Winning Fixes Everything: How Baseball's Brightest Minds Created Sports' Biggest Mess

The reporter who broke the Houston Astros’ cheating scandal reveals how a baseball team could so dramatically descend into corruption, with the never-before-told inside account of a broken management culture, the once-revered leaders who enabled it, and the sign-stealing scandal itself.

Baseball, that old romantic game, has been defaced and consumed by corporate America. As Moneyball-thinking and Ivy League graduates took hold of the sport’s analytics in baseball, the Astros set out to build a cost-efficient winning machine on the principles of the outside business world, squeezing every dollar out of every transaction, player and employee.

In less than a decade, ex-Astros general manager Jeff Luhnow helped revolutionize the game. He created an environment that led to one of the worst cheating scandals in modern baseball history, a Shakespearean tragedy of innovation and failed change management. Through years of extensive interviews, former Houston Chronicle beat writer Evan Drellich, now a national writer for The Athletic, delivers the definitive account of baseball’s most controversial franchise and how a modern baseball team truly works—without the usual myth-spinning.

Drellich reveals the rise and fall of the Astros to be a collision of subcultures. The team’s top boss was a former McKinsey consultant who lived on the bleeding edge with no guardrails. He hired outsider after outsider to change the organization as quickly and cheaply as possible. The wins piled up, and so did the cash for the billionaire owner with a checkered business past. But not even a World Series title could cover up the rot in this cautionary tale of sports business.

All of it came at a cost to fans, employees, and the sport on a whole. But as Winning Fixes Everything makes clear, “The Astros Way” isn’t going anywhere. Drellich uses the saga of the Astros’ scandal to detail the evolution of baseball itself.

This gripping work of investigative journalism reveals:

• Corporate Culture in Sports: How a data-driven, “Moneyball-on-steroids” approach championed by a former McKinsey consultant created an environment where corruption could thrive.
• The Sign-Stealing System: The definitive, never-before-told details of the scheme, from the reporter who broke the story for the nation.
• Failed Change Management: A Shakespearean tragedy of innovation without guardrails, showing how the relentless pursuit of a cost-efficient winning machine came at a cost to the entire sport of Major League Baseball.
• A Collision of Subcultures: The inside story of Jeff Luhnow, Jim Crane, and the outsiders they hired to revolutionize the game—and how not even a World Series title could cover up the rot.

Evan Drellich, a senior writer for The Athletic, broke the story of the Houston Astros’ cheating scandal. He covered the franchise for the Houston Chronicle from 2013 to 2016. He now lives in Queens.