The Only Rule Is It Has to Work

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

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller (Henry Holt and Company, 2016)

   Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller are baseball experts, after a fashion. They have written for Grantland and Baseball Prospectus, whose daily podcast they host together. But their playing experience peaked in Little League: they are statheads, sabermetric geeks, all theory and no practice. In 2014, they had a chance to try out some of their theories with the Sanoma Stompers of the Pacific Association, an independent league which they estimate to be four levels below the affiliated minor leagues, which is to say ten levels below the majors. The general manager brought them in as the two-headed head of baseball operations, which meant they were the guys wearing corduroys and hoodies, carrying clipboards and stopwatches.

   The gulf between theory and practice is only the first paradox they encounter. The next is that they want to be both bystanders and participants. They are in an experimental situation that seems to call for trying to fade into the background, but they're also going to try to make their suggestions stick; at least part of how decisions get made comes down to who is most willing to pitch a fit, which is not Ben and Sam's strong point.

   From a purely baseball point of view, some of their ideas are really good. Why can't you have a five man infield, or some other defensive shift that puts fielders where the ball is most likely to go? Some batters may adjust, but others will be flummoxed. And: it is demonstrable that the seventh inning or so is most dangerous for your starting pitcher, because the top of the order is seeing him for the third time by then. If your best pitcher is in the bullpen, you might as well use him, because if your starter gets shelled, there will be no save, anyhow. 'The other teams will laugh at you' is not at all a good enough reason.

   But that runs into another version of the contradiction between the geeks and the old-timers. For the first half of the season, they are managed by a crusty 37-year-old player-coach named Fehland Lentini. From where he sits, 'the closer is the closer,' which means he doesn't pitch the seventh inning, because he's the closer. Obviously. Lentini is biased toward the players he's friends with, which counteracts the Corduroy Crew's biases toward players they chose out of row R of their giant spreadsheet. Everybody's right sometimes, and in baseball, time and chance happen to them all.

   It's a beautifully quirky indy-league season up there in Sonoma, including a weekend cameo by Jose Canseco. The 2014 Stompers, somewhat accidentally, featured two things that were new to all of organized baseball, with the first Japanese-born manager running the second half of the season, and the first openly gay active player, a pitcher named Sean Conroy. His start on Sonoma Pride Day draws a modicum of national press attention, in addition to being a move in the game of 'how can we get our best pitcher in the game earlier?'

   Such layers of meaning and motive run all through the season, and the book. Ben and Sam started out imagining a laboratory for experimental baseball. "But once we started signing players and getting to know them, and especially once we saw them in spring training, we realized that they were not in our story so much as we were in theirs." How much of a prospect can any Pacific Association player can be, ten levels below the bigs, and without even the level of daily instruction found in A ball? The odds are terrible, but it's not up to baseball operations guys to make them worse. And as Sam concludes, some of those players would be better off if they just viewed baseball as the most fun way to spend a particular summer, because the odds of that working out are excellent.

Emailed January 2, 2017