Business Week looks at the statistics driven Astros front office:

The hostility Luhnow’s faced isn’t surprising. Being baseball’s Mitt Romney has exposed the raw economic calculus of winning, shattering the romance and mystery that’s supposed to lie at the heart of the game. If Luhnow succeeds, other teams are sure to follow him—as Beane and the Oakland A’s can attest. “I joke with Billy,” says Olney, “that this is the spawn of Moneyball. It’s the most pure, numbers-driven experiment baseball has ever seen.”

It’s all in the blue jeans, baby:

Luhnow’s appreciation of the predictive power of data grew out of his experience selling designer jeans. In the early 2000s, with a former president of Levi Strauss, he co-founded an online custom apparel company that made jeans for Lands’ End (LE) shoppers. “You’re taking self-reported inputs from a human being,” he says, “and then trying to figure out exactly what pair of pants to make them. Are they being honest with themselves? Is there vanity sizing involved? How do they perceive themselves relative to how they actually are?”

These were critical questions because if wishful thinking led customers to order jeans that didn’t fit, they would send them back. Over time the company amassed enough data to anticipate and correct for these tendencies. “We used neural nets and other artificial-intelligence technology to develop algorithms to predict these patterns,” says Luhnow, who still holds two U.S. patents for custom-fitted apparel. “When I got to the Cardinals, I thought, this is probably something that can be applied over here.”

He found a kindred spirit in Mejdal, whose NASA research had uncovered similar examples of the limits of human intuition in predicting performance. For example, Mejdal showed that a drunken astronaut was a better pilot than a sober one flying four hours after his normal bedtime. After reading Moneyball, he sent unsolicited reports to each major league team outlining how they could improve their draft. Years later, when the Cardinals’ drafts were the envy of the league, other teams tried to emulate their strategy. “If they’d just hung on to their junk mail,” Mejdal says, “it would have been right there.”

All very cool. And I love this about tandem rotations:

To uncover starting pitching talent, baseball’s costliest commodity, the Astros’ minor league teams instituted a tandem rotation. In a traditional five-man rotation, a starter goes as deep into the game as he can. In a tandem system, every game features two “starters” who throw four or five innings in succession. This increases the number of pitchers given an opportunity to prove they can start and reduces the chance that human subjectivity will cause the team to miss hidden talent. (It’s also thought to prevent injury.) Luhnow cites a soft-tossing lefty named Tommy Shirley as a diamond this system unearthed. “He would have been pegged as a lefty specialist [relief pitcher],” he says. Instead, Shirley emerged as an All-Star starter in Double-A and was promoted to the club’s Triple-A team in July.

There’s so much more, so please read the whole thing.