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    The Extra 2%: How Wall Street Strategies Took a Major League Baseball Team from Worst to First
    Unavailable
    The Extra 2%: How Wall Street Strategies Took a Major League Baseball Team from Worst to First
    Unavailable
    The Extra 2%: How Wall Street Strategies Took a Major League Baseball Team from Worst to First
    Audiobook9 hours

    The Extra 2%: How Wall Street Strategies Took a Major League Baseball Team from Worst to First

    Written by Jonah Keri

    Narrated by James Lloyd

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    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. By quantifying the game's intangibles, they were able to deliver to Tampa Bay an American League pennant. This is an informative and entertaining case study for any organization that wants to go from worst to first.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDreamscape Media Audio
    Release dateMay 24, 2011
    ISBN9781611202366
    Unavailable
    The Extra 2%: How Wall Street Strategies Took a Major League Baseball Team from Worst to First

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    Reviews for The Extra 2%

    3.5/5

    92 ratings19 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Quick read of a solid baseball story. The work itself is somewhat repetitive, and of course the Rays have again fallen on hard times after Friedman, Maddon, and company have moved on. Keri's Up, Up, and Away is a much better book.
    • 4/5
      The Extra 2%: How Wall Street Strategies Took a Major League Baseball Team from Worst to First is an interesting look at the business of baseball. Jonah Keri tells the story of how the Tampa Bay franchise came to be, how it quickly became the laughing stock of the league due to inept management, and how a change in leadership turned it around in an amazing way. Includes plenty of details on the politics and economics of sports, the personalities that break or make a successful team, the ever popular statistical assessment of player potential and performance, the role of secrecy in best business practices, plus the saga of the evolving team name. Current through the 2010 season The Extra 2% is a worthwhile read for any baseball fan or aspiring sports executive.
    • 4/5
      This is a book that seeks to establish how small events will give a team a small advantage that is not gained by those teams that ignore these small actions. It is a good book, very interesting, and an enjoyable read. Anyone who is interested in the greater sphere of baseball, should read this.
    • 3/5
      This book reads like a series of feature articles suitable for the Sunday sports pages of a newspaper. On the upside, that means it's a quick and accessible read. On the downside, the chapters are poorly connected to one another, jumping from one aspect of the Rays' history and transition to another without any through line (or even connective tissue).Some of the chapters work - the biographical profile of manager Joe Maddon is, for my money, the most engrossing and entertaining section of the book. In fact, this chapter is so good that it made me acutely aware of how slim the biographical profiles of the other main figures are. (The Snidley Whiplash portrayal of owner Vince Naimoli, which takes up a lot of space early in the book, is entertaining at first but grows repetitive.)For the baseball stathead, there's not enough explanation of the new Rays' methods to be instructive. For business fans, the ownership group is treated with such kid gloves that we don't get to see inside their heads very well. (I nearly laughed out loud at the end of the book, when Twins owner Carl Pohlad was lambasted for "launch[ing] his career ... by foreclosing on family farms during the Great Depression", after Keri had so carefully danced around the Rays' owners' prior careers at Goldman Sachs and Bear Sterns.) But it did serve as a fair introduction to a franchise which I didn't know anything about.
    • 4/5
      Here's the thing with this book. If you love baseball, but don't care for business, or if you are a business guy/gal who has zero interest in baseball, you may start reading this book, but I doubt you finish. Not surprisingly, it will take a special interest in both subjects. As someone that has not followed the rise of the Rays closely, I found the book extremely interesting. Very well written and researched. There was a fair amount of time spent on Tampa/St. Pete's attempts to lure a team and how the management style of the previous ownership prevented the team's success. The second half of the book addresses how the new owners turned this team around using their cost/benefit style of thinking. Highly recommend for my baseball friends with an interest in business.
    • 4/5
      Jonah Keri tells the story of the Tampa Bay Rays. He takes us from the lows of the Tampa group being denied a baseball franchise multiple times and the Vincent Naimoli years to the highs of drafting Carl Crawford, signing Evan Longoria to a multiple year deal, and the World Series run.Keri is an extremely detailed story teller. You can tell that he definitely did his research. My favorite parts were a story about a scout's case for Albert Pujols, the mind boggling cheapness of first owner Vincent Naimoli, and the uniqueness of manager Joe Maddon. My only complaint is that Keri does bog the reader down with a ton of detail and numbers. For the casual baseball fan, the reader may not get into the business aspects of the book and number crunching. As a math nerd, it did not bother me as I trudged along with a smile on my face. But I could see that someone who is reading for the love of the game may get a little bored with the detail. Keri definitely did his homework though. There is no question that he put a lot of time and effort into this book. I would recommend this book for any fan of the Tampa Bay Rays or any baseball fan of the business side of things. Anyone who enjoyed Moneyball, by Michael Lewis, would most definitely enjoy this book.
    • 3/5
      The Tampa Bay Rays have been both a model for incredible success and resolute failure during than brief history as a MLB expansion franchise. Baseball wears the Rays current success as a feather in their cap, proving that there is truly "competitive balance" in the game.This book shows us how the influence that three Wall Street-experienced insiders (Stuart Sternberg, Andrew Friedman, and Matthew Silverman) brought to running a baseball franchise made the Rays successful, in what likely constitutes the toughest division to perform successfully and compete within, in all of professional sports.The Rays front office utilizes modern technology, innovative metrics, and a fan-friendly approach to make one of the soundest franchises in baseball, despite a virtual, relative lack of support from their fan base. The Rays management was able to accomplish this, despite emerging from one of the poorest ownership (Vince Naimoli) and leadership (Chuck Lamar/Larry Rothschild) combinations in MLB history.As much as I like baseball books and am interested in the innovative strategies that make a team successful, I believe that Keri was not able to reveal much about the Rays success because the Rays front office is insular and is concerned about losing their "2%" edge over their competition.In my eyes, the best part of the book is when Keri describes the deceptive way in which ownership groups can plea poverty and hold cities and their fan base's hostage, in hopes of gaining subsidies, in their attempt to build new stadiums. In lieu, of our recent banking and Wall Street financial collapses, I wish Keri might have spent more time discussing how these former Goldman Sachs employees (Sternberg, Silverman) were able to build a successful franchise using different tactics than their former cohorts did in engineering one of the most egregious and disastrous financial strategies in United States history.The aforementioned "2% edge" is compelling, but as Keri final chapters indicate, the odds are clearly stacked against future success for the Rays, with an increasingly disparate financial environment in MLB, and the flagging U.S. economy cutting into baseball fans discretionary income.
    • 4/5
      While the new owners of the baseball team may have hailed from Wall Street, their strategies have more to do with solid business management than the financial techniques of their original stomping grounds. And the business management techniques are obviously brilliant when compared to the strawman portrayal of the previous ownership's ineptitude. And as the Rays' management's tactics aren't compared to the approach of other successful clubs, we dont' really know how unique they are. (But we certainly know what doesn't work!)Regardless, the story of the Rays' rise is an enjoyable narrative, with Jonah Keri's writing conveying the story clearly. With his background as a financial/business writer, his is less fluid when telling the story of the Rays' first playoff season (the only section of the book that seemed to drag.) However, his writing on the financial tools available to large-market teams was very illuminating and highlights the revenue problems that will continue to cast a shadow on competitiveness in Major League baseball.
    • 4/5
      As a baseball fan and a New York Yankees fan, I watched firsthand as the Tampa Bay Rays went from perennial doormats to a league champion. However, The Extra 2% pulls back the curtain and gives an inside look at the minds and strategies that allowed such a turnaround to happen. Jonah Keri begins the book by covering the birth of the franchise and its struggles under its first owner, much of which was new information to me. I also enjoyed reading about the advanced analysis strategies that the new owners used to find inefficiencies in the market. This book will not have the influence that Moneyball did, but it is another important look at the advanced statistical analysis that is becoming commonplace in major league baseball.
    • 3/5
      Despite the title of the book I don't see that Wall Street really had anything to do with the successful turnaround of the Tampa Bay Rays. Like most other successful Major League Baseball teams, the Rays have achieved some success by implementing the lessons learned from twenty-five years of sabermetrics and doing their homework with player evaluations. In evaluating this book, I'd just say that several other recent baseball books that discuss sabermetrics and it's acceptance by the powers that be in Major League Baseball are better. Read Moneyball, Baseball Between the Numbers, The Book, The Fielding Bible, or anything by Bill James for a better understanding of the direction that Major League Baseball and talent evaluation are going these days.
    • 2/5
      Quite dull and a poor man's version (a Tampa Bay Rays version) of Michael Lewis's Moneyball. No real additional insight beyond what is already publicly known.
    • 4/5
      Reviewing Jonah Keri’s “The Extra 2%” is impossible without referencing Michael Lewis’s seminal work on small-market baseball economics, “Moneyball”. Like the Oakland A’s club Lewis followed, the Tampa Bay Rays have had to spend the past decade trying to succeed as a small-market team in a sport dominated by big city teams. Tampa has it even worse than Oakland in that, while the A’s had to compete annually against teams in Anaheim, Dallas, and Seattle, the Rays have had to best baseball’s juggernauts: The New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox. Despite playing from behind in terms of payroll, both teams learned to exploit market inefficiencies in order to build playoff clubs and challenge the moneyed baseball elite.The history of the Tampa Bay Rays really begins with Vince Naimoli, who was instrumental in bringing baseball to the Tampa/St. Petersburg area. Unfortunately, in their rush to have baseball played in the bay area, nobody considered what a ball club run by the business magnate would be like. Naimoli made his fortune buying failing businesses, stripping their costs to the core, turning them around, and selling them for profit. He was known as a nickel-and-dimer, who considered no expense too miniscule to escape his purview. Unfortunately for Naimoli, in the world of professional baseball, thrift and shrewdness have a different name: cheap. Every expense was scrutinized and no money was spent unless absolutely necessary. For the first five years that the team operated, the front office did not have internet or email, which Naimoli considered a fad. The St. Petersburg High School band, scheduled to play the national anthem prior to a home game, canceled at the last minute when they were informed that they would have to buy tickets to get into the ballpark. In perhaps his greatest act of hubris, Naimoli tried to force the local Dillard’s to play the club for the right to sell team merchandise. Recognizing that the Devil Rays needed the store more than the store need the Devil Rays, Dillard’s pulled all Tampa merchandise from their stores. Within five years, the cities had turned on the Devil Rays, particularly Naimoli. A regime change was needed and in 2005, three young Wall Street upstarts took over the team and began using finance principles to build a new franchise. Stuart Sternberg and Matthew Silverman purchased a controlling share in the club and brought in Andrew Friedman as General Manager. They significantly beefed up what had been an unimpressive minor league system. They dropped the “Devil” from the name and rebranded as the Tampa Bay Rays. And they created a more fan-friendly environment that encouraged fans to come back to the park. But most importantly, according to Keri, they embraced the financial practice of arbitrage—essentially, buying low and selling high, no matter how small the advantage—to make trades and sign players who could compete in a loaded AL East. Embracing some of “Moneyball’s” principles, they recognized inefficiencies in defense and relief pitching and began upgrading both areas. Ultimately, this new approach would pay off, as the Tampa Bay Rays would win the AL East in 2008 and make their first World Series appearance.The Rays’ story is an intriguing one and Keri tells it well. He avoids some of the mistakes Lewis made, such as ignoring how important the previous administration’s acquisitions were to the team. In “Moneyball”, Lewis largely ignores the five most important players on those A’s teams, pitchers Barry Zito, Tim Hudson, and Mark Mulder, and pre-Billy Beane acquisitions Eric Chavez and Miguel Tejada. Instead, he focuses on the Beane-acquired players who, while they made a big difference in the overall quality of the team, were not the significant contributors. Keri, on the other hand, gives credit to the Naimoli administration for making some good use of the bevy of high draft picks they acquired for losing so consistently. The core of the Rays AL Championship team was acquired prior to the arrival of Sternberg, Silverman, and Friedman. But it was, as Keri so effectively points out, “The Extra 2%” that made all the difference.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      This is an incredibly well researched history of the baseball club Tampa Bay (Devil) Rays. It's main focus is on the business side of the game and how statistical analysis, Wall Street principles, and outside of the box thinking created one of the best stories in baseball over the past few years. A team that goes from worst to first so quickly will always be of interest, but this book has such a narrow focus that it's demographic will be minimal. The Extra 2% will only appeal to intense, die hard baseball fans or to those that enjoy reading stories about statistical analysis. Being a huge baseball fan, I enjoyed this book to an extent, but I did find the author's focus on the Rays a little naive. The idea that they were able to create a niche for themselves through statistics and business models is a little deceiving since that niche is rather large. The buy low, sell high mentality is basic principle that has created winners out of many low budget teams, and losers out of even more. I hope that anyone that sits down to take a look at this book will approach it with an open mind, and with the knowledge that different is always great, but staying ahead of that statistical curve is much more difficult than getting ahead of it.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 2/5
      It's slightly immoral for me to review this book, as I've really only skimmed it. But what I have read has not been compelling -- more of a 'one damn thing after another' approach to recent (Devil) Ray history than a unified narrative or a analysis with any underlying principles. You get little capsule histories of key Ray owners/employees, but who cares? And Keri never dives deeply enough into the business process or baseball operations issues to make the analytical side interesting. A disappointment, as I have been very impressed by Keri's short form sports journalism.
    • 4/5

      The Extra 2% is an account of the turnaround in the (Devil) Rays fortunes when the current management team took over. It's largely focused on baseball operations VP Andrew Friedman (essentially the GM), team president Matt Silverman, and owner Stuart Sternberg, all of whom have finance backgrounds. There's also a lot about team manager Joe Maddon, of course; there are also portraits of a bunch of ballplayers.

      But the book's mainly about the team's management philosophy, which amounts to "do everything better," with a hint of buy low/sell high. The management group is portrayed as both detail-oriented and willing to delegate, which is unusual but hardly unheard of. Basically, these guys set goals, execute them, then review and revise. Over and over again. Despite the book's subtitle (How Wall Street Strategies Took a Major League Team from Worst to First), there's nothing particularly Wall Street about what they do. The important point is knowing what you want to do and making those things happen. Many baseball teams--and many corporations--have difficulty doing that.

      There's a lot of good stuff here, but it's an unexciting read, with more repetition than I'd like. There's little specific discussion of particular trades, and the Maddon portrayal leans pretty heavily on his oddities without really convincing that those are his key qualities. Similarly, there are many mentions of a boardroom coup that displaced Vince Naimoli from the team's general partner position without any details of the bargains and/or bloodletting which made the event possible.

      All in all, worth reading. But hardly essential; I was hoping for more.

      This review is also available on a dabbler's journal.

    • 4/5
      The Extra 2%: How Wall Street Strategies Took a Major League Baseball Team from Worst to First is an interesting look at the business of baseball. Jonah Keri tells the story of how the Tampa Bay franchise came to be, how it quickly became the laughing stock of the league due to inept management, and how a change in leadership turned it around in an amazing way. Includes plenty of details on the politics and economics of sports, the personalities that break or make a successful team, the ever popular statistical assessment of player potential and performance, the role of secrecy in best business practices, plus the saga of the evolving team name. Current through the 2010 season The Extra 2% is a worthwhile read for any baseball fan or aspiring sports executive.
    • 3/5
      In The Extra 2%, Jonah Keri has written a history of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays from the early years of the franchise to the takeover and makeover of the team using Wall Street strategies. He outlines mismanagement from the beginning leading to poor timing of player selections, poor draft picks, alienation of fans and advertisers and much more. The new team arrived in 2005 and turned perennial losers into winners of the AL pennant in 2008 and a contender today.The “extra 2%” refers to Wall Street practice of giving that extra edge which can be the difference between mediocrity and a successful enterprise. The new owner Stuart Sternberg used principles he learned in business, transforming the Rays. Keri successfully blends business information and baseball together in telling about the rise of the team. The most interesting chapter was the one dealing with the statisticians that the team hired and how they used that information.The book revolves around twelve chapters but the story isn’t linear and it is obvious that each chapter stands alone (and was probably written that way for purposes other than a book) so that information is needlessly repeated. We did not need the basic information of the takeover at least four times. By the third reading, it wears thin. And there were many other instances. Another major flaw was the lack of an index, making it less valuable as a scholarly resource. A timeline and a list of personnel would have also been helpful in understanding the full story.With all this being said, the book was an interesting look into the business side of a baseball team.Oh, I almost forgot – when the team re-branded, the members of the team and the front office were not permitted to use the old name. So I need to change the tags for this book from Tampa Bay Devil Rays to Tampa Bay Rays or pay a $1 fine to charity. I’ll change it now!
    • 3/5
      The Extra 2% was an interesting, but not overly captivating book. This being said I assume I am being apathetic rather than sympathetic in my review of it. I am mildly interested in peeling back the curtain of the glamorous sports world and getting a glimpse of what actually makes the machine tick. It isn’t that my naiveté gets the best of me by convincing me that I am receiving the exact or complete story, it is simply my curious nature which prevails, and any new information is able to quench my thirst. The insider story of the fall and rise of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be; at least not in the sense that The Extra 2% promised to deliver. The book was well written, but not engrossing enough to propel it forward. Unfortunately, I don’t have the magic formula that would have pushed this book over the top for me. Maybe it is the subject matter itself that makes me say, “who cares?” There were some interesting tidbit in this book that kept me pushing forward to the end, but it was a struggle at times. One of my favorite chapters in the book was number 2, which describes the sometimes head scratching exploits of the original Rays owner, Vince Naimoli. At times Naimoli makes Ebenezer Scrooge look like the patron saint of giving. Overall, I don’t feel robbed of the time I spent reading this book, but it certainly doesn’t make the list of my favorite sports titles of all time.
    • 4/5
      The Extra 2%: How Wall Street Strategies Took A Major League Baseball Team From Worst To First by Jonah Keri chronicles the rise of the Tampa Bay Rays from doormats to a contender in the brutally tough American League East and World Series participants. The “Extra 2%” is the edge the new Tampa Bay owners feel they have to create to compete with the deep pockets of the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox. Keri does a great job in showing how the owners, who came from Wall Street, used their acumen to bring a winner to Tampa Bay.Keri goes over the arrival of the Devil Rays in Tampa and the ownership that turned the franchise into a laughingstock. It’s interesting how the Tampa Bay Rays got into that position but the book really takes off when Keri starts relating the story of the new ownership led by Wall Streeter Stuart Sternberg. It’s there that the book really hits its stride. Keri profiles not only Sternberg but also Andrew Friedman, executive vice president of baseball operations; Matt Silverman, team president; and Joe Maddon, the Rays’ manager. It’s interesting how the four of them came together to lift the Rays to the World Series in 2008.There are two minor points of contention for me. The first was the portrayal of Chuck LaMar, the General Manager of Tampa before the new ownership took over from old owner and despot, Vince Naimoli. No GM could have thrived in the atmosphere that Naimoli created. Keri felt that LaMar should have been stronger and pushed his own agenda. Clearly Naimoli would not have put up with GM who did that. There is a full chapter devoted to LaMar’s failings as a GM which could have been easily cut down and wrapped placed into the chapter devoted to Naimoli. My only other problem was that the Pat Burrell signing was glossed over. I wanted to know more about why the Rays signed him and what they learned when they signing didn’t work out especially since Keri pointed out that a disastrous signing like that may cripple the Rays for years to come.But overall, Keri does a great job of relating how the Tampa Bay Rays have been able to compete in the toughest division in any sport in America.