Winners: How Good Baseball Teams Become Great Ones (and It's Not the Way You Think)

Why does your team float around the .500 mark year after year while other franchises always seem to be in contention? How do some teams make that incredible leap from worst to first in just a season or two? If you could corner your team's owner and general manager—say in mid-October when neither you nor they have anything better to do—what advice would you give them so that you can spend next October at the stadium? Plenty of ideas, but you're not sure which ones really work? You need to read Winners! In this raucous, entertaining, and sure-to-be-controversial guide for the dedicated fan and unpaid organizational watchdog, Baseball Prospectus columnist Dayn Perry dives deep into the stats and comes up with some mind-blowing answers to the most important question in baseball: How to winners win? Analyzing record, lineups, defense, and pitching staffs of the 124 teams that made it to the playoffs between 1980 and 2003, Perry separates baseball myth from hardball reality, slays some sacre