do it not very much.”

    2018-08-13 · Capital Allocators · Ben Reiter – Moneyball 2.0 (Capital Allocators, EP.64) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Long magazine features about six or seven thousand words, which are pretty long, to do in ten weeks. So, you know, one feature a week and you're done. It was not easy. It was tubbing the family, but that's how he did it.”

    2018-08-13 · Capital Allocators · Ben Reiter – Moneyball 2.0 (Capital Allocators, EP.64) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “It was compressed. It was. I guess what I would say is that I have been reporting the book and living the book in some ways since 2014. I have tons of reporting that I never used over the years as well, like notebooks filled with it. I maintained my relationships with the people in the book, like the players, front office guys over the years checked in as these various things were happening, 2015, 2016, 2017. I certainly had some more reporting to do after Jose Tuve thrudo Yuli Guriel to clinch that final out on November 1st. And I did a lot more, but it was really go time right then. So kind of sold the book about two and a half weeks later. I wrote 10,000 word proposal, I should say, and then sold the book off of that about two and a half weeks later. And then I essentially gave myself, you know, I'm a magazine writer. So I structured it as you have ten.”

    2018-08-13 · Capital Allocators · Ben Reiter – Moneyball 2.0 (Capital Allocators, EP.64) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “What was the process of writing this book like? Because I wrote a book a couple of years ago and I think about the time frame you go from the World Series to this book coming out a few weeks ago. That's pretty compressed.”

    2018-08-13 · Capital Allocators · Ben Reiter – Moneyball 2.0 (Capital Allocators, EP.64) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “I was trying to be quiet, man. I felt a bit out of place. I was kind of in the corner. I wasn't going to record it, so I was tapping notes on my laptop, you know, trying to type quietly so like Nolan Ryan wouldn't glare at me, something like that. But it really was exciting for somebody like me, first of all, knowing that this access would be really special and that readers would enjoy getting this sort of view that they never get. But also knowing that I'd been interested in what goes on in those rooms for a long time, and I'd asked a lot of teams over the years, can I just come fly on the wall, you know, just for a little bit, just see what the room is like. And they'd always said no. So to get a yes, to kind of start this whole thing off was really exciting. But yeah, I certainly don't want to stand out in any way.”

    2018-08-13 · Capital Allocators · Ben Reiter – Moneyball 2.0 (Capital Allocators, EP.64) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Well, sometimes things are always changing, things are always in flux. Like maybe a pitcher does not do this for a long time, then all of a sudden he starts doing it. Or maybe it's so small that it takes a real expert poker player like Carlos Beltran to even see it. Maybe computers one day will be able to see this. We're probably pretty close actually as far as motion analysis and things like that, but they don't have those tools quite yet. And I think the poker analogy is very apt because I draw this kind of extended blackjack analogy in the pool about properly taking advantage of probabilities in a way that a lot of people don't and kind of properly using your gut, which you really shouldn't in blackjack, but maybe sometimes you do. That's right. I mean, all these blackjack players they had in the front office knew that what they needed was a poker player to round things off. And that poker player was Carlos Beltron.”

    2018-08-13 · Capital Allocators · Ben Reiter – Moneyball 2.0 (Capital Allocators, EP.64) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “In a situation like that, it sounds a lot like a poker game. Sounds a lot like you're watching someone's tendencies and you're playing poker, you figure it out, you figure their tail, and then you execute on it. In this situation, it seems strange in reading it that wouldn't get exposed until the World Series.”

    2018-08-13 · Capital Allocators · Ben Reiter – Moneyball 2.0 (Capital Allocators, EP.64) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “But back when he was felt 100 mile an hour thrower, he realized that when he watched Cologne enough, he could see that he did things differently when he was going to throw a fastball versus ring ball. And if you know what even the hardest thrower is going to throw and you're a big league hitter, you can hit it. And Beltron, if you look at the stats, had a lot of success kind of all of a sudden against Bartolo Colonel.”

    2018-08-13 · Capital Allocators · Ben Reiter – Moneyball 2.0 (Capital Allocators, EP.64) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Think it's pretty common, although probably not on a stage like that, you know, and it certainly takes a certain type of guy who's been doing it long enough and is attentive enough to be able to read. It's called when pictures are tipping their pitches. Say sometimes before they throw, they're going to throw a curveball, they might hold the glove one way or hold their arm one way when they're going to throw a fastball, they might hold it a different way. And Beltron developed this long ago. You know, I have a story back when he was a young player trying to figure out did not have the sort of role models that he one day wanted to become. He did this with Bartolo Cologne back when Cologne was, you know, not the cologne we know now, the big sexy, right, who's kind of ageless.”

    2018-08-13 · Capital Allocators · Ben Reiter – Moneyball 2.0 (Capital Allocators, EP.64) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Really made that club come together, whether it's bridging the gap between Spanish-speaking players and English speaking players, teaching guys like Carlos Correa how to read pitchers on a pitch-to-pitch basis. Correa attributes seven of his 24 home runs last year directly to Beltron, like things he showed him about tendencies that pitchers were following and stuff like that. And then in the World Series, even though he didn't get a hit, I don't know how much he wanted to get into it, but he played a very major behind the scenes role as well.”

    2018-08-13 · Capital Allocators · Ben Reiter – Moneyball 2.0 (Capital Allocators, EP.64) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Stuff like that. And it's hard for the Astros to do that too, but especially after they kind of got good faster than they thought they would in twenty fifteen and made the ALDS and then lost to the Royals who had this extra quality, this kind of relentlessness, and everybody could see it, even though I don't know, a lot of statistically minded people would kind of scoff at it. But I think one of Jeff Luno's strengths was that he realized that it was real and that it was worth trying to find and invest in even if you didn't know exactly what you were looking for. Well, he did determine that he thought Carlos Beltran could still hold a lot of home runs at 40, which he actually didn't, but he signed him for another reason because there were a lot of guys who could hit home runs on the free agent market. There was only one guy who was 49 time all-star known as a great clubhouse guy wherever he'd been experienced virtually everything you could on a baseball field. That's why he brought in Carlos Beltran. And as I write in the book, I mean, in all sorts of real, if immeasurable ways, he, you know.”

    2018-08-13 · Capital Allocators · Ben Reiter – Moneyball 2.0 (Capital Allocators, EP.64) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “Well, I mean, Theo Epstein is another one who does recognize this, right? Because beyond Hayward, he also David Ross, there's actually an academic study that I cite in the book called the David Ross, or maybe it's called In Search of David. I think it's called the David Ross effect, actually. This guy hits, it's like a 230 hitting backup catcher, but this is somebody that Theo wants on his teams. He's on the Red Sox, he's on the Cubs for a reason. Same thing with a guy like Kyle Schwarber, who a lot of people think Theo is overly fond of. Well, there's a reason for it. And yeah, I think the reason that a lot of teams have trouble investing in this is because it's hard to know what it looks like, sort of. It's at least hard to define what it looks like. You kind of get a sense of certain guys who keep things together, keep things positive, are devoted to helping, especially younger players improve every day. But it's hard to put a number on it. Like, how much are we paying for this? How much is it really worth?”

    2018-08-13 · Capital Allocators · Ben Reiter – Moneyball 2.0 (Capital Allocators, EP.64) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “You wrote a lot in the book about this integration of the human element and culture onto the team as kind of that next iteration out of just the data centric money ball. I was always curious why more teams don't embrace the importance of call it a good clubhouse guy or as you describe Carlos Beltron in the book. In Verducci's book on the Cubs, he talks about Jason Hayward and the impact that he had, even though he wasn't hitting that well and sort of turning that last game around and sort of being instrumental in the Cubs Championship. And similarly, maybe tell a little bit of the story of Carlos Beltran on this team.”

    2018-08-13 · Capital Allocators · Ben Reiter – Moneyball 2.0 (Capital Allocators, EP.64) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “Going to remember. I think there's a little more to it than a coin toss. There are these, again, these kind of intangible qualities that allow people to perform in certain situations and others not to. But I don't know, maybe it's 51% to 49%. It certainly is a toss-up when you get all the way there.”

    2018-08-13 · Capital Allocators · Ben Reiter – Moneyball 2.0 (Capital Allocators, EP.64) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “Well, ultimately, right? I mean, look, the fact is the playoffs in baseball, there's a lot of luck to begin with. Because even a best of seven series, any team can beat any team in a best of seven series. It's not like the NBA, right? Where, I don't know, the Pelicans are, I guess they're pretty good now. The Mavericks this year are not going to beat the Warriors this year in a seven-game series. You could play those a thousand times. The Warriors would win every time. But it's certainly possible that the Padres can beat the Astros in a seven-game series. Maybe it would happen, I don't know, spitballing, but 30% of the time, something like that. They could do that. So yeah, there's certainly luck all the way through. When you come down in game seven, a one game playoff essentially has happened last year between the Astros and the Dodgers. You know, Sig Meidel, the data guy, calls it a coin toss competition, right? But it's a coin toss competition to decide what history was going to remember and which team history was going to.”

    2018-08-13 · Capital Allocators · Ben Reiter – Moneyball 2.0 (Capital Allocators, EP.64) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “But yes, they certainly identified in him some traits perhaps coming in part from the fact that he was that size and had never nothing had ever come easy to him in his whole life, at least athletically, they identified traits that said, you know, this is a guy maybe he'll be like a slap hitting middle infield type, but this is a guy we want to keep.”

    2018-08-13 · Capital Allocators · Ben Reiter – Moneyball 2.0 (Capital Allocators, EP.64) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “There's a lot of them really. One of them is how do you determine who you're going to keep? We've said that the organization was empty, more or less. The cupboards were dry. You come in, you have 300 players under contract all the way down from big leagues to AAA, AAA, single A, rookie ball, Dominican. Surely there have to be some players who you're going to hang on to. You're not going to burn the whole house down. But how do you decide and how they decided in large measure was again looking for this growth mindset, looking for players who had the personal traits that would allow them to become more than it seemed that they could become a five foot five inch second baseman slap hitting guy who got fifteen thousand dollars to sign out of Venezuela only after seventeen had passed on him. Like no, the Astros did not predict when they came in that Jose Tuve would become the MVP of the American League at that height.”

    2018-08-13 · Capital Allocators · Ben Reiter – Moneyball 2.0 (Capital Allocators, EP.64) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “Luno, you know, this is the sort of unquantifiable grit drive growth mindset type of things that they look for. So the scouting side of things really tipped that away from somebody like Byron Buxton, who was probably consensus number one that year towards a surprise pick Correa. And what do you know like three years later he comes into the big leagues at 20 and is the best shortstop in the league?”

    2018-08-13 · Capital Allocators · Ben Reiter – Moneyball 2.0 (Capital Allocators, EP.64) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “Looked awkward and uncomfortable when they were giving their postgame interviews through a translator, and he said, when I'm a baseball star, I want to be able to give mine in English. This is when he's eight.”

    2018-08-13 · Capital Allocators · Ben Reiter – Moneyball 2.0 (Capital Allocators, EP.64) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “However, and here you have a high schooler seventeen year old coming from this place where he doesn't have very good competition, where nobody else has come and had any success, whose whatever performance data you have on him is definitely unreliable. I mean, high school data is unreliable anyway for them, but coming from Puerto Rico is just like, who knows? So that was really a scouting call. And it was a scouting call of following him for years and years. And also, you know, sitting down. Jeff Luno is bilingual. He grew up in Mexico, although he's American. He sat down with Correa's parents and spent time with them and spoke with them and learned about how Correa every day of his childhood spent two hours with his dad practicing baseball no matter what it was usually the kid pulling the dad out to the diamond learned about how when he was eight years old he requested that his parents send him to a bilingual school because he would watch on TV and see how the Spanish speaking place”

    2018-08-13 · Capital Allocators · Ben Reiter – Moneyball 2.0 (Capital Allocators, EP.64) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “Yeah, well, Carlos Correa in some ways is the central decision that they made. This book, Astroball, is really about nine of the key decisions that they made along the way, of the many thousands that took them from cellar dweller to champion. Correa is in some ways the key one. This was their first number one overall draft pick in 2012. They didn't want to blow it. And they picked somebody who nobody saw coming as the number one pick. By the time of the draft, Correa was maybe top ten. Some teams had him as high as six. There's a long distance between six and one, but they picked him one. He wasn't regarded that highly in large measure because of the track record, not of himself, but because of players who were coming from Puerto Rico recently like he was. We think of Puerto Rico's baseball hotbed, you know, Roberto Clemente, Edgar Martinez, Padriguez. For a long time, there was no talent really coming off the island whatsoever.”

    2018-08-13 · Capital Allocators · Ben Reiter – Moneyball 2.0 (Capital Allocators, EP.64) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “Well, the Mets aren't bad on purpose, right? Unfortunately. But certainly there was probably pressure from around the league because of what he was doing. Maybe not the other owners they tend to act as a club, as we know more or less. But yeah, fighting off the union and media who are kind of ripping him for running a payroll that was under thirty million dollars at one point, like embarrassingly low. His argument would be we're saving for the future when we're not going to waste money on a team that's going to lose anyway. We're going to pay money to a team that's going to win. And to his credit, that's what he's done. I mean, the payroll has, you know, it's still around the league median, but there's room to grow and it certainly will have to grow as a lot of these young stars as it comes time for them to get paid. But yeah, I mean, there's pressure from everywhere. There's social pressure. There's business pressure. No one's coming to the park. I don't know if you're losing money because the perils are so low, but you're certainly not making a lot of it either.”

    2018-08-13 · Capital Allocators · Ben Reiter – Moneyball 2.0 (Capital Allocators, EP.64) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “I think there could be. Yeah, I'm not sure I know enough about, well, I know something about Jimmy Haslam of the Browns, but I don't know enough about maybe some of the other owners. But look, he is somebody who arrived in Houston in a U-Haul from college, his first company called Eagle Logistics. There were two employees receptionist and himself, right? So he built this business of his into one that was a fortune thousand business, shipping and logistics. Now he's got a whole portfolio of them. So he certainly has patience. And also being in that business, he kind of understands the power of data and things like that to make a real difference.”

    2018-08-13 · Capital Allocators · Ben Reiter – Moneyball 2.0 (Capital Allocators, EP.64) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “And I said, you know, like did you ever for a minute get cold feet about any of this? He said, he said he looked me in the eye. I mean, obviously he's not going to say anything else in this particular setting, but he said, you know, I told Jeff every day the plan, stick to the plan, stick to the plan, and that's what he did. So that's certainly a lot of faith from a guy like that.”

    2018-08-13 · Capital Allocators · Ben Reiter – Moneyball 2.0 (Capital Allocators, EP.64) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “who's the owner of the team. This was the plan that Geofflino presented to him when he sat down with him in twenty eleven to interview for the job. He made like a twenty two or twenty three page essentially guide to what they were going to do and why they had to do it. Why they had to do it was largely because the cupboards were so bare when they arrived there. They had the worst major league team with very few assets whatsoever, and they had recently been ranked as the worst minor league team. Obviously there were a minor league system, I should say. Obviously there were a few pieces who would develop into something George Springer, Dallas Keichel Jose Altuve, but they didn't have anything there either. They're coming into a franchise with no assets. So what do you do? This is how we saw it going forward, and it was terrible. It was embarrassing. Jim Crane was kind of a pillar of the Houston community. Probably couldn't go out much for several years, but he stuck with it. I caught up with Jim Crane on the field in Los Angeles after game.”

    2018-08-13 · Capital Allocators · Ben Reiter – Moneyball 2.0 (Capital Allocators, EP.64) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “I think it might work. I mean, it worked for the Sixers eventually, right? I think who knows, but it still might work for the Cleveland Browns. But you're right, Sam Hinkey was fired before he could see it through, and the Browns fired their GM as well, Sashi Brown, before they could see it through. So I think one of the things that really set the Asters apart was patience, you know, was a stomach for the embarrassment and the torture that they had to go through for all those years and a confidence in it, right? Not to deviate from the plan. A lot of the credit for that has to go to Jim Crane.”

    2018-08-13 · Capital Allocators · Ben Reiter – Moneyball 2.0 (Capital Allocators, EP.64) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “Yeah, yeah. I'd love to dive into some of the aspects of the book. So let's start with talking about tanking. My favorite corollary of late is the Philadelphia 76ers, where they had this great season, but it was shortly after the architect of the process got booted out of the seat. What worked in baseball for the Astros? What part of tanking worked for them that other teams weren't able to do at the time?”

    2018-08-13 · Capital Allocators · Ben Reiter – Moneyball 2.0 (Capital Allocators, EP.64) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “That's right. Well, that's probably where the greatest successes come from. I think there's probably a lot of great failures that come from that too. So that's the risk. I guess the idea is if the data landscape has flattened, if everybody has the same numbers to some degree, everybody's kind of got the same processes, where are you going to make a difference, right? Where can you win, essentially? And a lot of that comes down to what you can't quantify, comes down to your gut. But certainly that's where a lot of risk comes into. Because when you depart from these models, you're introducing a great deal of volatility. And as you know in your line of work, volatility can work both ways.”

    2018-08-13 · Capital Allocators · Ben Reiter – Moneyball 2.0 (Capital Allocators, EP.64) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “And where does that seesaw tip? Because, again, the corollary with quantitative investing is a good one in the sense that there's this sense that this works because of the discipline to the data, because of the willingness to be long-term. And yet, at the end of the day, we all point to the exceptions to those rules.”

    2018-08-13 · Capital Allocators · Ben Reiter – Moneyball 2.0 (Capital Allocators, EP.64) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “lack in his clubhouse of chemistry, of leadership, and he's smart enough to know just because you can't quantify it doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. He made that decision too. So it's really not just about a team that has found a rigid system by which to win, although that certainly is the underpinnings of everything. It's about human beings who are essentially making big calls when it mattered most that they worked out. Yeah.”

    2018-08-13 · Capital Allocators · Ben Reiter – Moneyball 2.0 (Capital Allocators, EP.64) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “But I really think what tipped them ultimately was the fact that essentially their gut was what made the final call, like Jeff Luno making informed but gut decisions to really put the finishing touches on this champion, whether you look at acquiring Justin Verlander with two seconds to go before the waivers deadline on August 31st last year. And I tell that story in this book kind of like a TikTok taking you through how that happened. That was essentially like a gut feel. Like, yeah, there was some analytics supporting it. A lot of analytics suggesting you should not do this. Like, this is a 35-year-old picture. You're giving up three prospects for he's making $26 million a year. This is not a smart move. But he did it, bringing in Carlos Beltron, recognizing that a 40-year-old, you're paying sixteen million dollars. Again, that's not something that any analytics would suggest, yes, there's a great track record of success for doing this. But Luno sensed that there was this unquantified.”

    2018-08-13 · Capital Allocators · Ben Reiter – Moneyball 2.0 (Capital Allocators, EP.64) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “I think it's really the purity and the depth to which they went to apply these ideas first of all. I mean, part of the reason people are so mad about it was because it was so extreme and I think people thought it was arrogant, right? They're often accused of being arrogant, but they had such a confidence in their system that they kind of went far beyond what almost any other team, almost any other fan base, what almost any other owner would stomach, which I think was one of the reasons they had such great results, you know, results that the pirates never quite attained. I also just think that this concept of blending human inputs with data inputs, yes, like they've come up with an incredibly integrated way of doing it, but that's not where it ends. That doesn't explain everything. There are certain wrinkles of fate. There's a lot of room for luck in their process, and I talk about it in the book some of the ways they got lucky and some of the ways they got unlucky.”

    2018-08-13 · Capital Allocators · Ben Reiter – Moneyball 2.0 (Capital Allocators, EP.64) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “I always love Travis Chachek's book, Big Data Baseball, which came out, I guess, four years ago. Pittsburgh pirates, similar kind of money ball 2.0 concept. What's different about how the Astros did things than the pirates or Verducci's book on the Cubs from last year?”

    2018-08-13 · Capital Allocators · Ben Reiter – Moneyball 2.0 (Capital Allocators, EP.64) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source