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    The Only Rule Is It Has to Work: Our Wild Experiment Building a New Kind of Baseball Team
    The Only Rule Is It Has to Work: Our Wild Experiment Building a New Kind of Baseball Team
    The Only Rule Is It Has to Work: Our Wild Experiment Building a New Kind of Baseball Team
    Audiobook13 hours

    The Only Rule Is It Has to Work: Our Wild Experiment Building a New Kind of Baseball Team

    Written by Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller

    Narrated by Kirby Heyborne and John Pruden

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    It's the ultimate in fantasy baseball: You get to pick the roster, set the lineup, and decide on strategies-with real players, in a real ballpark, in a real playoff race. That's what baseball analysts Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller got to do when an independent minor-league team in California, the Sonoma Stompers, offered them the chance to run its baseball operations according to the most advanced statistics.

    We tag along as Lindbergh and Miller apply their number-crunching insights to all aspects of assembling and running a team, following one cardinal rule for judging each innovation they try: it has to work. We meet colorful figures like general manager Theo Fightmaster and boundary-breakers like the first openly gay player in professional baseball. Even Jose Canseco makes a cameo appearance.

    Will their knowledge of numbers help Lindbergh and Miller bring the Stompers a championship, or will they fall on their faces? Will the team have a competitive advantage or is the sport's folk wisdom true after all? Will the players attract the attention of big-league scouts, or are they on a fast track to oblivion?
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateMay 17, 2016
    ISBN9781515977063
    The Only Rule Is It Has to Work: Our Wild Experiment Building a New Kind of Baseball Team

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    Reviews for The Only Rule Is It Has to Work

    4/5

    104 ratings16 reviews

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    • 4/5
      My only complaint is that there wasn't more nerdy analytic ideas that the authors got to try out. It really does make you realize though how much of modern team success is down to composition rather than tactics. Sure, aggregate managerial decisions could boost your WAR marginally, but really it's the ability to identify talent and roles (fireman) that makes such an immense difference compared to conventional wisdom.
    • 5/5
      Lindbergh and Miller are two journalists who firmly believe in the utility of statistical analysis for improving and managing baseball players and teams. They get the opportunity to essentially manage an independent minor league team for a season, and this book relates what happened. Their story is engaging and hits all the baseball high points: statistics reveal talent no one else sees, clashes with traditionalists, friction and friendship among teammates, victories and defeats. I devoured this book and recommend it to any baseball fan!
    • 4/5
      In 2015, Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller, a pair of sportswriters, bloggers and podcast hosts got the owners of an 4-team independent baseball league* to agree to allow them to apply the relatively new ideas about baseball that are generally housed under the broad term, "sabermatrics." Sabermatrics is the philosophy/practice of developing rosters and considering in-game strategy that is based on deep dives into performance stats and probabilities rather than going by old-school, we've always done it that way attitudes.* Independent leagues are the lowest level of professional baseball. The leagues are "independent" because they have no affiliation with major league teams.The book is, basically, a co-memoir. The two men take turns writing chapters. Together, they describe their progress through the season with their team, the Sonoma Stompers. While they don't get to create the team's entire 22-man roster, they are able to add several players of their own choosing for which they study databases of players who had remained undrafted by major league organizations and whose stats indicate potential success based upon the "new" theories. The writers describe the coming together of the team, their struggles to gain the respect of the players and coaching staff for their roles in the team's performance, their growing understanding of the dynamics of clubhouse culture and the specific problems of players performing at such a low level of organized ball. As the season progresses, the two writers, together, weave together a very engaging story and they don't stint in self-examination, either. There's a lot of learning done.There is also a very interesting section of the narrative about the coming out of one of their pitchers, Sean Conroy, to become the first openly gay ballplayer in American professional baseball. When Conroy starts on the mound for the team's Pride Night that June, the program for the game, signed by every team member, ends up in the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. The biggest part of the story, in a way, is Conroy's teammates' easy acceptance of his sexuality.Lindbergh and Miller are both quite good writers, so the book flows very nicely and remains interesting throughout. It's a study of baseball, certainly, and as such is more or less of interest to baseball fans only. But this is also an interesting and acute study of human nature.A personal note that the town of Sonoma is, you'll not be surprised to learn, in Sonoma County, California, just a touch south of where I live in Mendocino County. Yet I'd never even heard of the team, or the league, until I happened to notice an article online about their having fielded the first women players in organized baseball. (They did that the next year, after Miller and Lindbergh had ended their active participation in the organization.) That led me to the team's website, and to their "products" page, which features this book. I was looking forward to driving down to take in some games this summer. Oh, well.Anyway, I highly recommend this book, though for baseball fans only.
    • 2/5
      I tried so hard to like this book. I know the details are important to the authors, but the minutiae got in the way of telling the story. I couldn't keep track of the players and lost interest.
    • 4/5
      A pair of stats geeks with a podcast are given the opportunity to run a baseball team to see if they can test the concepts of sabermetrics - the empirical analysis of baseball - in a real world setting.  The team they get to try this on is the 2015 Sonoma Stompers who play in the low level independent league, the Pacific Association.  They face challenges of having a manager and players go along with their unorthodox suggestions for playing baseball, as well finding talented players to sign to the team, since the Pacific Association doesn't attract the best talent.  To surprise of many, the Stompers do very well, dominiating the league in the first half.  The authors are honest enough to admit that it wasn't always their ideas that contributed to the overall success.  But sucess has its downside as it leads to many of the Stompers' best players getting signed to contracts on teams in better leagues, leaving the Stompers weakened for the second half and postseason. Nevertheless, I did find myself drawn into their account and caring very deeply about how the Stompers would do that season.  The book is an interesting case study of putting sabermetrics into action and the real life challenges it may face, as well as just being an interesting baseball story.  
    • 4/5
      The best part about this book is the detailed, real life collision between "statistics and analysis says we should do things THIS way" and "Actual human beings don't like being treated as pieces on a chessboard." Both sides learn a lot from each other, and benefit greatly as a result. I wish this kind of experimentation could be more than just a seeming "gag to write a book". It also helps that they are both great writers!
    • 4/5
      Think Moneyball for the minor leagues. The really, really low level minor leagues. The Sonoma Stompers to be exact.Think the ultimate fantasy league where a pair of sabermetrics geeks get to test out their ideas on a real live baseball team one summer. Of course, they encounter managers and others who are less than willing to go along with the program. Their ideas and how they worked out, not to mention how they got the team to go along with those ideas, were the best parts of the book. Overall, a book that any baseball fan could love.
    • 4/5
      Entertaining and insightful. A slightly better subtitle might be "Our Attempt to Build ...", as much of the authors' book is about the various hurdles that get in the way of their quest. To their credit, Lindbergh and Miller are funny and candid about their own failings and don't just complain about how their new-school sabermetrics were stymied by hidebound managers. It was also eye-opening to read their descriptions of the independent league they were working in; affiliated minor ball is far away from the majors (think of Crash Davis's speech in "Bull Durham"), but indie ball has far less money, far less support and far fewer chances of making it to even Single A, let alone the Show. Too bad the book only covers one season; I would've liked to see the authors have more of a chance to try out their strategies and to see if they actually added up to more wins and better players.
    • 4/5
      Entertaining and insightful. A slightly better subtitle might be "Our Attempt to Build ...", as much of the authors' book is about the various hurdles that get in the way of their quest. To their credit, Lindbergh and Miller are funny and candid about their own failings and don't just complain about how their new-school sabermetrics were stymied by hidebound managers. It was also eye-opening to read their descriptions of the independent league they were working in; affiliated minor ball is far away from the majors (think of Crash Davis's speech in "Bull Durham"), but indie ball has far less money, far less support and far fewer chances of making it to even Single A, let alone the Show. Too bad the book only covers one season; I would've liked to see the authors have more of a chance to try out their strategies and to see if they actually added up to more wins and better players.
    • 4/5
      Baseball is the sport that most appeals to the dreamers among us, those who lack the talent to play the game at a high level but who have such a deeply felt love of the sport that we are willing to take just about any baseball related job that comes along. Until recently, such dreamers were limited to jobs in the front office or to positions that could never even remotely impact what was happening down on the field. But then along came Money Ball, and everything changed. It hasn’t been easy, but baseball’s statistical nerds are finally in position to contribute to the game in ways that used to be impossible.Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller are two of those dreamers – and they managed to make their own dream come true by convincing the owner of a small-time professional baseball team to hand them the keys to his team for an entire season. As Lindbergh and Miller describe them, the Sonoma Stompers, members of a four-team league known as the Pacific Association, are pretty much astride the bottom rung of the professional baseball ladder. But that doesn’t matter.What does matter is that the Stompers and the three teams they play over and over again are comprised of real, living and breathing baseball players – young men who grew up dominating the baseball fields of their youth, all the while believing that one day they would make it to the major leagues. But although that hasn’t happened for any of them so far, and probably never will, they are not ready yet to call baseball a day. And as long as they can afford to play the game for the $500 a month or so that the Stompers can offer, Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller want to help them make their dreams come true.Lindbergh and Miller are baseball writer/editors (Lindbergh for FiveThirtyEight and Miller for Baseball Prospectus) with lots of theories about how best to play the game. They use intricately designed spreadsheets to identify players that may have slipped through the cracks of major league baseball’s comprehensive player draft system. They dream of using a five-man infield against players who almost never hit a fly ball, and they wonder what would happen if they ask their hitters not to swing the bat any time they jump in front on a two-ball, no strike count. They wonder why managers insist upon saving their “closers” exclusively for ninth inning save situations instead of using them in critical situations that happen an inning or two earlier when a game is so often lost. Now it’s time to see what happens when theory becomes reality. The Only Rule Is It Has to Work – and there’s only one way to find out.
    • 4/5
      I Finally got time to read The Only Rule Is It Has To Work by Ben Lindbergh.Very interesting story of a couple ofBaseball Prospectus alumni getting a chance to actually try what allthe Sabermetricians talk about. They get approved to basically useSabermetrics to populate the roster of a low independent league teamand try a lot of unorthodox (to baseball traditionalists) ideas - shifts,pitching moves, etc.There are very interesting positive results and some that don't work.They also run into some problems with the manager balking at some moves,even though he was part of the agreement.All in all a very interesting and it would be fun to see more of theseideas implemented in the Majors.
    • 4/5
      The Only Rule is an excellent and different kind of baseball book. Two baseball writers/analysts got the opportunity to run the operations of a low level minor league baseball team for a year. They are believers of using statistics in their decision making and used this experience to test their theories. While there a lot of explanations of the modern statistical game there turned out to be as much information about the human side of putting together a team and getting everyone to buy in. The interpersonal parts of the book were at least as interesting as the analytics. One of the theories they tested was to challenge the use of the best reliever almost exclusively in the last inning when the team his winning in a close game. I the always found that strange and why not use your best reliever in a tight situation at any time. Anther thing they tried was to use five infielders in certain situations. The book gave a lot of insight into life in the low minors and also portrayed the unique situation of the better you do the greater the likelihood of the best players moving to a higher league.I was not anticipating the excitement of a season and the authors managed to generate suspense which I was not expecting.Overall the book was informative and a very good read.
    • 5/5
      Five stars for baseball fans interested in the application of sabremetrics to real life baseball. The authors succeed and fail as they discover the intersection of statistics, human dynamics, and the laws of baseball, where all the right moves don't necessarily translate into the right outcome. This book is also a well written portrait of the personalities and places associated with independent league baseball.
    • 4/5
      Disclaimer, I am a big fan of the San Rafael Pacifics, the "enemy" of the Sonoma Stompers, so I think I was pretty pumped to like this book, as I've been attending games since the league was founded! And I did like it! Lots of great behind the scenes information about how this team was run, and tons of statistical data about how some of the decisions were made. It was also cool to read about the league in general and of course, baseball in specific! And even though I hate "the shift", I did enjoy the perspectives given by the authors! Fun to read, and a MUST read for any fan of the Sonoma Stompers!
    • 4/5
      Authors Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller provide an entertaining look at the process of building an independent league team, the Sonoma Stompers, at the lowest rung of professional baseball. So here's the challenge: how do Ben and Sam find "diamond-in-the-rough" players (or merely competent/serviceable players) to fill out a roster when 99.99% of them have already been found by all the teams at the higher levels of professional ball? Stitching together some advanced statistical services to create player spreadsheets, they construct a team. But their story goes well beyond mere sabermetrics and building a team fantasy-style, as the heart of the book is the human element, the personalities, and the personal interactions with players and ownership which overlay upon the statistics.This is a fast-paced, fun read, recommended for for any baseball fan.
    • 5/5
      Library Thing Early Reviewer copy.The older I get, the better I am at finding books I like to read. So I can scan a review and go 'yeah' or 'naw' in a few lines. I knew I was going to like this book. It is even better than I had hoped.Ben and Sam are baseball writers, both Editors-in-Chief (like Attorneys General) of Baseball Prospectus - Sam current, Ben emeritus, my go-to site for daily baseball browsing. Through an unlikely series of events, they were able to 'take-over' an unaffiliated minor league team last summer, given mostly free-reign over decisions by the team's GM and owner.The authors showed up to spring training armed only with spreadsheets and baseball geek connections, and had to figure out how to make it all work over an 80 game season. They mostly succeed, with a few (foreseeable) difficulties integrating the data into the various humans affected. BenandSam (run-on intentional) are also podcast hosts for the (mostly) daily Baseball Prospectus podcast. I hope they eventually - maybe next off-season - go into a lengthy, chapter-by-chapter out-take - because I have some questions. One is did they change names, because some of the portrayals are less than flattering. They may have burnt some ships. Like life, the events last summer didn't all work out as planned. At best, the existential gale quieted for a few innings here and there. But that is more than enough reward for the reader. This book is like your favorite sandwich at your favorite sandwich shop - you look forward to it, despite knowing what to expect, and devour it down every time, pickles and all. Five stars.