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WORK TITLE: The Only Rule Is It Has to Work
WORK NOTES: with Ben Lindbergh
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE: CA
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http://theonlyruleisithastowork.com/ * http://theonlyruleisithastowork.com/#theauthors
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Married; children: a daughter.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Write, editor, and columnist. Baseball Prospectus, former editor in chief and coeditor of the annual guidebook; ESPN, feature writer and columnist.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Sam Miller is the former editor in chief of Baseball Prospectus and served as coeditor of the annual guidebook before joining ESPN the magazine as a writer and columnist. He also cohosts the podcast Effectively Wild with Ben Lindbergh, a journalist. Miller and Lindbergh are also coauthors of The Only Rule Is It Has to Work: Our Wild Experiment Building a New Kind of Baseball Team. In this volume, they recount their experience as short-term comanagers of the Sonoma Stompers independent minor league baseball team.
Miller and Lindbergh narrate alternating chapters of the book. In one of Lindbergh’s chapters, he discusses his aspirations to lead a baseball team, using the analytical data for which he and Miller have advocated on their podcast and in articles. “I’m eager to test myself, even in an upstart indy league,” writes Lindbergh. “Neither Sam nor I had ever completely let go of that one special fantasy, the last lingering what-if: Could we ‘crack’ baseball if we could borrow a GM’s job and live it for a single season? How would we be altered? And how would we alter a team?” In the same chapter, Lindbergh explains how an interview on his and Miller’s podcast caused the two friends to seriously to consider heading up a baseball team. He notes that the podcast ended up connecting them with someone who could make his dreams a reality. A listener to the Effectively Wild podcasts led both Miller and Lindbergh to admit they had never attended the game of any independent minor league team. They then got a message from Tim Livingston, the director of broadcasting and media relations for the Sonoma Stompers, a franchise in the fledglin, four-team Pacific Association of Professional Baseball Clubs. The message is an invite to come by and watch the team.
Eventually, Miller and Lindbergh were given the opportunity to run the Sonoma Stompers during their 2015-16 season. On their first day on the new job, they arrive, both of them wearing corduroy slacks. From then on, they are known as the “corduroy boys.” Other members of the staff initially blow them off and even insult them. However, over time, Lindbergh and Miller smooth out their relationships with the other staff members. As Sports on Earth contributor Will Leitch noted: “The Stompers show immediate improvement when Ben and Sam start putting together the roster–largely thanks to their quantitative approach, finding value in players the rest of baseball overlooked, the book’s one real nod to a Moneyball-type narrative that never ultimately emerges, thankfully–but then things start getting weird.” Leith points out that the authors were not always right about a player’s potential, with some players they thought would improve not doing so while others they thought had little potential proving otherwise. They also get on the wrong side of the team’s manager, who begins to “openly antagonize them,” as Leitch noted, adding: “Even more telling: Much of the analytics is thrown out the window once things start getting hot. Players are kept in the lineup because it’s the easiest way to keep the clubhouse happy; Ben and Sam hesitate to try out most of their craziest ideas because they don’t want the players to resent them.”
The center fielder of the Stompers at the time is also the team’s manager, and Lindbergh and Miller clash with him. They attempt to persuade him to change the way he uses closers on the team, but the manager is unmoved. Lindbergh and Miller find themselves susceptible to superstitious thinking. They do not altogether abandon the ideals with which they arrived, but they do begin making some decisions based on feelings rather than analytics. Lindbergh and Miller discover that many of their prognostications have been incorrect. Some players they suggested letting go have become more successful over the course of the season. Conversely, some players for whom they had high hopes ultimately disappointed them. Among those whose playing abilities they accurately predicted are Daniel Baptista and Sean Conroy. Conroy had retired from baseball, but Lindbergh and Miller persuaded him to return to playing. Conroy’s performance on the team was excellent. He also came out as gay and was the first professional baseball player to do so.
Miller and Lindbergh sum up their experience with the Stompers at the end of the book. They highlight the improvements that were made during the season. They also note that in the end the team appreciated their work, even requesting that Miller stay on as a manager during the following season. Ultimately, they decide to return to their former lives as podcast cohosts and writers, taking the lessons they learned with them.
Booklist contributor Alan Moores remarked: “The authors’ drily comical narrative is a winner.” J.J. Cooper, writing for the Baseball America Web site, suggested that The Only Rule Is It Has to Work offers “a new slant on a topic that has been investigated time and time again.” Cooper then added: “By having the two authors trade off writing responsibilities from chapter to chapter, the book bounces back and forth in style and tone, but it works. The Only Rule Is It Has To Work is yet another worthy read in a very good year for baseball books.” Maclean’s contributor Adrian Lee described the volume as “rollicking, gleeful, and sometimes melancholic.” Lee also noted: “The Only Rule Is It Has to Work is a joy not just because it easily finds the humanity in spreadsheets, but because, like the best baseball books, it’s the story of the life of dreams–even if those dreams look different by the end.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, May 1, 2016, Alan Moores, review of The Only Rule Is It Has to Work: Our Wild Experiment Building a New Kind of Baseball Team, p. 63.
Maclean’s June 20, 2016, Adrian Lee, review of The Only Rule Is It Has to Work, p. 61.
Publishers Weekly, April 18, 2016, review of The Only Rule Is It Has to Work, p. 111.
ONLINE
Baseball America, http://www.baseballamerica.com (May 3, 2016), J.J. Cooper, review of The Only Rule Is It Has to Work.
Huffington Post, http://www.huffingtonpost.com (May 13, 2016), review The Only Rule Is It Has to Work.
Sports on Earth, http://www.sportsonearth.com (May 6, 2016), Will Leitch,”When ‘Regular Guys’ Run a Ballclub,” review of The Only Rule Is It Has to Work.
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.
Sam Miller is a national baseball columnist and feature writer for ESPN. He is the former editor in chief of Baseball Prospectus, and coedited three editions of Baseball Prospectus's annual guidebook. He lives in Southern California with his wife and daughter.
The Only Rule is It Has to Work
Adrian Lee
Maclean's. 129.24 (June 20, 2016): p61.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Rogers Publishing Ltd.
http://www2.macleans.ca/
Full Text:
THE ONLY RULE IS IT HAS TO WORK
Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Michael Lewis's seminal book Moneyball exposed the 2000s' defining rift in Major League Baseball, between the data-driven nerd, trying to make sense of a game romanticized to the point of fantasy, and the grizzled insider, with his lifetime of innings watched and played. The debate is largely settled: MLB is now an analytics vanguard, offering accessible data--down to the microsecond and micrometer--as its teams snap up statheads. But where in math there is a likely correct call determined by calculations, baseball-revelling in greys--continues to use stats as merely one tool in the decision-making toolkit. Tradition refuses to die.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
For years, Lindbergh and Miller--the Seinfeld and Costanza of baseball wonkery, each of whom has served as editor-in-chief of Baseball Prospectus, a sort of Polaris star for data pilgrims--have excoriated these very decisions on their excellent podcast, Effectively Wild. One show led to another, which led to an email from the Sonoma Stompers, an independent baseball team in the Pacific Association: "Do you want to run a professional baseball team?"
The pair's answer was an eager yes. It would be a true test of something that has never been wholly tried: What if spreadsheets and unfeeling data come down from the ivory tower and operate an actual team, to try wild ideas like five-man infields and five-inning closers?
The Stompers' 2015-16 season, chronicled in this book, is the rollicking, gleeful, and sometimes melancholic answer. While the team is professional, the realities are hard; an under-resourced team in a tiny, low-ranking league, it's a mishmash of young, hungry players desperate to keep moving up, and older vets whose love of the game overpowers the certainty that their big-league dreams are dead. The players' contract negotiations aren't over better offers, but rather the gravity pull of retirement, of school, of real life. They're paid a small stipend, given a game-day spread of white bread and peanut butter, and live in the homes of Sonoma families with extra rooms. There is no glamour.
But they do get to be ballplayers for a living. And as is so often the case in sports, it's dreams--not peanut butter--that provide the fuel. That goes for Lindbergh and Miller, too: Lindbergh nurses a chip on his shoulder about his too-short internship with the New York Yankees; Miller, a writer quick with an existential turn of phrase, is hyper-aware of needing to earn the players' respect. But running a team is the stat-head dream, and so they and a few podcast-listeners-turned-volunteers leap to join "a long line of super-smart people who might have cured cancer if they'd never come across a dumb game in which grownups hit cowskin with sticks."
There are emotional issues: the reality of making hard calls (releasing an earnest rookie; firing a manager) and the stumbles into bravery (they replace their manager with the first Japanese native in pro baseball; their ace pitcher Sean Conroy, signed off a spreadsheet, comes out and becomes the first-ever openly gay pro). There are moments of doubt and struggle, all the according highs and lows encapsulated by the final, improbable moments of the Stompers' season. In the end, the two stat heads even concede there may be limits to how far you can go with data alone: "No matter the scouting report, in every game some baseball happens."
Baseball is the pro sport that fans feel they could potentially play. They're wrong, of course; hitting against an MLB pitcher is one of the hardest things to do in sports. But the intimacy of the bleachers wrapped around the diamond, the foul balls that occasionally soar into the crowds, the fact that some of its players look like you and me--there's something about it that inspires wild-eyed dreaming. The Only Rule is It Has to Work is a joy not just because it easily finds the humanity in spreadsheets, but because, like the best baseball books, it's the story of the life of dreams--even if those dreams look different by the end. ADRIAN LEE
Caption: 'The Only Rule is It Has to Work: The Sonoma Stompers were managed for a season by a pair of 'stat heads' who put their theories into practice
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Lee, Adrian. "The Only Rule is It Has to Work." Maclean's, 20 June 2016, p. 61. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA454730325&it=r&asid=c69fa11c56030831c3ce7aecbacbfaa6. Accessed 25 Jan. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A454730325
The Only Rule Is It Has to Work: Our Wild Experiment Building a New Kind of Baseball Team
Alan Moores
Booklist. 112.17 (May 1, 2016): p63.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
The Only Rule Is It Has to Work: Our Wild Experiment Building a New Kind of Baseball Team. By Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller. May 2016.368p. illus. Holt, 530 (9781627795654). 796.357.
Lindbergh and Miller--former editor and current editor in chief, respectively, of the Baseball Prospectus podcast--gave new meaning to the notion of "fantasy baseball" when they took over baseball operations of an independent minor-league franchise, the Sonoma (CA) Stompers, last summer. "Our ideas about baseball are academic, theoretical, never exposed to tobacco spit and stray infield pebbles," writes Miller, who, along with fellow "stathead" Lindbergh, lived out every sabermetrician's dream: to apply theory to the realities of a pro-baseball team, from drafting players to applying complicated defensive shifts to seeking that ever-elusive clubhouse chemistry, all to varying degrees of success. The authors' drily comical narrative is a winner, though, in portraying one patchwork collection of men who are each uniquely endearing, yet who also embody the very human dynamics certainly at work in any baseball clubhouse.--Alan Moores
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Moores, Alan. "The Only Rule Is It Has to Work: Our Wild Experiment Building a New Kind of Baseball Team." Booklist, 1 May 2016, p. 63. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA453293798&it=r&asid=8b7f679e446f7895e3ad69479b4d6a82. Accessed 25 Jan. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A453293798
The Only Rule Is It Has to Work: Our Wild Experiment Building a New Kind of Baseball Team
Publishers Weekly. 263.16 (Apr. 18, 2016): p111.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Only Rule Is It Has to Work: Our Wild Experiment Building a New Kind of Baseball Team
Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller. Holt, $30 (368p) ISBN 978-1-6277-9564-7
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
What happens when two numbers crunchers take command of an independent minor league team? Through some fancy wheeling and dealing, Lindbergh, a staff writer for FiveThirtyEight, and Miller, the editor-in-chief of Baseball Prospectus, are put in charge of the operations for the Sonoma Stompers, an independent professional squad in California. Their task is to scout and sign prospects for a winning season. Using data-driven sabermetics and spreadsheets, the two set a goal of "making the right decision every time, giving players every resource and advantage available."
Lindbergh and Miller are real storytellers, explaining their strengths and defects as they attempt to field a capable team, using the best stats money can buy. They pay tribute to the collection of older, dedicated players who are pleased to play in the minors and have no illusions of making the majors. Armed with data, they gleefully describe their team's roaring start in the first half of the season, gaining first place, then slipping to a respectable second-place finish. For fantasy baseball junkies and baseball purists alike, this is a vivid, joyful exploration of recruiting and running a team by numbers--and instinct. (May)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Only Rule Is It Has to Work: Our Wild Experiment Building a New Kind of Baseball Team." Publishers Weekly, 18 Apr. 2016, p. 111. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA450361337&it=r&asid=2c4082bc69b48c123939871c748ffb45. Accessed 25 Jan. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A450361337
May 6, 2016
When 'regular guys' run a ballclub
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The Sonoma Stompers compete in the independent Pacific Association. (Photo by Danielle Putonen/Sonoma Stompers)
I can come up with so many ennobling reasons that we watch sports. Visceral excitement. Diversion from life's daily pressures and woes. Connection to one's community. A sense that one is bonded to something larger than one's self. The facilitation of communication between loved ones that might otherwise be blocked or thwarted. A perpetual history, a throughline from one generation to another, a universal ongoing story. Handing foul balls to kids. An excuse to be outside in the sun for a few hours. Cold beer. Mike Trout.
But deep down, I think it's much more self-oriented than all that. I think we watch sports because we wish it were us out there.
Futurists are always claiming that, someday, our professional athletes (specifically football) will be played by robots. The idea is that what we want out of sports -- fierce competitiveness, escalating physicality, data generation -- will become too much for mere humans to provide; we're too unpredictable, too prone to breakdown, too unsustainable. (Here's an essay in Robotics Trends making this exact argument.) But this will never work because it doesn't mean anything for a robot to win, because we can never imagine ourselves as a robot or a machine. It would be impressive to watch a robot hit a 700-foot home run, or swish a jumper from 100 yards away, or kick at 250-yard field goal, but it wouldn't mean anything. It would be as connected to our own lives as watching a blender make a smoothie, or a junkyard trash compactor pulverize a Buick into the size of a bale of hay. It is entirely independent of us.
No, for sports to work, we have to pretend it's us. Every connection we have to the games imagines us out there. If a guy misses a free throw, we wouldn't have. If a pitcher walks a guy, we wouldn't have brought him in to begin with. If a quarterback throws an interception, we wouldn't have traded for him in the first place. Watching sports is a passive, helpless activity, and the only way we can attach meaning to it -- them only way we can make ourselves part of it -- is to project ourselves on it. We can't do anything. But if we could … we would.
Among the many delights of Ben Lindbergh's and Sam Miller's new book "The Only Rule Is It Has To Work," about their summer running (or attempting to run) the Sonoma Stompers, an independent baseball team playing in the Pacific Association, is that it attempts to find out what would happen if, in fact, we really could do something. It was born out of Lindberghs and Miller's daily podcast, "Effectively Wild," a large portion of which is spent wondering how the game of baseball itself could be reinvented, how various variables, like playing six infielders or planting a tree next to the mound, would end up turning out in the real world. (Of note: I have been an avid, compulsive listener to "Effectively Wild" for several years and a guest on the program several times.) Through a series of odd coincidences, Lindbergh and Miller ended up with the opportunity to run the Stompers for one season, resulting in this book. They took time off from their jobs -- Lindbergh wrote for Grantland before working for FiveThirtyEight when the former was dissolved by ESPN, and Miller is the editor-in-chief of Baseball Prospectus -- and their lives to go see if some of their theories about baseball can work outside the lab environment of spreadsheets. They have been like the rest of us, screaming at the television for decades, while those inside baseball have claimed they couldn't criticize because they Never Played The Game. Now they were in charge. Would it work?
One of the great jokes of "The Only Rule Is It Has To Work" is that, well, Lindbergh and Miller aren't really in charge. (It's so difficult for me, a listener of the podcast for so long, not to call them Ben and Sam that I'm just going to go ahead and do that the rest of this piece, if that's OK with you.) Within hours of showing up in Sonoma, they're labeled the "corduroy boys" -- thanks to an ill-fated coincidence of the two men wearing the same pants on their first day -- and are belittled and ignored by much of the on-field staff. And even when they fight through that, and push for more autonomy (longtime listeners of the podcast will be surprised, I suspect, to learn that Ben is the bad cop who has to push Sam to be more aggressive and strident), they discover that changing decades of baseball inertia is near-impossible, even if you're the ones in charge. Understanding that the way most managers use their closers is counterproductive is one thing to write in an essay or a tweet; it is quite another to find the correct way to persuade your manager -- who is also your center fielder, by the way -- who just keeps saying "the closer is the closer is the closer." Ben and Sam might be right about a lot of things. It doesn't make anybody listen to them any more closely.
Of course, it doesn't necessarily make them right, either. The Stompers show immediate improvement when Ben and Sam start putting together the roster -- largely thanks to their quantitative approach, finding value in players the rest of baseball overlooked, the book's one real nod to a "Moneyball"-type narrative that never ultimately emerges, thankfully - but then things start getting weird. Players they were eager to give up on start hitting; players they went out on a limb for, obsessed over even, falter and implode; the manager they hired because they assumed he'd listen to them begins to shut them out and openly antagonize them. Even more telling: Much of the analytics is thrown out the window once things start getting hot. Players are kept in the lineup because it's the easiest way to keep the clubhouse happy; Ben and Sam hesitate to try out most of their craziest ideas because they don't want the players to resent them; most of all, a pennant chase makes Ben and Sam lose much of their perspective, not abandoning their principles but not averse to old-school superstitions and black magic either. When they look back at the end of the season, not only have most of their projections been wrong, they also realize they're more emotionally attached to their team, and the men on it, than they ever were to any of their beloved experiments. And they end up helplessly screaming on the sidelines anyway.
There are still many successes, from slugger Daniel Baptista (whom Sam, in the book's funniest scene, essentially smuggles out of an open tryout so no other team can figure out how good he is) to Sean Conroy, the player Ben and Sam talked out of retirement to become a Mike Marshall-type swingman who also turned out to be the first openly gay professional baseball player. (And a mean Super Smash player.)
And all told, the Stompers are better off with Ben and Sam than they were without them. They even ask Sam to manage the team in 2016, which he turns down in the book's closing chapter because he wants to spend more time with his family (and, presumably, promote this book; the season starts in one month). Ben has work to do too, and then there is the podcast, and their rightful place back with the rest of us, watching those with skin in the game make mistakes and gritting their teeth about how they would do so much better. It is ultimately a much more comfortable place to be, and one of the sad jokes of the book is that it's probably more profitable. Ben and Sam make more than 10 times more a month from the Patreon sponsors of their podcast (of which I am one) than the average salary for a Stompers player.
This is a fun lark for Ben and Sam, something they got a terrific book out of, but now they're back where they are supposed to be, where the rest of us are supposed to be. Their shoes are cleaner, their consciences are clearer and their salaries are higher. They don't have to cut anybody, or try to talk some Old Baseball Man into not hitting his best OBP guy ninth in the order. They just get to watch now. They get to be connected only tangentially, and only in their own minds, like the rest of us. We all want to fly closer to the sun. But not really.
It's easier over here. We need to feel like we can do better. Even if it's not true. Especially if it's not true.
The Only Rule is it Has to Work
05/13/2016 03:32 pm ET | Updated May 13, 2016
Thought Matters Featuring originals essays, interviews, and excerpts from some of the world’s most influential minds
2016-05-13-1463150764-1844133-TheOnlyRule.jpg
By Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller
Not Joking at All
Sam is sitting in the passenger seat of his 2011 Honda Fit, which is parked inside his garage in Long Beach, California. I’m sitting in my 2005 fading, faux-leather desk chair, which is parked inside the small office in my Manhattan apartment. Sitting between our sound-dampening sanctuaries (where we’re trying not to wake Sam’s wife or my girlfriend) is former Los Angeles Dodgers general manager Dan Evans, who’s in an Arizona hotel on a spring training scouting trip, talking to us on Skype.
It’s March 2013, just after midnight my time, and Sam and I are interviewing Evans for the latest episode of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast we record for Baseball Prospectus. Midway through the call, we ask him about his new job, a side gig as the commissioner of the Northern League, an independent circuit that he’s trying to bring back from the dead. Indy leagues are like the minors, except that they’re even more minor: They employ professional players, but they aren’t affiliated with major league organizations. This means they don’t take orders from above, but it also means that most of them are in perpetually critical financial condition, one down year away from drowning in debt and leaving only ripples behind. The Northern League, which fielded teams in Minnesota, South Dakota, Iowa, and Ontario, was founded in 1993 and winked out of existence in 2010. Now Evans is trying to wink it back in again. And to do that, he tells us, he needs investors to take on teams.
“If you’re asking,” I say, “Sam and I will take one team.”
Everyone laughs, but cohost telepathy tells Sam I’m serious. I sense the same about him.
“I wonder how many people in this conversation are joking, because at least two of us are not joking at all,” Sam says.
Evans responds by extolling the virtues of indy-league life. “Unlike a minor league franchise, where you have no say in the players . . . everything in the independents is under your jurisdiction,” he says. “For some people, that’s really intimidating. For other people . . . they see that and they go, ‘Oh my gosh, this is my real fantasy team.’ “
We don’t need any additional selling. We spend the rest of the podcast distracted, sending silent text messages to each other and trying to contain our excitement. Once we’re off the air, we ask Evans if he was just humoring us or if it’s safe for our hopes to be high.
“Down the line, if you guys are really serious, I would actually entertain something like that,” he says. We feel as if a real GM has just walked us to the war room where teams talk strategy, flashed his credentials, and assured security that we’re with him. After Evans is off the line, Sam and I instant message into the night. We’re already playing out all the implications, wondering which ideas we’d test out if we owned a team and could be the bosses of our own baseball sandbox. “I might not sleep again until we have a baseball team,” I say to Sam.
Once the sun is up and I can send emails without looking like a vampire, I contact our boss, Joe Hamrahi, the president and CEO of Baseball Prospectus and a friend of Dan Evans. Joe, can we buy a baseball team? Can we? Can we?
“They want a lot of money,” Joe writes back. He keeps me in suspense until the answer to my “How much money?” follow-up appears: “$250,000.”
I have three minutes to mull over that massive-sounding amount before another email arrives. “By the way, that’s just the admission fee,” Joe adds. “Then you have to come up with the capital to operate the team, pay the players, the front office, lease the ballpark, run concessions, etc. And you’re not talking about real players here. These are has-beens and guys looking for some shot at getting into real baseball.”
Well, hell, so are we. Sam and I aren’t old enough to be “has-beens” in every respect, but we qualify when it comes to our childhood hopes. Sam was that skinny ten-year-old who pictured himself hitting the World Series–winning home run. Like every amateur hero before him, he sprinted around the imaginary bases as though the earth were crumbling behind him, leaping and skipping, pumping a fist, throwing a helmet, voicing the cheers of each of the thousands of fans who sounded so loud in his head. Over the course of a quarter century, that pretend applause went silent. In the saddest perversion of a sports-movie montage, it became increasingly clear to Sam that he would never hit that home run. He was too shy, then too small, then too distracted, then too old. Finally, he was simply too realistic.
I grew up five years later, after the steroids era had given athletes comic-book bodies. I had no illusions about displacing Alex Rodriguez, but I could see myself as the successor to the New York Yankees’ general manager, Brian Cashman. GMs and other team executives look the way we would if we wore more expensive suits. They’re the sports heroes of the computer age, and they’ve instilled in us the oh-so-tantalizing notion that we could do that. Thinking along with the GM is the new national pastime. In its most mocked form, this fetish for front offices is known as “rosterbation,” a word that captures a fan’s sometimes-delusional attempts to engineer the perfect transaction. In its most mainstream form, it’s fantasy sports, a multibillion-dollar industry now served by an array of statistical resources so granular and accessible that anyone can retrieve far more data from a home computer than Oakland Athletics GM Billy Beane did in his famous Moneyball season.
My mental montage was more sedate than Sam’s, but still satisfying: Making the perfect pick on draft day. Swindling a rival team in a trade. Landing the high-priced free agent who lays waste to the league. I came closer to my dream than Sam did to his: I became a baseball operations intern for the Yankees straight out of college, sitting with other interns in an office inside Yankee Stadium where every so often Cashman himself would walk by, saying hello (or activating his beloved handheld fart machine) on his way to continue trade talks or address the press. He knew, and we knew, that everyone in the room had designs on his job.
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I had good timing: It was 2009, the year the Yankees beat the Philadelphia Phillies to win their first World Series since their (most recent) dynasty team. After Game 6, in which New York’s Andy Pettitte outdueled a past-his-prime Pedro Martinez in Pedro’s last-ever outing, I sipped champagne in the clubhouse while CC Sabathia smoked a cigar, Kate Hudson lounged on A-Rod’s lap, and Kurt Russell talked intently to Mark Teixeira. After the fans had reluctantly cleared out, the players had hit the town, and the empty stadium was ours again, I did tipsy cartwheels on the field with the rest of the front office. Later that week, I rode on a duck boat with the rest of the interns in the ticker-tape parade as a horde of pinstriped strangers on lower Broadway chanted, “WHO-ARE-YOU? WHO-ARE-YOU?” and bombarded us with whole rolls of toilet paper. For the rest of the off-season, I slipped on my lanyard and badge as self-importantly as if I were putting on an actual uniform. My MLB.TV account had no blackout restrictions. I felt as if I belonged in baseball.
But the following spring, my time as an insider ended, almost without warning. On a day like any other, Cashman came in and told us he’d been ordered to bring in new blood, that the legal department was worried about interns staying more than a year, and that his hands had been tied by a hiring freeze. I tried not to be bitter about the news that the World Series-winning Yankees, who regularly dropped hundreds of millions on free agents who weren’t worth the money, couldn’t afford to convert a few underpaid interns into underpaid full-timers. It stung even more when the “hiring freeze” turned out to be a comforting fiction: Two of the senior interns got to stay as full-fledged staffers. My skill set, it seemed, just wasn’t special enough for the team to make an exception.
So what do you do when the guy whose job you grew up wanting to do kicks you (very gently) to the curb? I could have tried to parlay my year with the Yankees into another team internship, eventually ascending to a GM role with another organization and, in my moment of triumph, exacting revenge for my freeze-out by taking Cashman to the cleaners in a lopsided deal. Instead, I steered into the skid and went back to the baseball writing I’d begun in college. In time, I came to believe that the Yankees had done me a favor by pushing me into a role for which I was a far better fit. But now, having spoken to Dan Evans, I see a way to bypass the intern stage and skip directly to running a team. I’m eager to test myself, even in an upstart indy league. Neither Sam nor I had ever completely let go of that one special fantasy, the last lingering what-if: Could we “crack” baseball if we could borrow a GM’s job and live it for a single season? How would we be altered? And how would we alter a team?
Unfortunately, we don’t know anyone with six figures to throw away on someone else’s wish fulfillment. Evidently Dan doesn’t either: The new Northern League never gets off the ground. Sam and I don’t dismiss our vision of running an indy team, but without an obvious outlet we put it on the back burner. And the longer it sits there, the sillier and less realistic it seems.
It took a podcast conversation to inspire this far-fetched idea; it takes another to make it more real. Sixteen months and hundreds of Effectively Wild episodes later, a listener’s email prompts us to admit on the air that we’ve never attended an independent-league game. Some hours after that show ends, a message appears in Sam’s inbox. “I hear you’re looking for an invite out to an independent league game,” writes Tim Livingston, the director of broadcasting and media relations for the Sonoma Stompers, a franchise in the fledgling, four-team Pacific Association of Professional Baseball Clubs, which rose out of the ashes of the North American League (itself a chimera created from the remnants of three earlier leagues). “I think it would be great if you could come by to watch.” So does Sam.
Copyright © 2016 by Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller. Excerpted from The Only Rule is it Has to Work
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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.
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Book Review: The Only Rule Is It Has To Work
May 03, 2016 By J.J. Cooper
It’s been nearly 35 years since Bill James’ Baseball Abstracts reached a mass market. Moneyball has been around for more than a decade. And every year since, we get a new group of books that are promised to bring some new variation of the Moneyball theme.
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The problem for many of these new books is that the ideas that made the Abstracts and eventually Moneyball ground-breaking are now part of the common understanding of the game. There are still advancements being made in sabermetrics, but the gains are much more incremental.
No one in 2016 would say that we lack for quality books about sabermetrics, but nowadays it’s also fair to say that there are a number of sabermetrically themed books that are derivative works, without Michael Lewis or Bill James’ flair for writing.
But The Only Rule Is It Has To Work, Sam Miller and Ben Lindbergh’s first-person account of a year of running a team with sabermetric principles, actually gives a new slant on a topic that has been investigated time and time again.
Lindbergh, a former staff writer for Grantland.com who now writes for FiveThirtyEight.com, and Sam Miller, editor-in-chief of Baseball Prospectus, first discussed on a podcast the idea of what would happen if they got to run a team.
Luckily for them, the Pacific Association, a four-team independent league based in Northern California, had teams that were willing to be creative. They figured that Lindbergh and Miller’s approach might help win some games, and it would also give some attention to a league that never minds additional publicity.
Lindbergh and Miller found a willing cohort in Sonoma general manager Theo Fightmaster. Fightmaster was willing to run a team with a stat-heavy approach, but his job as GM involves selling tickets and making sure the concessions are stocked, as much as it was building a roster and winning games.
So he took Lindbergh and Miller on as a two-man baseball operations department and let them loose from the preseason draft and free agent signings to on-field defensive shifts and lineup optimization. In the span of six months, the authors went from being indy ball neophytes to guys who figuratively lived and died with the outcome of every Stompers game.
The Only Rule tops most works of its genre because it explains the real-world successes and pitfalls that come with trying to take theories and apply them to a team of real humans who might not always be as receptive to change as a simuation league team. If you ever wondered what it would be like to jump from running a fantasy team to being a GM, The Only Rule is your guidebook.
And the Pacific Association is a perfect laboratory for their approach. While every MLB team now uses analytical principles, the Pacific Association is far enough down on the food chain that the idea of using big data and Pitch/FX data seemed impossible before Lindbergh and Miller arrived.
Lindbergh and Miller quickly realize that getting buy-in from the players and coaches is a key aspect of any of the changes they want to implement. It’s what makes this book different and provides a consistent theme from the preseason to the end of the season.
By having the two authors trade off writing responsibilities from chapter to chapter, the book bounces back and forth in style and tone, but it works. The Only Rule Is It Has To Work is yet another worthy read in a very good year for baseball books.
Read more at http://www.baseballamerica.com/news/book-review-only-rule-has-to-work/#l1BWCQGCiqf1DrxT.99