The Only Rule Is It Has to Work: Our Wild Experiment Building a New Kind of Baseball Team. This item is unavailable.The Only Rule Is It Has to Work: Our Wild Experiment Building a New Kind of Baseball Team

It's the ultimate in fantasy baseball: You get to pick the roster, set the lineup, and decide on strategies - with real players, in a real ballpark, playing in real time. That's what Ben Lindbergh and Sam Millergotto do when the Sonoma Stompers, an independent minor league team in California, offered them the chance to run the team's baseball operations according to the most advanced statistics. Their story 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: It has to work. We meet colourful figures like general manager Theo Fightmaster and boundary breakers like the first openly gay player in American professional baseball. Even Jose Canseco makes a cameo appearance. Will their knowledge of numbers bring the Stompers a championship? Will the team have a competitive advantage, or is the old folk wisdom really true after all? Will the players attract the attention of big league scouts or will this be a fast track to oblivion? It's a wild ride, as the authors' infectious enthusiasm and feel for the absurd make the Stompers' story one that will speak to numbers geeks and traditionalists alike. And in a new afterword, Lindbergh and Miller pick up the story in a new season to show how the team and its players continue to break new ground, on and off the field.

BEN LINDBERGH is a staff writer for The Ringer and the cohost of the podcast Effectively Wild. He is a former staff writer for FiveThirtyEight and Grantland and a former editor in chief of Baseball Prospectus. He lives in NYC. SAM MILLER is a national baseball columnist and feature writer for ESPN. He is a former editor in chief of Baseball Prospectus and coedited three editions of Baseball Prospectus's annual guidebook. He lives with his family in California.