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

"It’s fair to say that every baseball fan ever has grumbled over their team’s strategy, but in this era of advanced statistics, that second-guessing has given way to a new type of data-minded armchair analyst who might actually be able to do the job. So when Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller — two sabermetrically inclined writers — were handed the keys to the small-town Sonoma Stompers for a summer season, they had free rein to finally put their wildest ideas to the test. The resulting book certainly goes deep in the weeds, er, outfield grass of implementing high-concept, stat-driven theories. But it’s an idiosyncratic, compelling character study of the writers and their management challenges, and the journeymen players you can’t help but root for."