In 2017, the Houston Astros stopped striking out. That wasn’t the only reason why the team went from 84 wins to 101 and catapulted from finishing third in the American League West in 2016 to winning the 2017 World Series. They upgraded the lineup at a few crucial spots: Franchise cornerstone Alex Bregman took over at third base and certified competent baseball guy Yuli Gurriel at first, and they ground their way from subcromulent to perfectly cromulent at catcher. Justin Verlander, acquired in the last seconds before the trade deadline, pitched like a vengeful demigod from the moment he arrived; other starting pitchers ably filled gaps in the bullpen during the playoffs; and all the hitters in the lineup who mattered hit a bit better than they had before. The Astros looked like not just the best team in baseball but one that might fill that role for another half-decade or so.

That success seemed all the more remarkable in light of how bad the Astros had been just a few years earlier. The abjectly terrible Astros teams of the early 2010s were bad by design, but any team that loses two out of every three games for three straight seasons tends to stick in the mind. General manager Jeff Luhnow, a former McKinsey consultant whom the Astros poached from the Cardinals back in 2012, had efficiently torched the middling and mid-priced roster he inherited while painstakingly putting together a years-long effort to remake the team’s farm system. What emerged after those years of meticulous and intentional awfulness was something like the perfect contemporary baseball roster—deep and talented and anchored by veteran stars who stubbornly refused to decline, but primarily built around and upon young players the team drafted during its years at the bottom. Those players would for years continue to be wildly underpaid relative to their production, thanks to the way MLB’s salary structure works. That last cost-saving data point is the sort of thing that baseball fans have been conditioned during the arbitrage-obsessed Moneyball era to regard as an objective good; executives and owners tend to use words like “flexibility” or “sustainability” to describe this approach, and many fans have come to adopt the same market-savvy argot. Prioritizing that sort of thing and using that sort of language were things that Luhnow did very well.

Luhnow was a true McKinsey consultant’s consultant, which is to say that he was secretive and a little smug. He reliably kept outsiders—a group that included, for years of his tenure, even the players in his employ—on a need-to-know basis when it came to the work that he and a “decision sciences” team were doing as they collected and parsed every available bead of data that the game could provide. He was so devoted to efficiency that he engaged consultants from McKinsey to audit the organization (and, inevitably, to disrupt the org chart) every year. The collective mission was to ensure that the Astros brand of Moneyball would stay artfully (yet efficiently!) poised on the bleeding edge of managerially minded innovation.

All perfectly bloodless in the management consulting way, then, but not without some carnage. There were stories that the front office culture Luhnow had created in Houston was not just cutthroat and paranoid, but increasingly high-handed and stridently amoral. Luhnow overruled junior staffers and acquired a talented young closer at a discount while that pitcher served a 75-game suspension for domestic violence; he pushed unsuccessfully to sign Luke Heimlich, a college pitcher whose prospect status evaporated when it was revealed that he was a convicted sex offender who preyed on minors. But the results spoke for themselves.

Take that strikeout thing, for instance. In 2016, an improving but not yet great Astros team struck out 1,452 times. That was a whole lot—roughly one out of every three outs the team made that year came by strikeout, and only three big league teams struck out more often. Seven of the nine players who most frequently filled out the team’s lineup card struck out at least 100 times. Jake Marisnick, the team’s reliably damp-looking top reserve, struck out 83 times in just 311 plate appearances. Trends in the game had normalized this to an extent, if not necessarily at this scale; strikeouts were fine, so long as there were a sufficient number of home runs built into the deal. In 2016, the team hit 198.