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

Author: Sam Miller, Ben Lindbergh

Narrator: Kirby Heyborne, John Pruden

Unabridged: 13 hr 20 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 05/17/2016

Synopsis

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 José 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?

About Sam Miller

Sam Miller is the editor in chief of Baseball Prospectus, coeditor of Baseball Prospectus's annual guidebook, and a contributing writer at ESPN The Magazine. He lives on the San Francisco peninsula with his wife and daughter.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Mac on June 11, 2016

As the book jacket says, "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......more

Goodreads review by Mark on April 14, 2016

I really enjoyed this book. I would recommend it for intense baseball fans, more than casual ones ... regardless of which category you fall into, it would probably help to listen to Ben and Sam's "Effectively Wild" podcasts to get a feel for their sensibilities and communicative style (plus, it's an......more

Goodreads review by Mike on June 18, 2016

Very good book. Follows two sabermetricians who take over an independent minor league team. They wanted to see if they can used advance metrics to win a championship and dominate the competition. This book talks about stats, but not to a point where it becomes hard to follow. It really more than jus......more

Goodreads review by Ryan on June 27, 2016

If you are a Baseball Prospectus reader and/or baseball junkie like myself, this is for sure worth a read. It's amazing how relatively quickly the movement of analytics have gotten us to the point where an independent league team gave control of their baseball ops to two writers from a baseball comm......more

Goodreads review by Matt on December 23, 2019

December 23, 2019 The fifth star is for love, and three and a half years after reading it the first time, I have to say that I love this book. It is no coincidence that I've also come to love the podcast hosted by the book's authors, something I started doing because I initially read the book in 2016......more

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