The Only Rule Is It Has to Work: Our Wild Experiment Building a New Kind of Baseball Team (Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller, 2016)

Book club selection (via POC; session held July 17, 2016).

Authors are well-known baseball statistics guys, including stints with Baseball Prospectus.  A situation arises during one of their regular podcasts - almost like a dare - they agree to take on responsibilities with an independent league team, the Sonoma Stompers.  The idea was that they would have authority to select players and implement cutting-edge strategies based on statistical analysis.

That was the idea.  They find out that institutional inertia is powerful.

Interesting, useful; I pay lots of attention to baseball for so many years now (55 and counting), and had plenty of new insights based on reading this.

And our reading group has a couple guys who have lived the life, and had interesting things to say about all this.

Some thoughts:

1.  Sonoma is a town we know from vacations (just there in April as a matter of fact); team stadium just a couple blocks north of the town square; adds to the enjoyment of the book.

2.  Good job of explaining the gap between the independent leagues and affiliated ball - these players really are on the cusp, pretty much without exception.  In plenty of cases, deciding whether to play one more season for near-zero chance of advancing, or give up the dream and get a "real" job.

3.  The authors' interactions with the first manager (Feh) - very interesting - how  instincts, clubhouse experiences matter.  The stat guys won't anticipate that seemingly innocuous decisions will have a big morale effect, at least based on how players still tend to approach the game in 2016.

4.  Some interesting details about how the authors unearth players with unrecognized potential.

5.  But all in all, the authors had less control than one would expect based on the book blurbs.  Harder to initiate changes than they expected.

5.  One problem with the story:  sample size is too small to judge effectiveness.  One season, and a very short one at that.  The book publicity oversold what was going on here.  Which was a minor shame, since the book stands up quite well anyway.

6.  Unusual things - one of the players comes out; Jose Canseco signs for a short stint.