How the losingest team in baseball found a competitive edge with analytics and rode it four years later all the way to the World Series
How the losingest team in baseball found a competitive edge with analytics and rode it four years later all the way to the World Series
2 PagesCustomer Story Analytics for the win Though many in 2014 saw the Sports Illustrated projection that the last- place Houston Astros would win the 2017 World Series as further than a long shot, the Astros’ front office was confident in what was at the time an unconventional strategy. That strategy hinged on the work of former NASA engineer turned sabermetrician Sig Mejdal, who first walked into the offices at Minute Maid Park in 2012. If you’re going to try to build a championship team from scratch, “you want to figure out how to take advantage of what’s discoverable and acquirable,” says Mejdal, then the Astros’ Director of Decision Sciences. Now Special Assistant to the GM, Mejdal describes his remit as improv- ing the processes by which the Astros’ decision makers – scouts, coache
