The Only Rule Is It Has to Work: Our Wild Experiment Building a New Kind of Baseball Team [Includes a New Afterword]

Their story in The Only Rule is it Has to Work is unlike any other baseball tale you've ever read.We tag along as Lindbergh and Miller apply their number-crunching insights to all aspects of assembling and running a team, following one cardinal rule for judging each innovation they try: it has to work. We meet colorful figures like general manager Theo Fightmaster and boundary-breakers like the first openly gay player in professional baseball. And they prove that you don’t need a bat or a glove

Best Sports Book of the Year by Sports Illustrated, The Boston Globe, and The Buffalo News, and a Great Read of the Year by NPR“Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller have given us a brutally honest but blissfully funny look at where we really stand a decade into the ‘analytics revolution.’ If you want the insights that statheads and baseball traditionalists still need to learn from one another, start by reading this book.”--Nate Silver, bestselling author of The Signal and the Noise and the founder and editor in chief of FiveThirtyEight“The Only Rule Is It Has to Work is a terrific read, as

"Behind the Spreadsheet" according to 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. "An Instant-Classic" according to 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 les. 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

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 guid