BOOK REVIEW: Winning Fixes Everything: How Baseball’s Brightest Minds Created Sports’ Biggest Mess

Often, quickly after a team wins a World Series, there will be a book written about how that team managed to achieve its goals. There will be a smattering of inside info, a “you were there” feeling to some key moments and enough of a narrative to give fans of that team a book to sit on the shelf and remind them of the season their team won it all.

“Winning Fixes Everything” is about the Astros, and it comes out just months after the Astros won their second World Series title in the past five years. But it is in no way one of those commemorative books that summarizes a team’s run to a title.

And that’s probably a good thing, as Astros fans are not exactly the prime market for this book. Some who are willing to read a warts-and-all telling of the story of a successful baseball team may enjoy learning more about their favorite team. But those Astros fans who don’t want to read the bad with the good are best off steering clear. This is not a book that leaves a fan base feeling better about their team.

But it’s also not a book-length takedown of the Astros. It’s a book that tries to paint a full picture of how the Astros were one of the most innovative teams of the 2010s, but also one whose ethos of not caring about what others thought led to excesses that led to the downfall of a front office.

This isn’t just a rehash of the Astros sign-stealing saga with some new tidbits added in. It’s a much different and fuller book than that. 

It does give you a comprehensive explanation of the sign-stealing. That could be expected, as Evan Drellich was, along with Ken Rosenthal, the author of the story that made public the Astros’ in-depth efforts to steal signs illegally on their way to their first World Series title.

Readers who pick up “Winning Fixes Everything” do get more details about the Astros sign-stealing efforts, and the book also gives details about other teams’ illegal sign-stealing efforts.

But if you read “Winning Fixes Everything” only for notes about banging on garbage cans, you’re going to end up enjoying only a few chapters of the book. Drellich and others’ reporting efforts have largely covered this ground before. And you’re likely missing the point.

Drellich was an Astros beat writer who went on to cover the Red Sox and now covers baseball at the national level for The Athletic. That combination of in-person, in-depth reporting on the Astros during their rise, combined with the perspective that comes from getting away from that up-close look propels the book.

What this book actually does better than almost any book of the last decade is to serve as a fly-on-the-wall of a front office as it finds success and then tries to sustain it. It traces Jeff Luhnow’s path from McKinsey to the Cardinals to the Astros and eventually to his dismissal. But it also explains the stories of many who worked with him along the way. It does a good job of covering when the Astros were a victim of the Chris Correa hacking scandal, but much of the book is highlighting many of the behind-the-scenes people who played key roles in the Astros rise, including some who would then depart in disgrace.

At the end of the day, a baseball front office is an assemblage of power centers and power struggles. There are ascents and descents. You get insights into what the Astros did better than other teams, what they did differently and where they crossed lines.

And that’s what makes this a must-read baseball book if you care about the why as well as the how. You may have already known that the Astros built a powerhouse whose leadership achieved many of its goals but then was exiled for overstepping the rules of the game. “Winning Fixes Everything” helps explain why the seeds of that success and failure were all tied together.