That zero-sum perspective is, in that sense, a way into why the Astros are where they are right now—in the World Series after another dominant season, but also at the center of an entirely avoidable conflagration ignited by a senior front office staffer who made a point of gloating about the team’s most cynical player acquisition to someone in a way he intended to be hurtful, exacerbated by the team’s decision to baselessly tab the initial reports about the incident as fake news and some unsatisfying non-apologies, and not nearly ended by the decision, on Thursday afternoon, to fire the staffer in question.

“We get tens of thousands of rows of data —about every swing, every pitch, every fielder movement,” is how Assistant GM Brandon Taubman explained it to the Cornell Alumni Magazine last spring.

Because every team is playing the same game—the Mets’ approach could best be categorized as anecdotal/folkloric and the Royals often seem to just be trying to craft an unusually muscular Christian men’s group, but both at least have analytics departments—the Astros have to take their edges where they can find them.

This organizational dedication to all that proprietary stuff created some problems at the beginning, Luhnow told his McKinsey interlocutors, because players and coaches were initially put off by non-negotiable edicts from above about, say, shifting aggressively on defense.

For an organization built on the promise that every moment of every baseball game can be fully understood, the Astros sure pivoted to radical subjectivity notably quickly when Taubman’s behavior became public.

“Jeff’s gonna do what he wants to do.” In the book, Lindbergh and Sawchik note that Luhnow was “talked out of” drafting child sex offender Luke Heimlich ; his owner backed him on Osuna and the deal got done.