The Only Rule Is It Has to Work: Our Wild Experiment Building a New Kind of Baseball Team
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.60 (520 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 1627795642 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 368 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2013-04-10 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
The story of their season with the Sonoma Stompers is a fascinating human drama about the give-and-take between the new thinking and the old school.”--Ken Rosenthal, MLB on FOX reporter, FOXSports senior baseball writer, and MLB Network insider“In a phenomenal book that is a fun, breezy, and moving read, Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller invite us into their mad experiment. They show us the trials, travails, and challenges of running an independent league baseball team, and along the way they do something remarkable: they make us care deeply for the players who put their hearts into every point of on-base percentage.”--Jonah Keri, bestselling author of Up, Up, and Away and The Extra 2% “The Only Rule Is It Has to Work is the happy, improbable spawn of Moneyball<
The New York Times bestseller about what would happen if two statistics-minded outsiders were allowed to run a professional baseball teamIt’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. And they prove that you don’t need a bat or a glove to make a genuine contribution to the game.. 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?It’s a wild ride, by turns provocative and absurd, as Lindbergh and Miller tell a story that will speak to numbers geeks and traditionalists alike. Their story in
Behind the Spreadsheet Christopher D. Long In the book "The Only Rule Is It Has to Work: Our Wild Experiment Building a New Kind of Baseball Team", Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller recount a grand adventure to take command of an independent league baseball team, with the vision of trying every idea, sane or crazy, in an attempt to achieve a winning edge. Five infielders, four outfielders, defensive shifts, optimizing lineups - everything.It was really an impossible task. Professional sports . An Instant-Classic Andrew Gargano As an avid listener of Effectively Wild and consistent reader of Ben and Sam's work, I know that they are statheads. I assumed this book would lean heavily on sabermetrics, the pages chock-full of numbers and advanced baseball analysis. I was wrong. This book offered much, much more.This is less of "The Book," by Tom Tango, and more of "The Soul of Baseball," by Joe Posnanski; it is more story than stat. Ben and Sam may have been the ones who go. Patrick Wilson said The best book I've read this year. I absolutely loved this book. It reads like a top-flight novel, is packed with interesting stories and details, and brings the game to life. Many of us are armchair coaches and general managers, always making recommendations and second-guessing our teams' decisions. We have the dream and we put it on a pedestal. Ben and Sam explain just how difficult it is. Sam's note and prepared speech especially hit home.But even more interesting than the bas
Ben Lindbergh is a staff writer for FiveThirtyEight and, with Sam Miller, the cohost of Effectively Wild, the daily Baseball Prospectus podcast. He lives in New York City.Sam Miller is the editor in chief of Baseball Prospectus, the 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