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The writer who predicted Houston Astros triumph makes sense of an unthinkable ascent

It see-sawed from one side to the other, but in the end it's the Houston Astros that enjoyed Worl...



The writer who predicted Houst...
Other Sports

The writer who predicted Houston Astros triumph makes sense of an unthinkable ascent

It see-sawed from one side to the other, but in the end it's the Houston Astros that enjoyed World Series glory in Major League Baseball after overcoming the LA Dodgers in Game 7.

It's been an enthralling battle between the two franchises, ultimately providing a first time winner in the shape of the Astros.

Sports Illustrated's Ben Reiter joined Joe on the show to sum up the culmination of the action and he started off by discussing his visionary prediction from 2014 that the Astros would be 2017 champions at a time when they were struggling terribly as arguably the worst team in MLB.

"In all honest, all credit goes to the team," he said of the fulfillment of that prophetic prediction. 

"It goes to the front office, the executive who put an unprecedented plan for rebuilding what had been a terribly suffering team in place and to the players who did it. We just made a wild call in our magazine three years ago and they took it the rest of the way."

Reiter also explained the depths from which the Astros have come from in such a short space of time.

"The Astros were an embarrassment to the sport of baseball, they really were. They were the losingest team in the League for three straight years," he said. 

The writer who predicted Houston Astros triumph makes sense of an unthinkable ascent

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"The year that [SI] cover came out, they were back in last place. They were a laughing stock. A lot of people just thought it was not right to put a team like that on what is still a very honoured type of place which is the cover of Sports Illustrated.

"But down in Houston I learned some things that really convinced me that this team knew what it was doing, that it was losing for a reason and that there would be much brighter days ahead.

"Now, what they were doing was they were smartly combining big data and analytics and advanced metrics and all these things that all sports teams have these days. But they were combining them with old-fashioned sources of information. Their advanced scouts, what their scouts saw with their eyes and what their experience told them, that sort of stock information has been discarded in a lot of different organisations. The Astros used it."       

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