Animation, Sport and Culture

Phillies under Pat Gillick, the team’s general manager from 2006 to 2008. Mentioned previously in connection with his success with the Blue Jays, Orioles, and the Mariners, ‘Pat Gillick showed [with the Phillies] that he did not need to aggressively embrace analytics, even in the twenty-first century’. This assertion rings true only within the narrow time frame of the 2008 World Series victory; the Phillies and their continuing aversion to modern analytics have left Philadelphia fans in baseball purgatory. The Phillies, despite their earlier success and supposed organizational superiority, have yet to notch more than 81 wins in a season since 2011 and currently rank twenty-first in organization talent. In Pursuit of Pennants’s main contribution is inviting the reader, and the baseball community at large, to examine our understanding of organizational success. Armour and Levitt have expertly woven stories, history, and statistics (though mainly traditional ones) into a coherent narrative that tracks the evolution of the front office through the modern era. As this narrative continues to develop, the reader is provided multiple opportunities to evaluate the traditional barometers of success – pennants and World Series titles – and their relevance in an increasingly corporatized sport. When used in conjunction with proanalytics resources such as Baseball Prospectus, Grantland, and FanGraphs, the book becomes a powerful tool in analyzing the ability of any modern baseball organization. In this way, the book epitomizes its thesis about the modern age – that only those able to synthesize the traditional approach with the emerging analytics will be able to maintain success.