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How Wall Street Strategies Took a Major League Baseball Team from Worst to First
Random House
March 2011
On Sale: March 8, 2011
224 pages
ISBN: 0345517652
EAN: 9780345517654
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
What happens when three financial industry whiz kids and
certified baseball nuts take over an ailing major league
franchise and implement the same strategies that fueled
their success on Wall Street? In the case of the 2008 Tampa
Bay Rays, an American League championship happens—the
culmination of one of the greatest turnarounds in baseball
history. In The Extra 2%, financial journalist
and sportswriter Jonah Keri chronicles the remarkable story
of one team’s Cinderella journey from divisional doormat to
World Series contender. When former Goldman Sachs colleagues
Stuart Sternberg and Matthew Silverman assumed control of
the Tampa Bay Devil Rays in 2005, it looked as if they were
buying the baseball equivalent of a penny stock. But the
incoming regime came armed with a master plan: to leverage
their skill at trading, valuation, and management to build a
model twenty-first-century franchise that could compete with
their bigger, stronger, richer rivals—and
prevail. Together with “boy genius” general manager
Andrew Friedman, the new Rays owners jettisoned the old ways
of doing things, substituting their own innovative ideas
about employee development, marketing and public relations,
and personnel management. They exorcized the “devil” from
the team’s nickname, developed metrics that let them take
advantage of undervalued aspects of the game, like defense,
and hired a forward-thinking field manager as dedicated to
unconventional strategy as they were. By quantifying the
game’s intangibles—that extra 2% that separates a winning
organization from a losing one—they were able to deliver to
Tampa Bay something that Billy Beane’s “Moneyball” had never
brought to Oakland: an American League pennant. A book
about what happens when you apply your business skills to
your life’s passion, The Extra 2% is an informative
and entertaining case study for any organization that wants
to go from worst to first.
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