NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The inside story of the Houston Astros, whose relentless innovation took them from the worst team in baseball to the World Series in 2017 and 2019 “Reiter’s superb narrative of how the team got there provides powerful insights into how organizations—not just baseball clubs—work best.”—The Wall Street Journal Astroball picks up where Michael Lewis’s acclaimed Moneyball leaves off, telling the thrilling story of a championship team that pushed both the sport and business of baseball to the next level. In 2014, the Astros were the worst baseball team in half a century, but just three years later they defied critics to win a stunning World Series. In this book, Ben Reiter shows how the Astros built a system that avoided the stats-versus-scouts divide by giving the human factor a key role in their decision-making. Sitting at the nexus of sports, business, and innovation, Astroball is the story of the next wave of thinking in baseball and beyond, at once a remarkable underdog tale and a fascinating look at the cutting edge of evaluating and optimizing human potential.

When a space scooter race on CLEO-7 becomes a battle between the boys and the girls, the AstroKids need a reminder to work together as a team.

A smooth-talking Galaxian visitor to the space station shows unusual interest in the AstroKids' new space mutt, Zero-G.

Book 10 of AstroKids. Tag is sick of tagging along, so he hops his sister’s space scooter and heads to the nearest spaceship, only to find himself trapped on a vessel where the digital food copiers are stuck on astro Cheesies! Tag knows he’s in deep-space trouble, but he also realizes that with God, he’s never completely alone. Theme verse: “Where can I run from you?” (Psalm 139:7).

Because of their popularity, books in series are great vehicles for fostering literacy among all types of readers, who are almost always adamant about reading every title in the series, in series order. Yet traditional information sources on children's and YA literature include very little about series fiction, so librarians often have difficulty managing this literature. This guide will be a rich resource and time-saver for librarians who work with children. It introduces users to the best and most popular fiction series of today, covering more than 1,000 series with over 10,000 titles, appropriate for elementary readers. Annotations also indicate series and titles accepted by some of the popular electronic reading programs (e.g., Accelerated Reading, Reading First). A numbered list of titles in the series follows.

Buzz Bright, a newcomer to CLEO-7, the new space station orbiting the moon, finds his Christian principles tested by an unfriendly prankster. Includes a history of space stations and instructions for decoding a secret message.

Book 9 of AstroKids. Miko has discovered a secret about her lost family that no one could have imagined: She has inherited an entire planet! But a sneaky developer is after it, too. Will Miko’s new wealth ruin her friendships and her life on CLEO-7? Theme verse: “A cord of three strands is not quickly broken” (Ecclesiastes 4:12).