The Only Rule Is It Has to Work: Our Wild Experiment Building a New Kind of Baseball Team by Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller is the story of two statistics-minded outsiders taking over a professional baseball team and the results of that season.
It’s a definitive in dream baseball: You will pick the lineup, set the arrangement, and settle on systems – with genuine players, in a genuine ballpark, in a genuine season finisher race. That is the thing that baseball examiners Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller had the opportunity to do when a free small time group in California, the Sonoma Stompers, offered them the opportunity to run its baseball activities as per the most progressive measurements. Their story in The Only Rule is it Has to Work is not normal for some other baseball story you’ve ever perused.
We follow along as Lindbergh and Miller apply their calculating experiences to all parts of gathering and running a group, keeping one cardinal standard for making a decision about every advancement they attempt: it needs to work. We meet brilliant figures like senior supervisor Theo Fightmaster and limit breakers like the primary transparently gay part in expert baseball. Indeed, even José Canseco shows up.
Will their insight into numbers assist Lindbergh and Miller with bringing the Stompers a title, or will they fall on their appearances? Will the group have an upper hand or is the game’s society insight valid all things considered? Will the players draw in the consideration of major association scouts, or would they say they are on a most optimized plan of attack to blankness?
It’s a wild ride, by turns provocative and ludicrous, as Lindbergh and Miller recount a story that will address numbers nerds and conservatives the same. What’s more, they demonstrate that you needn’t bother with a bat or a glove to make a real commitment to the game.
Ben Lindbergh Baseball Books
| The Only Rule Is It Has to Work | (2016) | Shop at Amazon |
| The MVP Machine | (2019) | Shop at Amazon |
About the Sonoma Stompers
In 2015, the Sonoma Stompers allowed Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller of Baseball Prospectus’s Effectively Wild podcast to serve as the Baseball Operations department, under General Manager Theo Fightmaster.
The 2015 season also featured pitcher Sean Conroy who became the first openly gay active professional baseball player.
About the Authors
Ben Lindbergh is a staff writer for The Ringer and, with Meg Rowley, the cohost of Effectively Wild, the daily FanGraphs podcast. He is a former staff writer for Grantland and FiveThirtyEight, and a former editor in chief of Baseball Prospectus. He lives in New York City.
Sam Miller is the former editor in chief of Baseball Prospectus and a former writer for ESPN. He lives on the San Francisco peninsula with his wife and daughter.
Other Books You May Like
The MVP Machine: How Baseball’s New Nonconformists Are Using Data to Build Better Players by Ben Lindbergh and Travis Sawchik: Ben Lindbergh’s second book sees him team up with Travis Sawchik to examine major league baseball’s next cutting-edge revolution: the high-tech quest to build better players.
Future Value: The Battle for Baseball’s Soul and How Teams Will Find the Next Superstar by Eric Longenhagen and Kiley McDaniel: Fangraphs’ lead prospect analysts take an unprecedented look inside the world of baseball scouting and evaluation.
The Arm: Inside the Billion-Dollar Mystery of the Most Valuable Commodity in Sports by Jeff Passan: Yahoo’s lead baseball columnist offers an in-depth look at the most valuable commodity in sports—the pitching arm—and how its vulnerability to injury is hurting players and the game, from Little League to the majors.
The Only Rule Is It Has to Work Podcasts
Effectively Wild: The podcast that started it all. Ben Lindbergh still records the sabermetrics-oriented podcast three times per week.
The Ringer MLB Show: Ben Lindberg is also featured on this podcast alongside Michael Baumann and Zach Kram.