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

Amazon.com Price:  $9.03 (as of 08/05/2019 17:44 PST- Details)

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Description

What would happen if two statistics-minded outsiders were allowed to run a professional baseball team?

It’s the ultimate in fantasy baseball: You get to pick out the roster, set the lineup, and make a decision 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 in line with the most advanced statistics. Their story in The Only Rule is it Has to Work is unlike some other baseball tale you’ve ever read.

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 every innovation they are trying: 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 lend a hand 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 in the end? Will the players attract the attention of big-league scouts, or are they on a fast track to oblivion?

It’s a wild ride, by turns provocative and absurd, as Lindbergh and Miller tell a story with the intention to speak to numbers geeks and traditionalists alike. And so they prove that you don’t need a bat or a glove to make a genuine contribution to the game.

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