How to Beat a Broken Game

“Today, baseball is deciding who it will serve in—and for—the coming generations. Soaked in greed and in the hands of Ivy League numbers crunchers, the game teeters between sport and thesis paper. Better it is in the hands of Pedro Moura, who, in How to Beat a Broken Game, has captured the science, the economics, and the soul of a pastime laboring to rediscover its most authentic self. It’s a brilliant book about the championship Dodgers. It’s a book about so much more.”

“Pedro Moura has written a clear-eyed, absorbing account of the Dodgers’ rise—and baseball’s decline. It lays out everything broken about Major League Baseball while simultaneously reminding us exactly why we love the sport so much. How to Beat a Broken Game is a book with heart to match its brains. If only the league itself could say the same thing.”

“The scope of this book is just extraordinary. It’s supposedly about a single championship team, but it’s really about everything: technology and culture, insiders and outsiders, the young and the old, and all that’s right and wrong and now and next in the sport today. Moura is such a great reporter that he does what every writer wishes they could do: He comes to know even more about his subject than his sources do. I loved this book, even if it did make me feel old.”