The Extra 2% (or How I Learned to Stop Fake Blogging and Start a Fake Book Review)

Jonah Keri’s The Extra 2%: How Wall Street Strategies Took a Major Baseball Team from Worst to First is at face value, the story of how the Tampa Bay Rays overcame the huge spending deficit they face aligned in the same division as the Red Sox and Yankees to claim their first World Series appearance (not to mention winning season) in franchise history. In order to tell that story, many layers have to be peeled back. It wasn’t an accident and the Rays didn’t just get lucky (well, not entirely). A seemingly plain shift in the standings does in fact require an entire book to explain.

Building a baseball team starts early. It’s a long process to build a winner and Keri does an excellent job of starting at the beginning. Not just the start of their winning, not just the start of the current management regime or even the start of the Devil Rays. By beginning I mean from the beginning stages of the Tampa area vying for a Major League Team. He even delves into how Chicago's questionable political integrity helped to get Tropicana Field was built years before they had anybody to play there after Jerry Reinsdorf and company threatened to move the White Sox down to Florida if money wasn’t received to build a replacement for the aging Comiskey Park. Obviously, that never happened, after some crafty Daley influenced and Governor Thompson executed "clockwork". It was an interesting road to acquisition, including many more false positives, that must have been absolutely heartbreaking for baseball fans of the area longing for a local rooting interest.

Save for some fairly high draft picks inherited by the previous ownerships terrible finishes, the real story of the current Rays, post twilight-ing Wade Boggs, Fred McGriff and Jose Canseco types, doesn’t begin until the new ownership group took over the cellar dwelling team. Armed with the knowledge imparted over the course of their various successful Wall Street careers, the group found new innovative and cost efficient ways to evaluate talent in order to acquire undervalued quality players through the draft, international signings and careful perusal of the scrap heap. Taking their time and doing it the right way, they were able to build a team that would not only be able to compete for one year, but maintain that level of competition for years to come.

The book’s main takeaway, aside an extreme sense of relief at the White Sox not being in the AL East, is the huge role that economics and MLB politics play in the sport. In order to thrive, a team really must have things covered from all angles.

It’s a baseball book that is not bogged down with stats to turn off the more casual fan, while opening them up to viewing the game from a non-traditional angle. For the serious baseball head, it glimpses into aspects of the game that may have not been previously explored in detail. For me personally, it created a great curiosity in the economics of the game that go beyond just salary amounts.


On a very related note, alongside the blog there is now a list of some of my favorite baseball related books. The Sox have off days people, so go read one!