The Extra 2%

How Wall Street Strategies Took a Major League Baseball Team from Worst to First

By: Jonah Keri

Narrated by: Lloyd James

Length: 9 hrs and 43 mins

Publisher's summary

What happens when three financial-industry whiz kids and certified baseball nuts take over an ailing Major League franchise and implement the same strategies that fueled their success on Wall Street? In the case of the 2008 Tampa Bay Rays, an American League championship happens - the culmination of one of the greatest turnarounds in baseball history.

In The Extra 2%, financial journalist and sportswriter Jonah Keri chronicles the remarkable story of one team's Cinderella journey from divisional doormat to World Series contender. By quantifying the game's intangibles, they were able to deliver to Tampa Bay an American League pennant. This is an informative and entertaining case study for any organization that wants to go from worst to first.

©2011 Jonah Keri (P)2011 Dreamscape Media, LLC

Critic reviews

"Jonah Keri has given us a fascinating look at how the Tampa Bay (Devil) Rays became winners. The Extra 2% is a captivating book if you love baseball, but it's an even more captivating book if you love success." (Joe Posnanski, senior writer, Sports Illustrated)

"The Tampa Bay Rays - with their ma-and-pa-sized budget - have gone head to head with baseball's two superpowers, the Yankees and the Red Sox. In the superb The Extra 2%, Jonah Keri explains how and why in a way that will remind readers of Michael Lewis's Moneyball." (Buster Olney, senior writer, ESPN The Magazine)

"All baseball fans ever ask for is hope: hope not only for a season out of their dreams, but also for leaders smart enough and imaginative enough to figure out how to make those dreams reality. In The Extra 2%, Jonah Keri not only presents this blueprint followed to perfection but does so with a brilliant page-turner of a book that will satisfy fans of both baseball and first-rate writing." (Mike Vaccaro, columnist, The New York Post)

Adequately written, Poorly read

For the savvy sabermetrician, the gross and egregious pronunciations of far too many player names will drive you insane. Minor prep work in familiarizing the reader with player names would have eased the distraction from the behind-the-scenes tell-all of the Tampa Bay Rays' rise from perennial cellar dwellers to unsuspecting contenders.

Keri's normally outstanding work is tarnished not only by the reading, but some tired and repeated adjectives like "also ran" throughout the latter half of the book. Nonetheless, getting the inside scoop similar to the Pirates' history of using defensive shifts and internal reinventions of already-controlled assets within the organization is interesting enough to warrant the purchase.

Casual readers may well be inclined for a more focused and recalled historical recap of down-but-not-out tales of their own favorites team's conventional successes.

Really bad experience

This book was not nearly as compelling as other analysis-minded baseball books of recent years. Even worse was the reader, who mispronounced the names of an uncountable number of players. All around, really an annoying audiobook.

The book isn't sure what it wants to be

The overarching thesis is weak and the book flits between a play by play money ball type narrative vs. The holistic strategy employed by management ownership and the field manager.

By far the best chapter is the one on the skipper Joe Madden...the rest of the book doesn't stand the test of time.

Disappointing.