Political

The Extra 2%: how Wall Street strategies took a Major League baseball team from worst to first by Jonah Keri

The Extra 2 Percent by Johan KeriJonah Keri’s The Extra 2% is the story of what happened when three financial industry experts took over a failing baseball team with an unpopular owner and tried to turn it round. As the full title reveals, they did rather well.

The book came several years after the famous bestseller Moneyball, itself the tale of a similar turnaround of a small and financially limited team into one that could compete with – and beat – vastly richer rivals.

The Extra 2% is harder going than Moneyball for non-baseball fans, although the basic story – of spotting new ways of doing things in order to get a competitive edge – is of interest to more than just baseball fans.

Whilst Moneyball gives much more detail as to how its protagonists found their edge, The Extra 2% does a great job at explaining how jaw-droppingly bad in many ways the previous Tampa Bay Rays regime.

This book also has the extra interest of the financial backgrounds of the three people who took over and revolutionised the Tampa Bay baseball franchise. Financial experts have a rather checkered reputation, to put it mildly, especially when they have tried to apply their values outside of the financial markets. So Jonah Keri’s account is an interesting tale of both the pitfalls and benefits of taking basic financial attitudes such as seeking opportunities for arbitrage and applying them to areas very different from the financial markets.

Keri’s account shows how the wisest financial experts do not simply look to cut costs – the mistake made by the previous owner of the Rays – but rather look to make effective investments. Other than that, the book is rather silent on quite what the new team did to turn round the club so dramatically, perhaps in part because the publicity given to specific techniques in Moneyball made it easier for others to emulate them. The Rays team are wise in their reticence to explain the reasons for their own success.

Still, it’s an interesting book – and if you’re interested in the wider lessons about how modern sport works and how attitudes of mind formed in the financial markets work elsewhere, then the lack of hard-edged baseball analysis isn’t a drawback.

If you like this, you might also be interested in Moneyball – both the book and the film.

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Buy The Extra 2%: how Wall Street strategies took a Major League baseball team from worst to first by Jonah Keri here.

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