Take Me Out to the Data Field

What if the most important baseball stories have become too boring to tell? This is the question that arises from Evan Drellich’s Winning Fixes Everything. The book details the Houston Astros’ 2017 sign-stealing scandal, the team’s over-reliance on data, and general culture of corruption. Drellich, a senior writer for The Athletic, broke the sign-stealing story in 2019. His expanded reporting in Winning Fixes Everything positions the book as an indirect sequel to Michael Lewis’s Moneyball (2004), which presented baseball’s analytics revolution through the innovations of Oakland Athletics’ General Manager Billy Beane and was later adapted into a movie starring Brad Pitt. Drellich’s latest charts that revolution’s bloodless denouement. The book is excruciatingly well-reported, yet the characters involved—primarily former Astros GM Jeff Luhnow—are so lacking in humanity that there is little to excavate. As such, Winning Fixes Everything reflects a game that has grown more bland as it has grown more analytical and automated.