Astro-Matic Baseball

The meeting drew to a close at 11:40 a.m. “All right, it’s a good group,” Luhnow said to his 39-man brain trust. “Flip a coin now, or later?”

“If we take one of the high school pitchers, we have to be really [convinced] that this guy is the guy, and that’s not real easy to settle on,” Elias said later. “Especially when you’ve got other good options.” The Astros’ decision engine had one more day to make its choice.

The Astros anticipated backlash against the rebuilding effort they planned to conduct with a purity that to their knowledge had never before been attempted. They have received it. It came most fiercely at the end of last season, after they had traded away the last of their mature assets in closer Jose Veras, outfielder Justin Maxwell and starter Bud Norris. They finished out the season with a 15-game losing streak. Their record, 51â€"111, tied for the majors’ worst in a decade.

Before the season they’d hired a manager they felt was the right man to guide their players through such a stretch. Bo Porter understands the necessity of losing, or at least he professes to. “We had to go through that,” says Porter, who is 41. “The biggest mistake organizations can make is the misevaluation of their own players. Had we not gone through what we went through last year, we wouldn’t be where we’re at today, because we’d still be trying to figure out who can we move forward with, who do we need to cut ties with. ”

Even though Luhnow intellectually understands why his Astros must lose, he maintains that doesn’t make it any easier. “The hardest part for me is when people think we don’t care,” he says. “We desperately care. Would I prefer to be able to do this with losing 70 games a year instead of 100? No question about it. Do I think it’s possible? I really don’t.”

As for concerns about the payroll, “we feel we’re going to have the resources we need to add the appropriate players to complement what we have to win when we need to win,” Luhnow says.

Though Luhnow understands why his Astros must lose, he maintains that doesn’t make it any easier. “The hardest part for me is when people think we don’t care,” he says. “We desperately care.”

Other criticisms have surfaced more recently. In an article published in the Houston Chronicle on May 25â€"the day, as it turned out, the Astros began a seven-game winning streakâ€"beat writer Evan Drellich detailed the ways in which, as the headline read, radical ways paint astros as ‘outcast.’ “They are definitely the outcast of major league baseball right now, and it’s kind of frustrating for everyone else to have to watch it,” Norris, who was traded to the Orioles last July 31, told Drellich. “When you talk to agents, when you talk to other players and you talk amongst the league, yeah, there’s going to be some opinions about it, and they’re not always pretty.”

The criticisms fell into two categories. The first was that the Astros’ analytics-based approach dehumanizes players. “It was a difficult thing for me to read, because I spend so much time personally getting to know our players, and so does our staff,” says Luhnow. “There is a perception that anybody who is doing analytics in a serious way is doing that at the expense of the human element. It’s just not true, in our case.”

Adds Mejdal, “We realize these are human beings, not widgets. As far as assigning a number to a personâ€"well, I assume you get a salary? Do you feel dehumanized because your boss has put a number on you?”

The Astros’ leadership bristles at the notion that it thinks it knows how to operate better than anyone else. All it knows is what it believes to represent best long-term practices, based on the information it has acquired and processed.

The other criticism stemmed from the Astros’ use of new competitive tactics, such as a heavy reliance on extreme defensive shifts. The club’s proprietary databaseâ€"christened Ground Control by Elias’s wife, Alexandraâ€"contains not just projections of the future value of every player but also spray charts for every hitter on every count against every type of pitch thrown by every type of pitcher, as well as the probabilistically optimal way to position defenders in each scenario. This sometimes leads to shifts in which, say, the Astros’ second baseman plays well to the left of second base against a pull-happy righthanded hitterâ€"a violation of traditional baseball norms, though one that’s becoming more common across the game.

Mejdal puts the Astros’ tactics into perspective. “A year ago, with the defensive positioning that was going on, we were in the top half dozen, and there was tremendous pushback,” he says. “Well, the rate at which we shifted last year, that would be below average in the major leagues now. Innovation, by definition, suggests change will be taking place. If there’s change taking place, it’s not likely going to feel right at first. If it felt right, it would have been done a long time ago.”

The Astros’ leadership bristles at the notion that it thinks it knows how to operate better than anyone else. All it knows is what it believes to represent best long-term practices, based on the information it has acquired and processed. “We’re far from perfect,” Mejdal says. Even what they believe to be optimal decisions often don’t work out. Sometimes a righthanded pull hitter goes the other way. Sometimes players they discard, or decline to draft, turn into stars. “Sometimes you hit on a 16,” Mejdal says, “and if you stayed, you would have won.”

As 6 P.M. Central approached on the evening of Thursday, June 5, the majority of the Astros’ scouting and analytics staff milled around the club’s draft room. The metal walls were covered with magnets, each bearing the name of an amateur player. The staffers were waiting, like the rest of the baseball world, to see who the team’s leadership would pick one-one. The day before they had dressed in khakis and oxford shirts, but now they wore suits and ties. If there was any need to remind them of the caliber of player they hoped to draft, there was the dinner they had just been served: Nolan Ryan Beef Brisket and Nolan Ryan Jalapeño Sausages.

Finally, at 6:05, Elias emerged from Luhnow’s office, where he had been huddling with the GM, Stearns and Mejdal. He nonchalantly slapped the magnet bearing their pick’s name at the top of the draft board. Minutes later commissioner Bud Selig announced the pick from the MLB Network studios in Secaucus, N.J. On the fuzzy big-screen TV mounted at the front of the room the Astros’ scouts watched as the player, whose reaction the network’s cameras were covering live from his home, buried his face in his hands.