Brew Crew Ball Book Club Meeting #2: Discussing Chapters 4-6 Of The Extra 2%

I was surprised by how quickly the tone changed regarding the Rays’ frugality. On page 87 there’s a discussion of how the team would’ve gone bankrupt if they’d spent another $20 million. In the Naimoli chapters it seems like they just would’ve been called cheap for being unwilling to spend said money.

I thought it was very cool to see Josh Kalk mentioned for the first time on page 101. Most of you probably haven’t been around long enough to remember when he wrote here as dixieflatline.

The book contains a pretty stern indictment of publicly-funded stadiums, but I wonder if the Mets situation won’t make people reconsider that. They’re a franchise in baseball’s biggest market that might be in debt more than the team is worth, and a big chunk of that is $600 million they still owe on Citi Field.

If a stadium construction debt is big enough to be the largest creditor on a financially troubled franchise in New York, how could anyone expect a team in a smaller market to build one for themselves?

story last time – they’d clearly read ahead.

I mean, I know lots of teams passed on Pujols, but I feel like the first few chapters of the book are entirely based on the premise “What it?!”

It felt really long and drawn out to me. Maddon seems like a great guy and a creative thinker, but I feel like that point could have been made without 20 pages of stories about it.

Especially in 2008, and during the playoffs. He’s always been very accessible. It basically proves what I thought about Joe, anyhow: that he’s a very special person.

And the perfect person to work with the scouting team and front-office personnel that we’re learning about in the book :)

But if you don’t know all that much about Joe, the chapter doesn’t stick out as much. I think the Rays’ insistence on extending at radio feed to Joe’s hometown in Pennsylvania with a population of just a little over 20,000 people is kind of neat.

*If I hadn’t had access to mlb network since it came out, I probably would have known very little about Maddon. But they started having all of those “follow this person around” programs, and he was on a couple.

What have you guys taken away so far as the main reason for the Rays’ turnaround? What did they do right that the rest of the teams in the league haven’t done?

I ask because I remember the whole concept of ‘the extra 2%’ coming up early in the book, but then never really being expanded upon too much. It seemed like the lesson was more ‘market inefficiencies plus counterintuitive thinking plus treating people like they actually matter,’ which didn’t seem to add up to ‘the extra 2%.’

in these chapters. We already knew they failed at drafting prior to these chapters, so even the detail of missed picks wasn’t really super-interesting.

I guess we’re in set-up mode for the new management

Chapters 7-9 for next week?