Ben Lindbergh The Only Rule It Has To Work

t all started when a listener of their daily baseball podcast, EFFECTIVELY WILD, turned out to be an executive of the Sonoma Stompers, a team in the independent Pacific Association. He invited Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller out to a game, to see what indy ball was all about. Miller took him up on this offer and was entranced by the experience; before long, Lindbergh and Miller had volunteered their services to run the team’s baseball operations. To their amazement, the Stompers said yes. Enjoy the Cracker Jack as you watch Lindbergh and Miller apply their number-crunching insights to all aspects of assembling and running a team, always hewing to the one cardinal rule for judging each innovation they try: IT HAS TO WORK. Lindbergh and Miller partnered with baseball technology companies to collect data that had never been available at this level. The project offered them the chance to attempt many of the advanced analytical prescriptions that they and other bloggers had promoted for years. More than that, though, it challenged them to convince the players and coaches to trust the numbers and the wisdom of “nerds” with no high-level playing experience themselves. Filled with larger-than-life characters and hilarious absurdities, Lindbergh and Miller put their statistical theories to the ultimate test, in order to discover if sabermetrics will bring the Stompers a championship. You’ll have to read the book to find out if they succeed. About the authors: BEN LINDBERGH is a staff writer for FiveThirtyEight and, with Sam Miller, the cohost of Effectively Wild, the daily Baseball Prospectus podcast. He is a former staff writer for Grantland and a former editor in chief of Baseball Prospectus. 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.