Baseball can be a two-faced sport. On one hand, you have megamarket teams like the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox spending obscene amounts of money to lure the game’s biggest names to their lineups. Conversely, you also have this wave coming over many teams, small and large, to implement advanced systems of analytics to spend smarter and plan decades ahead.

And while the Red Sox enjoyed the most publicized of these successes, winning the 2004 World Series after an 86-year drought, an arguably greater turnaround was experienced four years later and 1,400 miles to the south, where the Tampa Bay Rays executed one of the most remarkable turnarounds in baseball history. Abruptly and seemingly from nowhere, these perennial doormats surprisingly went from perennial doormat to the 2008 World Series and back-to-back division championships.

Jonah Keri, a former writer for both Baseball Prospectus and Investor’s Business Daily, has spent the last two years chronicling how the Rays overhauled their organization from top to bottom, concentrating less on alluring big-name talent and more on investing millions in home-grown statistical databases, scouting techniques, and a better fan experience. In his new book, The Extra 2%: How Wall Street Strategies Took a Major League Baseball Team From Worst to First, Keri examines how the Tampa Bay Rays — the last pro baseball team to offer employees e-mail — ultimately embraced the best ideas from Wall Street to become one of the sport’s most unlikely winners.

Wired.com: So you’re Canadian, grew up a huge Montreal Expos fan, and now you live in New Hampshire. How in the world did you end up writing a book that takes place almost entirely in central Florida?

Jonah Keri: Back in the mid-’90s, I used to post on this baseball site that’s long been become something else at this point, and I used the screen name joneseyjones. I had grown up reading Bill James and Rob Neyer and all those guys, and so I used to go on there and say things that really made no sense to anybody else. Either people thought Oh, this guy’s really interesting or would be like What the hell’s this guy talking about? But I definitely stood out from the rest of them — and no, I wasn’t trolling.

A few years later, some guy e-mails me out of the blue and says, “You don’t know me but I was AZbullpencoach on that message board you used to post on.” And he had gone to McGill University and was a huge Expos fan also. And so he says, “I loved your opinions back then and I’ve tracked your career over the ensuing years and now I’m an editor at Random House. Why don’t you come write a book for us?” And I’m thinking that it’s one of my friends playing a prank on me, but he was for real.

Wired.com: You were a staff writer for Investor’s Business Daily for about a decade. Were you excited about being to apply these two knowledge banks — baseball and business — you had built up?

Keri: Oh, definitely. Starting out of college, it was hard to find anything that was remotely in sports. To be a columnist or a beat writer, you’ve got to pay your dues and cover high school field hockey for 20 years. So I became a business writer by default, and I tried to present myself as a sports business writer. And nothing really came of it, but this was before Darren Rovell and other guys had really taken off with that. So I tried to go down that path and wasn’t really successful. But as I writing later for Baseball Prospectus, I started to meet other people that were into that. And then getting into this book, it was a great opportunity to get back into that and get a real insider’s look at a major league baseball team. And then when these guys for Tampa Bay are referring to things like positive arbitrage, it was a great feeling to be able to understand those concepts right away.

But when the Rays’ people were in the process of turning the team around, those were business concepts they’re using, not traditional baseball concepts.

Wired.com: The main premise of the book is how this new ownership group comes and totally changes the culture by bringing in all these Wall Street guys who hadn’t previously worked in the industry. And they came with a very “long view” perspective, which can be rare in baseball. But other teams were starting to dabble in this, like the Red Sox with Theo Epstein and Bill James, as well as the whole Moneyball approach with the Oakland A’s. How were the Rays different from other teams in that respect?

Keri: You mean, analytically? Well, the interesting thing about the Rays had all these guys that were straight from Wall Street, and that basically manifested itself in the statistical analysis. They had guys who were in charge of “baseball R&D” — guys like Erik Neander, Josh Kalk, and James Click — and we hadn’t really seen that before.

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