The Extra 2 Percent

Jonah Keri, The Extra 2%: How Wall Street Strategies Took a Major League Baseball Team from Worst to First. New York: Ballantine Books/ESPN Books, 2011. Pp. vii-ix, 253 pp.

Keri’s book chronicles the way the former cellar-dwelling Tampa Bay Devil Rays changed not only their name, but their entire organizational structure on a quest of rebuilding that took them from last to first in the span of a year.

Baseball’s history in the greater Tampa/St. Pete area is fraught with bad luck and bad timing. The general story arc of The Extra 2% is the fact that baseball nearly came to Tampa/St. Pete when in 1988 the White Sox made the first relocation power play that resulted in public financing of a stadium. The tragic irony of the Rays’ situation is that now, encumbered with the need for a new stadium, the history of bad debt and empty promises that has become commonplace when discussing public funding of stadiums ­– along with a crippling fifteen more years on their lease at Tropicana Field – are preventing the Rays from the commodity they can’t survive without: growing revenue streams.

As much as The Extra 2% is a story of hope it is also one of a failure so inherent that it seems predetermined. For all the success found in the new approach applied by Stuart Sternberg, Andrew Freidman, and even Joe Maddon, there are the stories of passing on Albert Pujols in the draft and paying not-so-smart monies in a smart money era to the likes of Pat Burrell and Troy Percival.

The leap from worst to first is a story that is more monumental in baseball than almost any other sport. The problem is no longer (and probably never was) a flash of success. The real problem facing the Rays, a situation Keri blames Major League Baseball for, is the limitation on Tampa’s ability to maintain success. Moreover, Keri’s argument that arbitrage (the simultaneous buying and selling of assets, in this case players) was the main road for Tampa’s success is semantic at best. I am not an educated Wall Street mind, but if you show me a team that doesn’t attempt to gain some type of value with each trade you’re probably showing me the Pittsburgh Pirates. Keri is so intent on establishing arbitrage as the focal point of Tampa’s success that he at times relegates the importance of the conceptual revolutions Tampa’s front office is responsible for. Again ironically, these concepts were picked up quickly by the powerhouse teams like the Yankees and Red Sox, nullifying much of the strategic advantage that the Rays appeared to have.

The book is without even a small index, which would be helpful, but whether that is on the author or ESPN Books is unclear. Keri’s tone is at times vitriolic and polemic, bearing an all too common resemblance to biographers that become apologists for their subject, but his prose is crisp and enjoyably readable. As a whole, the book is a cogent reminder to baseball and its fans that tradition and progress are not mutually exclusive. Nor should they be.