The Extra 2%: How Wall Street Strategies Took a Major League Baseball Team from Worst to First by Jonah Keri

The Extra 2%: How Wall Street Strategies Took a Major League Baseball Team from Worst to First Reviews

• 
  Michael

  “The Extra 2%: How Wall Street Strategies Took a Major League Baseball Team from Worst to First” is the tale of a few smart guys bringing their business acumen to Tropicana Field, home of baseball’s Tampa Bay Rays, and turning a perennial loser into a team capable of toppling the mighty Yankees and Red Sox.
  
  Exploring a topic this mundane is no easy task, but Jonah Keri consistently swings and misses throughout the book. Most notably, the book fails to explain Wall Street strategies. The strategy the reader should take away from this book is to replace mean, cheap owners with friendly, less cheap owners, bad managers with good ones, and over-priced, aged players with bargain-priced, home-grown talent. Those principles aren't unique to Wall Street, and Keri never delves into the alleged genius of the Wall Streeters before they wind up in Tampa.
  
  Here’s an example of a passage (p.95) describing why Andrew Friedman as a young private equity manager (in New Jersey, by the way), soon to be Rays’ general manager, excelled at closing deals:
  
  "“I can wrap it up if you like, “Friedman told his boss, “or even do better if you like.” The young associate believed in his negotiation skills and had a handle on all the numbers. “It’s your baby, full speed ahead,” Clevinger said, eager to see what Friedman could do. Friedman closed the deal as promised. He also materially improved its terms, as promised."
  
  Wait, what? How did he close the deal? How did he improve the deal? What are the strategies?? TELL ME!!!
  
  When you turn the final page, you’re left wondering why you just did that to yourself. Skip this book, and instead Wikipedia the word “arbitrage.”
  
• 
  Dan

  2.5 stars. I am nearly done with a project where I am reading a book on each of the Major League teams. This was my choice for the Tampa Bay Rays. There just aren’t many bestselling books on recent expansion teams or teams that aren’t in big money markets.
  
  I guess this was an attempt at a Money Ball type book. But the approach was flawed because few people can write as well as Michael Lewis. Now it is true that the Rays have one of the best records over the past dozen years and that analytics did turn around the club’s fortunes in the late 00’s.
  
  But in the end it’s a really dull book with very little focus on any of the players. My job is in high tech as an A.I. expert and I didn’t learn or recognize anything in this book in the the way of deep analytics either. Maybe it would appeal to someone with more of a business background.
• 
  Jake

  Its natural comparison is "Moneyball" and that's not really fair because the Athletics and Rays stories are so vastly different and there's very few people on the planet that can write like Michael Lewis. The focus here in Keri's book is the Rays, the Wall Street geniuses who bought them and how they turned a moribund franchise into a superpower in the toughest division in baseball (basically a miracle). The book's strength lies in the detail presented about how the Wall Street guys use their business savvy in how they analyze players and the sport in general. Keri does a great job showing how their strategies are applied, particularly viewing baseball players as investments and how they utilize baseball's free agency/draft/trade markets as if they are stock, looking for trends. Several other parts of the book are very well done, especially the Joe Maddon chapter - which I found fascinating - as well as the early dreadful days of TB. The negatives are few but glaring. The book is poorly structured and could use a better editor. Keri commits several redundancies, especially when it comes to Tropicana Field (saying that it's a "dump" repetitiously does not enhance the narrative), as well as the difficulty of playing in the American League East. But it's still a good book telling a great story. A little editing and it could've been great. But why dwell on that?
• 
  Lance

  One of the best accomplishments a sports team can achieve is to jump from last place one season to first place the next. In 2008, the Tampa Bay major league baseball club not only changed its name from Devil Rays to Rays, they jumped from fifth place to first in one of the toughest divisions in baseball, and then went on to capture the American League pennant. This book by Jonah Keri attempts to describe the strategies that the front office team of Stuart Sternberg, Matt Silverman and Andrew Friedman employed to take the team from worst to first.
  
  The strategy of trying harder by that extra 2% in the title is not clear while reading or listening to this book. There is an exhaustive description of all the poor practices of the previous ownership team led by Vince Naimoli – everything from overpaying for aging sluggers to harassing fans who brought their own food into the ballpark. When the trio of former Wall Street businessmen take over, it is almost like the cavalry came in to rescue the Devil Rays. While their record speaks for itself – improving by 31 wins from 2007 to 2008 – the way this was done did not seem to use Wall Street strategies.
  
  Because of this, the book fell a little flat in that aspect as I expected it to have more groundbreaking strategies for building a winning baseball team. Instead, Keri discusses the problems that Tampa has in generating revenue with a poorly located stadium, limited media revenue and poor luck in being in the same division as the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox, two teams with huge revenue streams. There is some “Moneyball” aspects, some wise drafting and investments and recognition that spending a lot of money on a bad team to gain a few more wins won’t improve long-range success. While all of those were key reasons why Tampa Bay became a better team, none of it seemed like a breakthrough discovery that was expected.
  
  There is one other topic that Keri discusses in depth, not only about Tampa Bay but other locations as well, and that is how baseball teams will extort cities and states to finance new ballparks with the threat to move. While this was very interesting material, what seemed a little off to me was that other teams such as the Florida/Miami Marlins and Minnesota Twins were discussed when this topic was covered instead of the Rays and what they are doing to try to get a new stadium.
  
  Overall, this book was okay because the material is interesting and it is always good to hear success stories. However, what was expected from the title and book description and what was actually presented were two different things which left me feeling a little disappointed when I completed the book. This book is recommended for fans of the Rays, but if one wants to learn more about building a winning team, this isn’t the best source.
  
  
  http://sportsbookguy.blogspot.com/201...
• 
  Jay French

  This is not one of those baseball books where you get the joy of playing ball, the thrill of the grass, the blue sky, white ball and windblown dirt of the infield. Nothing poetic about this one. Don’t expect that going in. This is more of what I’d call a business biography of a baseball team. Success in this book isn’t a well hit ball, it’s a well negotiated contract. It feels a bit like the business side of “Moneyball”, but without the charm of the identifiable characters. If they made a movie of “The Extra 2%”, everyone would be played by Jonah Hill – there aren’t any Brad Pitt roles here.
  
  This is the story of the first years of the Tampa Bay (Devil) Rays, the Devil part of the name excised near the end of the book. The first quarter of the book is a review of the efforts involved in bringing the team to Tampa and a description of the first head of the owner’s group, Vince Naimoli. Naimoli is heavily criticized throughout the book. The illustrations of how he operated are sadly comic at times. The rest of the book describes the offices of the team after Vince’s departure. The new team brings in Joe Madden to coach, and his story fills about a tenth of the book. Frankly, I found this most interesting, in that Madden was, and is, willing to try things out. The rest of the book focuses on what the new Wall Street owners brought to the team. I saw three things: 1) a friendlier way to treat employees, 2) hiring analytics experts, using them, and not bragging about what they were doing, and 3) thinking up novel ways to negotiate contracts that hadn’t been tried in baseball. The moneyed Yankees are the bad-guys in this book, and much of the effort described is how Tampa reduced the benefits the Yankees derived from their deep pockets.
  
  I found the description of arbitrage a bit tilted here. They describe arbitrage in baseball as buying the contract of a player who is undervalued, and later flipping the player to another team at a higher price. Arbitrage by definition is a riskless set of exchanges that occur simultaneously, and what they describe here is not simultaneous nor is it riskless. The author reached a bit too far to get a Wall Street term in the book. I was also a bit disappointed in that the analytics weren’t more heavily discussed.
  
  The business take-aways are to treat your employees well, and to think differently than your competitors about the things you have control over. These are pretty obvious, but the description is well written, especially if you enjoy stories about the business that is baseball. If you like stories about businesses pivoting to success based on research and on doing things different than the competition, this is a good book.
• 
  Christian

  Took me way too long to read this but the main things I learned:
  -- The former Devil Rays owner was a cheap miser who had no business owning a professional team
  -- The revenue streams of the Yankees and Red Sox are so ridiculous, it's incredible that any other team can win a World Series.
  -- I dislike Pat Burrell even more now because of how his contract hamstrung the team from making other moves.
  -- They probably won't be moving into a new stadium for the next 10+ years despite the fact that they have the lowest percentage of fans within a 30-mile radius.
• 
  Gavin

  After so thoroughly enjoying 'Up Up and Away', Keri's new book on the Expos, I went after his first book, all about the Tampa Bay Rays. This book wasn't the same history as the Expos book, but also a bit more examination of the forward thinking used by the Owner, GM, and other members of Tampa's braintrust. These men all left Wall Street careers for their true love of baseball, and took their bright ideas with them. This can be seen as a sort of companion book to Michael Lewis' 'Moneyball' which is far more famous (the Brad Pitt movie didn't hurt either). I suppose Moneyball will be next on my baseball reading list.
  
  Jonah Keri loves baseball, all the simple little things about the game, the stats, the joy of everything from Spring Training to Game 7 of the World Series. Reading his work makes me remember just how much I used to love baseball, and how I'm getting close to where I used to be in loving it. I profoundly thank an author who makes me remember how much I love something, and who's writing makes me want to go devour more about that subject.
  
  I look forward to the next book Mr. Keri writes, but for now, I'll have to settle for his columns, podcast, and the occasional Twitter response he gives to my questions/opinions.
  
  A very enjoyable read for baseball fans, even if you're not a Rays fan or a Wall Street type. Highly recommended.
• 
  David Peters

  This is what you get when combining the math awesomeness that is statistical analysis with insider baseball – a great look into what it takes to put a winning baseball team on the field. Now if you got tons of cash you can just skip all of this nonsense and just buy the best talent at the top prices and have at it. At least that is what the Yankees do and even though that alone is pretty much a great reason to hate them, it is a winning formula.
  
  Now if you don’t have the cash (i.e. just about the rest of MLB), but do have time; well there is plan B. Plan B is when you build a strong and loyal fan base and find local home grown product to put on the field. That is what my team, the Twinkies, does. Not as successful as the Yankees but they are competitive most years. Plus there is no shame in cheering for them.
  
  If those first two aren’t available for you, then the old school method was to gamble using your gut. That means you put out the dollars based on instinct and hope for the best. Normally that would mean gambling on a plan, but our heroes, the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, never did formulate a plan; at least one they would follow for more than a season or two. Consequently they were the bottom dwellers of MLB and a perennial punch line.
  
  To make his point, the author details just how bad things were for the Rays, laying just about all of the blame at the founding owner’s feet. While this gossipy evisceration of Vince Naimoli is a very entertaining demonstration of clueless brand management, it struck me as the weakest part of the book. It was mainly he said/she said, and clearly shows a man completely out of touch with the need for managing his public image, but at the same time it bordered on nasty for nastiness sake. It seemed like the author didn’t believe you the reader would get the point of the rest of the book without tearing down owner number one.
  
  I would say the author didn’t have faith in the original concept of the book and added all this shallow stuff to suck in the readers. Unfortunately the people who read the book for this material are going to quit reading by chapter three. That said it is fun to read in a back-biting way. It is always good to remember that a alienating your fan base is never helpful when all your profits are based on said fan base. A good example is getting the local high school band to perform, but then not allowing them into the stadium unless they bought tickets.
  
  The real strength of this book is the math. Taking something that seems as arbitrary as MLB and applying solid business analysis to it can show up a lot of flaws in the current business model. The title suggests that gaining that 2% edge over your competition will lead to substantial profits down the road. Think if you could guarantee winning at roulette 52% of the time. Played right you would soon be a millionaire. Could the same be true for winning baseball games? Three finance guys who had done extremely well on Wall Street and had a love of baseball picked up the Rays relatively cheap. Using their finance knowledge they began managing the team with a long term strategy of gaining that 2% edge.
  
  This meant looking at the numbers to find underappreciated talent at under market value. Just as Warren Buffet scans to country for undervalued companies to add to Berkshire Hathaway, these guys scanned the minor leagues and the free agents trying to fill the holes they had in their roster. How do you find that information out – the numbers? For example there is a guy who can breakdown a pitches style down to when he releases the ball and from that give you a very accurate prediction of how far away they are from injury. Really cool stuff.
  
  Also on a strictly business level, the lengths the new owners go to repair their brand is great. As anyone can tell you brand is everything, especially in a consumer driven business model. Some of the counter-intuitive arguments reminded me of Chris Anderson’s book “Free.” For example, allowing fans to bring in their own food actually leads to increased sales at the concessions. Coupling the games with concerts is another strategy while not original to the Rays, it is used to great effect.
  
  Of course you can’t lead strictly lead by the numbers, you just have to respect them. Two problems are evident in this system though the Rays have been very successful following them. First is mentioned in the book and that is the big miss on Albert Pujols. The Rays has him in their sights since high school (they were “first” to see him) and no matter how they added the numbers up it kept showing a loss. Time and again they (and to be fair, almost everyone else too) passed on him. The second thing, and this I didn’t see mentioned, it is possible to be profitable financially as a team without winning. I would guess that is what would get you through the bad years but the model doesn’t require winning as part of the equation. Rather winning is seems to be the icing on the cake, and while that is good; it won’t keep your fans around forever. “We may not play well, but at least were profitable” is not brand tagline for the long run.
  
  While I like insider baseball and cool analysis used in new and creative ways, I realize I might be in the minority. Plus the early negativity was done a little too much with an excessive zeal. But I do recommend this book for anyone interested in baseball and business. If you like both then you are sitting on a homerun right here.
  
• 
  Mark

  As someone who dedicates, well, every night of the baseball season to watching baseball games, I don't think that I was the target audience for The Extra 2%. Jonah Keri has certainly watched more baseball than me and has talked to and interviewed way more baseball people than me, even before writing this book. But I don't think that it's aimed at a serious baseball fan. So I'm not going to hold it against the book for mostly glossing over the 2008 turnaround season, which I actually thought were the slowest and least interesting parts of the book.
  
  Far more interesting to me was the winding saga of how baseball ultimately came to Tampa Bay - well, St. Petersberg. I did not know this before, or even that Tropicana Field has been built for several years before the baseball team even came into existence. No wonder the place doesn't seem so modern. As well, the problems with the previous owner and his failure on just about every level were interesting to me. The Devil Rays organization being so cheap that not every employee even had a company e-mail address until like 2003 was probably the biggest eye-opening fact here. I mean, wow.
  
  There's a fair bit of inside baseball here. That's what else is interesting to me, of course. Names like Sternberg and Silverman are ones that I hear but don't really know a lot. Keri interviewed a wide variety of people to get perspective on all of these events, including the failed GM from the Naimoli days, and it was also refreshing to kind of get a candid post-mortem from a guy who was in a job that was over his head for several years and maybe he wasn't cut out for it after all. On the other hand, you have to wonder if he might have done better if he didn't have the problem with ownership wanting to win immediately, leading to the bad contracts, and so on. There's always food for thought with what-ifs in baseball, which is part of the fun, too.
  
  I would have liked if there was a bit more meat to the day in and day out of that 2008 turnaround season. That's not the point of the book, though. It's more about the behind the scenes. Though it's not too old, the 2012 baseball season has kind of rendered some of the points moot; neo-Moneyball in Oakland and whatever-the-heck Dan Duquetteball in Baltimore were the dominant stories from 2012, and these are even more interesting (to me, especially, being an Orioles fan) because they're more complicated. The Extra 2% boils down to, the Rays were being run incompetently and now they are being run hyper-competently. So, duh, of course they are doing better now. How did the Athletics and Orioles manage to win in 2012? Well, that's another book for someone else to write. Maybe me, but probably not.
• 
  Audra Spiven

  [EDITED IN APRIL 2022 TO ADD: I originally gave this book 4 stars. I enjoyed the book, and I stand by my original review and will let it remain here unedited. HOWEVER, it is important to note that I have changed the star rating from 4 to 1 to demonstrate solidarity with abuse and DV victims everywhere. I did enjoy this book. But Jonah Keri is a disturbed and violent criminal who does not deserve praise or accolade.]
  
  This book was recommended to me by a brand-new friend who is now batting 1.000 (get it?) on reading recommendations. This includes a baseball article by Jason Parks he emailed me a few days ago too. He's 2 for 2. I can't wait to hear what he recommends next. He DOES say that Moneyball - which I'm starting today - is really good. But everyone says that, so he doesn't get credit for it.
  
  ANYWAY, seriously. The Extra 2% is about the baseball management philosophy of the Tampa Bay Rays, why it works, and how new ownership and leadership literally changed the course of this team and propelled it toward greatness. Jonah Keri is a respected sportswriter and did a superb job with this book. There's a lot of technical baseball terminology that he explains and makes accessible to the non-baseball reader, but he does it without angering/annoying the baseball reader.
  
  I also liked this book because it makes passing mentions of my favorite team, the Kansas City Royals, and actually manages to comment on their below-average yearly performance without being sarcastic or snarky about it, which I deeply appreciated. The book also discusses James Shields, who is basically Kansas City's 2013 MVP after something we in the Royals community refer to simply as "The Trade." It was the off-season move that brought Shields to our club. So it was fun to read about how he contributed significantly to Tampa Bay's success just a few years ago.
  
  The book has a slow pace and LOTS of in-depth information, especially about the history of the Tampa Bay organization and the politics surrounding its birth and continued existence. At no time was the book NOT interesting, but there were times that the pages turned more slowly than others. It took me longer than I would've liked to finish the book, but overall it was still a great read.
• 
  Dan

  As a Rays fan, and as someone who loved Michael Lewis' Moneyball, I came to Jonah Keri's "The Extra 2%" with high expectations.
  
  2% is largely a disappointment. If you are a Rays fan, or simply a baseball fan who wants to relive the incredible worst-to-first run that the Rays put together in 2008, you will find some enjoyable moments here. The most interesting material, ironically, is often the stories of ineptitude from the Naomoli era, which held the then-Devil Rays down for a decade.
  
  The idea here is that the Rays go 2% beyond everyone else when it comes to effort, research, idea generation, player evaluation, etc. Hence the title, The Extra 2%. Don't expect any more information than this. The Rays guard their internal operations very closely, and honestly, I feel they are wise to do so.
  
  So if you wondering HOW the Rays turned the ship around, you'll just have to settle for the hyperbole that they tried about 2% harder than everyone else. Don't expect to learn anything about how they value defense, how they evaluate pitchers and teach the change up, or anything else. They don't want you to know.
  
  Which brings up an interesting question: If there isn't any information to be had, why was this book written at all? Surely the Oakland Athletics didn't reveal all internal operations when Michael Lewis wrote Moneyball, but at least we learned that they valued OBP highly, that they were one of the first teams to look at Fielding Independent Pitching, and that they could prove statistically that RBI's are more a function of who your teammates are than who you are. Lewis took us into the draft room, where we witnessed Billy Beane throw a chair through a wall at the height of his conflict with the old guard scouting system. Moneyball gave us wonderful insights and made us feel like a part of the Athletics, even if the most important secrets were kept from us.
  
  What did I learn in The Extra 2%? That the Rays have to try really hard to beat the financial juggernauts from Boston and New York. But I already knew that, and so did you. Unless you are a die hard Rays fan who wants to relive 2008, you might want to pass.
• 
  Pedro Calmell

  As with all baseball stories, it cab always be spun on two different ways. I wonder if the Rays story told here would be told very differently if the outcome had been different. Say, if the Rays had come up just short of the playoffs (still a marked improvement from the LaMar days) the process would have been the same but the storyline wouldn't be as compelling. Having said that, overcoming the traditional AL East powerhouses is a major achievement and this book does a good job of connecting the threads that took the Rays there in an entertaining manner.
• 
  Jay Rain

  Rating - 7.8
  
  A bit thin on insider content but a satisfying read nonetheless, particularly since I did not know much of Friedman & the Tampa Bay turnaround; Ending makes the 2011 outcomes even more fan rewarding
  
  Not as much Wall Street applicability as the title would suggest & the repetition is evident; Overall, Keri has a smooth writing style, knows his shit & has efficiently targeted the knowledgeable baseball fan
  
• 
  Autumn

  
  
  Predictably written and not nearly detailed enough. I know what the damn team did, tell me how they did it when other teams couldn't!
• 
  Mike

  Could have been a 1000 word article instead.
• 
  Mike Kennedy

  Good book that details the Tampa Bay Rays franchise concentrating on their upswing into relevance in the last decade. It was real interesting to learn about their struggles to get a MLB franchise, and how cheap their first owner was. It was also interesting how they tried to take sabermetrics a step further than Billy Beane and Moneyball did. They kept looking for new ways to change the game and gain that extra 2%. These baseball outsiders found success, and their success continued to change the game of baseball. If you are interested in how a MLB franchise works, I think you will enjoy this book.
• 
  Harry Harman

  I use a calculated, pragmatic approach to solve problems.
  
  Layed the flattery on thick.
  
  Exhausted all possible scenarios.
  
  Built a streak of successful turnaround stories.
  
  All had one thing in common: too much fat.
  
  The antithesis of my philosophy.
  
  The hero that can’t get out of his own way.
  
  We’re not looking for all sorts of ways to squeeze an extra dollar.
• 
  Steve Francis

  i read this theee years too late for any of the ideas it explores about building a ballclub to be new, but still loved it
• 
  Christopher

  **1/4: repetitive where it should be informative; would have more value for people who already have a deeper understanding of finance.
• 
  Emsoca

  The book is definitely excellent.
• 
  Wingedbeaver

  With non-fiction books, sometimes the title of a book means everything. It pulls the reader in. It tells us what we’re going learn. It sets expectations. When the title doesn’t match the content or the content doesn’t live up to the title, when the expectations aren’t met, an otherwise good book can fall flat. That’s what happened with Jonah Keri’s new book, The Extra 2%: How Wall Street Strategies Took a Major League Baseball Team from Worst to First. I’ve heard about this book for some time and as a huge American League East baseball fan I was eager to read it, but unfortunately it didn’t live up to the hype I had built for it. I hoped to read an interesting analysis on how the Rays new owners used Wall Street Strategies to turn around what had been a horrible franchise stuck in the hardest division in professional sports. I envisioned the next generation Moneyball, possibly a mix of Freakanomics and Ball Four, but all I got was a history of Tampa Bay’s dealings with baseball. That’s not to say I wouldn’t have read a history of Tampa’s dealing with baseball or that the material wasn’t interesting, I enjoyed what the book had to say on these topics. My problem was that the book never seemed to effectively address the topics suggested by the title.
  Other then pointing out that the new owners of the Tampa Bay Rays came directly from jobs on Wall Street, Keri fails to convincingly show how Wall Street strategies turned the team’s fortunes around. He points out that most of the key components of the present team were drafted by the previous management. The only effect the new owners had with these players was signing them to cheap long term contracts before they became superstars, but that is far from a new strategy, Cleveland and Texas GM John Hart made that strategy famous a decade ago. Many of the moves of the new management team, including the signing of Pat Burrell, blew up in their faces. Keri highlights the pick up of career minor leaguer Dan Johnson as if it was a major coop, but the guy hit one homerun that happened to lead to one Ray win and was never heard from again.
  The one valid point Keri seems to make is about the new management’s attempts to fix the team’s relationship with the community, but even that falls flat in the end. Keri spends a ton of time on both how Vincent Naimoli, the first Ray owner, pushed the Bay community away and the various outside the box techniques the new owners have used to try and bring them back. If anything this may be where Wall Street strategies would turn around the franchise. Who knows more about marketing then Wall Street? But the book ends by pointing out that Tampa’s attendance still comes in at the bottom of the Major League. All these new strategies have had no effect on bringing the community back at all making the time spent talking about the strategies in context of turning the franchise around seem frivolous.
  I also feel that Keri was unsure who he was writing the book for. At times he explained simple details of the game of baseball as if he was writing to someone who was not familiar with it. At other times, he brushed over baseball ideas as if he assumed his audience would know what he was talking about. As a baseball fan, I was confused why he chose to explain the simple old fashioned concepts but brush over the more complex newer ones.
  If you’re interested in reading about the history of the Tampa Bay Rays and Tampa’s attempts to get a major league team, this is a good enough read. There is a lot of interesting information here that most baseball enthusiasts will enjoy. If you’re only interested in how Wall Street strategies turned the team around then stay away. Keri’s hypothesis falls flat and on many occasions is proven false by his own writing. This book, unfortunately, is not the next Moneyball.
  
• 
  Brad

  Worst-to-first. It’s an age-old cliché that is seldom achieved, but when it is, everyone wants to know the details. How did you do it?
  
  Jonah Keri presents an adequate description of perhaps the most unlikely of such events, the sudden and unexpected rise of the Tampa Bay (Devil) Rays in the brutal American League East. The very concept is so far-fetched, catching and passing the filthy-rich New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox, that this book, if written ten years ago, would have been near the top of comedy best sellers.
  
  The recipe for this success story begins with a sad-sack franchise, poorly located and even more poorly managed, and ripe for fresh blood. Enter Stuart Sternberg and Matthew Silverman, late of Wall Street investing and banking services, and rabid baseball fans, and the saga begins.
  
  So what is the “2% extra” that was so deftly applied to this losing franchise, turning them from perennial losers to World Series participants in just three years?
  
  Keri takes us through the nightmare of “culture change” that was necessitated by the policies implemented by former owner Vincent J. Naimoli. There were changes in the name, the uniform, the promotions (which could be a separate book of its own), and, most important, the way fans and employees were treated. It’s clear that these changes took time, but while these were being implemented, General Manager Andrew Friedman was charging into the fray with a determination to build a team of like-thinking players, players who would fit their respective roles and give Manager Joe Maddon options in pivotal game situations. His concept is reminiscent of the system implemented by Jimmy Johnson in Dallas in which he assigned a number value to players and prospects, enabling the team to gain advantage in drafting and stockpiling draft picks. A quick look back at the success of the Cowboys shows the merit of such a system; one that proved strikingly successful until the ��elephant in the room”, the massive ego of Jerry Jones, forced Johnson out.
  
  Friedman openly admitted that he loved obtaining players for less than they were worth, using contracts that were loaded with team options, especially in dealing with young players who were willing to risk some future earnings in exchange for immediate financial security. Of course there was, and is, inherent risk because of potential injury and the chance that subjective evaluation could be wrong, but the concept, when applied across the board, proved to be the key contributing factor in the quest to overtake teams with many times the cash flow and resources available to them. When the team fought through the wars of 162 games plus playoffs in 2008, reaching the World Series, the “Extra 2%” that had been so fiercely applied was justified, much to the pleasure of thousands in Tampa Bay as well as baseball purists all over the country who had longed for a way for small-market teams to compete with the “big-money” teams.
  
  This book is a blend of concepts and facts that will lean you toward being a fan of the Rays if you’re not careful. The specific examples of innovative managing, from the front office to the diamond, will capture your attention, making this a very entertaining and revealing study of this very unusual story.
• 
  James

  Although it is written in a style that seems to be more like a very long magazine article than a book, Jonah Keri provides some fantastic insight into the resurrection of the largest laughingstock in American sports over the last two decades - the Tampa Bay (Devil) Rays.
  
  Without a doubt my favorite part of the book doesn't actually even discuss how Stuart Sternberg, Matt Silverman and Andrew Friedman used their Wall Street savvy to turn around the trainwreck. It's reading on how that trainwreck unfolded in the first place. Somehow, Keri was able to get some of the funniest (or saddest, if you're a Tampa Bay resident) anecdotes about former owner / skinflint Vince Naimoli. In the annals of terrible owners, Naimoli ranks right up there for Tampa fans with the way Cleveland fans feel about Art Modell and Lebron James. Naimoli ground a promising franchise to rubble just to squeeze another few pennies, and in the process opened the door for the aforementioned Wall Street trio to swoop in at a discount price and overhaul the franchise.
  
  Does Keri tend to deify the protagonists? Yes. In the last section of the book, on stadiums and revenue sharing in baseball, Keri tends to glance over the vast handouts that Sternberg has stumped for, as well as the veiled threats he (like Naimoli) have made about selling or moving the team if a new stadium is not built to replace the dump known as Tropicana Field. The Trop may be a baseball hellhole but St. Pete residents should not feel hijacked every few years by an owner who bought a team KNOWING the stadium stunk and paid a low price for the team accordingly.
  
  My other disappointment was the lack of one-on-one discussions with Andrew Friedman, the GM whiz-kid running the show. All those around him go to great lengths to discuss his financial and business acumen, but most of all his negotiation skills, but we the reader get precious few moments to hear the man speak. Given that he is living out the dream of just about every investment / financial professional worldwide (the opportunity to be the GM of a pro sports team), you'd think getting some more choice blurbs from him would be critical.
  
  Despite a flow that is a bit choppy - the chapters seem more like collections of profiles on the key players and the obstacles the Rays face against the Yankees and Red Sox, rather than a clear story - some colloquial writing and precious few interviews with the triumvirate running the Rays, The Extra 2% is a great read for all baseball fans, whether casual or hardcore. Keri ably dives deep into some nuanced parts of the business of baseball while still making it understandable for casual fans, a difficult balance. And you really do feel for the Rays and the challenges they've faced as you read about the failings of Chuck Lamar, Vince Naimoli, et al, during the first decade of existence. While I'm not going to be trading in my Sox hat for a Rays one anytime soon, I've got a new-found respect for these AL East foes and if it comes down to rooting for them or the Yankees should my Sox fall short, rest assured I'll be picking up a cowbell and cheering for the Rays!