2019 Houston Astros Thread

[Mez2 4037]

Cole isn't gonna be the one to throw at pujols, we get up/get a lead, we'll bring James in to nail him between the shoulder blades. he'll get thrown out/fined but teammates will cover the fine. 

maybe this is what this team needs - a little fire to get them going, seem to just be going through the motions. and it's hard to have a good feeling with you're not starting Cole, JV or Wade Miley. Shit needs to happen, and soon.

[henrygandorf 29199]

i'll be there tonight, somewhere fairly close to the astros dugout.

if they start throwing at each other, i'm in.

the wife will hold my beer.

[Mez2 4037]

the more i think about it, i don't think something happens tonight - i'm thinking more towards the end of the season when we play these fucks at home and our pitching staff isn't held together but duct tape and a snorkel. baseball players have long memories and this isn't the last of it.

and fuck albert pujols in his stupid fucking face. fucking puto

[Planet Houston 4943]

I think Yordan pokes an outside pitch for a foul ball into their dugout.  He's good enough to pick out Ramirez and put one on him.

[tx 3 putt 77951]

I like the idea of waiting 

[henrygandorf 29199]

Just now, tx 3 putt said:

I like the idea of waiting  winning.

 

[DaysOff 8009]

We should concentrate on not losing the fucking divisional lead. Start fucking winning; it's like better than losing.

[Native Horn 3520]

50 minutes ago, UTPhil2006 said:

If Cole throws at anyone and gets kicked out I'm fighting our own team.  I'm not watching another abortion of a bullpen game 3 games in a row.

So you're saying your interest rate would drop?

[UTexasFight 9655]

We should concentrate on not losing the fucking divisional lead. Start fucking winning; it's like better than losing.

Oh not this again...

We’ll have a double digit lead and rivaling the Dodgers for largest division lead by August 15.

[UTPhil2006 3830]

53 minutes ago, Native Horn said:

So you're saying your interest rate would drop?

Yep so I could then drop escrow and Tyler White

[henrygandorf 29199]

i’d like to drop tyler white off a 3rd floor balcony. 

[Mez2 4037]

You're too kind, and thinking at least 7. He'd hurt the ground when he'd land

[UTexasFight 9655]

13 to match his jersey number

[ChickenSandwich 9856]

2 hours ago, cabowabo said:

If there is no suspension by gametime tomorrow, then we start Rondon, Framber, or one of our other fucksticks and let them drill Pujols. Then we bring in Miley for the second inning. If Pujols puts a beat down on the pitcher, then that's a win win for us.

 

 

Tyler White to start

[UTexasFight 9655]

Back to something with more substance... I guess.
idk why Drellich is doing long/detailed articles on the inner workings of the Astros, but here is a look at our dealings with McKinsey the last couple of years.
My read: we paid McKinsey a shit ton of money to tell us how to develop an org chart and move around some deck chairs. (Shocking)

And I guess I get Drellich wanting to dumb this down for people not familiar with that world, but I felt this was a lot of words with no real substance. In other words, Drellich would make a great management consultant.

Long:

Even for a group that showed the baseball world how successful outsiders can be, this was bold, and a bit weird. It was an undertaking that embodies the tao of the Astros: Treat baseball like any other business, even if it’s uncomfortable, or be left behind.

Before the draft every year, baseball teams often fly in their amateur scouts. In this way, at least, the Astros were operating routinely in the summer of 2017. Drafts are a rare time when the whole department is together.

This go-around, when the scouts met as a group and in breakouts, some onlookers were on hand. These people are from McKinsey, the scouts were told.

The management consulting firm was conducting a study, in what was likely a first in professional baseball.

Some Astros scouts may have at least heard of McKinsey, which had revenues reportedly north of $10 billion in 2018 — roughly the same as all of Major League Baseball. The scouts’ top boss, Astros president of baseball operations Jeff Luhnow, worked for McKinsey for most of the 1990s.

Through a connection made at the firm, Luhnow wound up in touch with the owner of the Cardinals, Bill DeWitt Jr., an introduction that created Luhnow’s entree into professional baseball. He had success in St. Louis’ front office before the Astros made him their general manager.

At least one scout present for those meetings in Houston, however, had not heard of McKinsey.

“I didn’t know what they did,” the scout said. “I thought they just wanted to see just how we do things for their benefit. I didn’t know.”

People outside of the traditional business world, never mind scouts, often have only a vague idea of what management consultants actually do.

At the highest levels of business and sometimes government, management consultants are hired to help solve complex problems, usually with broad access to an organization. At the direction of their client, they study the core of a business’ approach: What projects are prioritized? What goals make sense? What reporting structures and oversights are needed, and what personnel? Just about anything you can imagine, they can be hired to evaluate.

There are three major firms, colloquially referred to as the Big 3, or MBB: McKinsey & Company, Boston Consulting Group, and Bain & Company. The Big 3 recruit from prestigious schools, have offices across the world and pay their experts, who parachute onto the scene, handsomely.

Movies and TV do not always portray their roles kindly — think “House of Lies.” In popular culture, consultants are often linked to layoffs. But not all consultants are brought in with the express purpose of firing workers, although their studies can sometimes lead to dismissals, as well as new hires. At their most controversial, consultants have “Helped Raise the Stature of Authoritarian Governments,” as a December story about McKinsey in The New York Times was headlined.

Intuitively, other divisions of a baseball team would sooner have use for a firm that typically couples with Fortune 500 companies. But the Astros did not hire McKinsey to review ticket sales, concessions or merchandise. This was about baseball operations and baseball operations only, a willingness to open up the most essential and insular area of the team to complete outsiders who had never worked in baseball.

Big 3 consultants are in some ways the ultimate insiders, but this is one realm where, at least to this point, they are not. Not yet, anyway.

Anyone who does contract work for a company, or a baseball team, can be considered a “consultant” in a general sense. Bill James’ work in baseball, for example, has always been in the capacity of a consultant, even if his title has been different.

But management consultants are different beasts. They produce the organizational equivalent of a thorough physical examination.

When Luhnow brought in McKinsey for engagements in 2017 and 2018 — the first coming in the middle of the season that produced the only World Series title in franchise history — he did not exactly hand over the keys to baseball ops. But he made McKinsey an extra set.

In the summer of 2017, McKinsey consultants reviewed the Astros’ scouting departments and its baseball research and development. The second “engagement,” which is what arrangements with consulting firms are called, was in 2018 and focused on player development.

Multiple sources with direct knowledge of the engagements detailed them to The Athletic. Luhnow declined to confirm that the Astros worked with McKinsey, but said he could speak generally about the Astros’ arrangements with outside parties. Consulting firms almost always try to work confidentially, and McKinsey did not respond to a request for comment.

“Baseball operations leaders have traditionally been reluctant to invite outsiders in to study and perhaps help set direction, solve problems and improve operations and results,” Luhnow wrote in an email. “There are some good reasons for this: the learning curve is steep, the issues tend to be more complex than believed from the outside, and every team wants to keep their particular strategy and approach close to the vest so they can create an advantage relative to other teams.

“Teams have also accessed outside help more than ever before. This includes individuals who have studied the game of baseball from a unique perspective with new and different tools. It also includes firms or organizations that have expertise in specific areas of interest to front offices.

“Since arriving in Houston, the interest in leveraging outside help has continued and intensified, as the baseball operations world has quickly become more complex. We have sought and paid for help in numerous areas across baseball operations, including adoption and rollout of emerging technologies; accessing, developing and retaining the best baseball operations talent; and helping devise strategy and operational approaches in a quickly evolving environment.

“We don’t disclose our partners in these areas unless it’s mutually desired and convenient. We also do not discuss the specifics of any work.”

The departments Luhnow targeted for McKinsey’s work are the lifeblood of a cost-controlled and profitable baseball business, which is what Luhnow set out to create in Houston.

McKinsey knows business, even if it has (or had) no specific grounding in the sport. Luhnow wanted McKinsey involved in research and development, despite the fact that its budget is not monstrous — around $1 million, per one source’s estimate — because the arena is so important.

Sports leagues have used McKinsey before. When MLB recently folded MLB Advanced Media’s operations into the parent company as part of the “One Baseball” vision touted by commissioner Rob Manfred, they did so with McKinsey’s advice.

“We used them on internal restructuring issues,” one person familiar with the league’s endeavor said. “When we combined our businesses, BAM, it was really complicated just in terms of taking a fairly large business, two separate businesses, and integrating them.”

But MLB didn’t ask for advice on anything related to the governance of the game itself.

For the Astros, consultants from a McKinsey offshoot called QuantumBlack, which has its roots in Formula One racing, contributed prominently on the data and analytics side during the 2017 engagement. McKinsey’s Houston office, normally an oil-and-gas heavy office, led the charge in both engagements.

“It’s definitely weird to do that in baseball,” one person with knowledge of the engagements said when asked what they felt the story here was. “How does that even work for a baseball team?”

On a practical level, the Astros had to designate a team to deal with the consultants, dedicating top front office people to meet with and guide them. The consultants didn’t need to talk with everyone in the organization, but did talk to many — including a handful of major league players.

The whole adventure seems predicated on an idea of, why not?

Advantages in baseball increasingly lurk further out of sight from the general public, and the Astros are as hell-bent on finding them as anyone.

But modern baseball front offices increasingly require skills beyond baseball. Research and development departments, for example, can resemble tiny technology companies.

Almost by definition, baseball people cannot be expected to innately understand best practices in running a tech company.

“With the ever-increasing amount of information and technology surrounding the game, front offices have had a harder time than ever building the skills internally to leverage everything that is available,” Luhnow wrote. “Teams have hired numerous people with education and experience in areas never before imagined in baseball — from math and physics to computer science and psychology.”

People with knowledge of the Astros’ engagements did not broadcast the findings loudly, in large part because everything in baseball is deemed proprietary these days. But most of McKinsey’s recommendations were structural.

As the number of video analysts grows, for example, how should they be organized? How should certain projects — the quick wins, the long-term gambles, low-hanging fruit — be organized?

On the minor-league side, the Astros have been steadily reshaping the role of coaches for some time, and McKinsey aided that effort in the 2018 engagement. The role of a minor league manager for a long time centered on mentorship and schedule-making and in-game strategy. Fielding drills, when they were done, were usually most intensive when a roving minor league coordinator came to town.

The idea already existed internally, but McKinsey advocated for the manager to take a more proactive role in fielding drills. That’s a change that was identified to The Athletic as one that may not have happened as quickly without McKinsey.

No recommendation ultimately has to be implemented. Luhnow and the Astros can choose what they want to accept. But implementation is probably easier for someone like Luhnow, who worked out of McKinsey’s Chicago office across different industries in his time with the firm, from the retail industry to hospitality and gambling. Outside consultants in the Bill James mold started to proliferate this decade and the last, and turning to McKinsey is, in a sense, the next step in welcoming outside input.

The Astros’ arrangement with McKinsey had some element of reciprocity, creating occasional access for other McKinsey clients to the Astros’ front office, sources said. One source emphasized, however, that the work was not pro bono.

McKinsey, like any business, wants to grow, to be appealing to both clients and prospective employees. The Houston office, for example, may not have the allure of some of McKinsey’s offices for someone who is not particularly interested in oil and gas. But getting to work with a baseball team? Now that’s different, and fun.

There was a small, opaque publicity effort tying Luhnow to McKinsey during 2018. A pair of articles are on McKinsey’s website, complete with accompanying videos, highlighting Luhnow’s accomplishments with the Astros following a career with the company. That content does not specifically reference that the Astros employed McKinsey to evaluate their baseball operations.



The impact would probably differ from franchise to franchise, but at least one other growth-minded baseball team is considering using McKinsey in the future.

But there are, naturally, hurdles for any franchise to consider.

If the goal of player development is to get players prepared for the majors in the most efficient manner, then there is a potential benefit in learning how other elite institutions approach developing their premier talent — be it the U.S. Air Force or top colleges. Olympic athletes train in a certain way.

If McKinsey can provide baseball decision-makers with an understanding of Olympians’ training habits, then a team stands to gain, despite the fact McKinsey doesn’t have a long history of working with baseball training environments. Consultants for any of the Big 3 are supposed to be quick learners. Yet, unless they work with this particular area of baseball on a consistent basis, there is a learning curve that some clients would likely consider.

Even for a group like Luhnow’s, reaching this far outside baseball norms was not universally comfortable.

“Are you going to know how sprinting is different in baseball than it is in Olympic track, and how it’s the same?” one person with knowledge of the engagements said.

The Astros’ engagement did create speculation amongst one group in particular: scouts. Eight scouts were informed by the Astros on one day in August 2017 they were not going to have their contracts renewed. This was right around the time that McKinsey wrapped its first engagement, a couple months after the draft meetings McKinsey sat in on.

People inside the organization began to wonder: Did the consultants lead to the firings? A hatchet job?

The answer, sources said, is that the Astros were moving in this direction anyway. Indeed, their vision was becoming identifiable through previous personnel changes inside the organization.

From management’s standpoint, it did not hurt that McKinsey came in and gave a thumbs up to Luhnow’s general vision for the department and baseball ops. But that approval also was not ultimately necessary, nor the driving force for the Astros.

“Any decisions made regarding personnel and staffing matters have been and will continue to be internally driven and not based on any third-party work,” Luhnow said.

The Astros theoretically could have broadcast McKinsey’s presence internally in a louder, more comprehensive way, but that might have only stoked fears further ahead of time.

In the big picture, baseball is an industry of followers. Others now will likely weigh similar arrangements to the Astros’ with McKinsey.

An executive with one mid-market team, however, thought it would be difficult to find room for a consulting firm in its budget. If a team has $1 million for research and development, does it have, say, half that amount handy to open up baseball ops to outside scrutiny?

But partners at firms like McKinsey have flexibility in these arrangements. Working with an industry regarded as cool, like baseball, has tangible benefits for firms, too.

In the meantime, the Astros’ engagements with McKinsey underscore the question the Astros have posed for years: if you do not operate a baseball team like a Fortune 500 company, are you doing it right?

 

[WBT 20757]

Hmm, that Luhnow actually bought the koolaid on that bullshit makes me lose a little respect for him.

Quote

How should certain projects — the quick wins, the long-term gambles, low-hanging fruit — be organized? 

fucking hell

Edited July 17, 2019 by WBT

[UTexasFight 9655]

Hmm, that Luhnow actually bought the koolaid on that bullshit makes me lose a little respect for him.

Especially after being part of the bullshit koolaid making prior to his life in baseball...

[tx 3 putt 77951]

I could have handled that consulting job for half the price 

[jkates 316]

[TonyTexas 10572]

I’m guessing that anyone criticizing this Astro effort to find an edge was probably also against using advanced analytics and technology in lieu of the eyeball test.

[UTexasFight 9655]

I’m guessing that anyone criticizing this Astro effort to find an edge was probably also against using advanced analytics and technology in lieu of the eyeball test.

Yeah I personally probably wouldn’t have authorized this expense if I were in charge but I also have no problems with doing it under the idea of “can’t hurt”.
By the time of these engagements, the winner had already been built and nothing wrong with turning over every rock you can to try and find ways to keep your edge/stay on top.

[FondrenRoad 4378]

2 hours ago, henrygandorf said:

i’d like to drop tyler white off a 3rd floor balcony. 

I don't think you can lift him over the railing. 

[WBT 20757]

35 minutes ago, TonyTexas said:

I’m guessing that anyone criticizing this Astro effort to find an edge was probably also against using advanced analytics and technology in lieu of the eyeball test.

Incorrect.

Management consultants spewing buzzwords aren't going to solve baseball

Edited July 17, 2019 by WBT

[ChickenSandwich 9856]

swag gift

[FondrenRoad 4378]

14 minutes ago, WBT said:

Incorrect.

Management consultants spewing buzzwords aren't going to solve baseball

Come on now. You're seeing a 30,000 foot view.  You need to peel the onion and look at it with more granularity. We will deliver Luhnow 2.0 without boiling the ocean. 

[VirginiaLonghorn 4808]

5 hours ago, tx 3 putt said:

I’d prefer they hit Calhoun, who spells Kole  with ‘k’ ????

Rocket’s love child?

[Mitch Hedberg 2096]

3 hours ago, UTexasFight said:

13 to match his jersey number

There is no 13th floor. But cmon man, if you're on the 14th floor you know what floor you're really on.

[Scraps 13600]

Ramirez suspended 3 games

Ausmus 1 game

Both fined

[Wishbone 4844]

5 hours ago, henrygandorf said:

i’d like to drop tyler white off a 3rd floor balcony. 

He’d only bounce back up and take you out while you’re still bent over the rail watching.

[Texas St. Armadillos 1381]

1 hour ago, Scraps said:

Ramirez suspended 3 games

Ausmus 1 game

Both fined

Seems harsh.  I thought this was baseball?

[TonyTexas 10572]

No Yordan tonight. SMH

[VirginiaLonghorn 4808]

12 minutes ago, Texas St. Armadillos said:

Seems harsh.  I thought this was baseball?

Don Baylor just rolled over.  He would have laughed at Ramirez, stole 2B, and destroyed whomever was covering. 

Slate cleaned ... 

[UTexasFight 9655]

My iPhone sucks but left side of the infield help is on the way.

[clapclapclap 9000]

Retaliate?  Not if Hinch has any say.  Heck, we still owe Odor from a few years ago.

[rvm96 1643]

1 hour ago, VirginiaLonghorn said:

Don Baylor just rolled over.  He would have laughed at Ramirez, stole 2B, and destroyed whomever was covering. 

Slate cleaned ... 

Austin high represent!!!

On a completely different note, nice outing by Enoli.

 

[UTexasFight 9655]

Carlos has the inside out oppo swing down
Just sliced one down the RF corner to drive in Diaz

[rvm96 1643]

Let's go Altuve, Bregman and Uncle Mike!!! Upton looked super confused on that Bregman double 

[Pibald 18]

Very nice start boys 

[Seasick Sailor 3747]

This is fun. We should just do this every time. 

[Mo Horn 8899]

Came to play tonight

[UTexasFight 9655]

Carlos 3 for 4 tonight all to center or right side

[rvm96 1643]

This is fun!!

[kevwun 15943]

That pitch was one Altuve would have missed earlier in the year.

[WBT 20757]

Aresnio was getting after that popcorn

[UTexasFight 9655]

[rvm96 1643]

Very interesting possibility

 

[cabowabo 4578]

Damn, team is dialed in tonight.

[YChang 3472]

Damn, team is dialed in tonight.

It’s wonderful to see. Let’s turn it into a sustained streak again.

[UTexasFight 9655]

We’re due for -1 runs this inning

 

 

[rvm96 1643]

So time to trade White after this game since his value will never be higher