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The Only Rule Is It Has to Work
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The Only Rule is It Has to Work/Lindbergh - 3 stars
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Anita -- I am so disappointed to learn that this book did not live up to its potential. I really had high hopes of it. As you and I have discussed before, baseball kinda rules our kids and therefore our lives. I have two that play and one that loves the game. We have often said that one will become a manager, one will be a player, and the other is going to become a GM. I had hoped this might be the book for the one to become a GM. Thanks for the review though, too much on the list to read a bad book.
J.W. wrote: "Anita -- I am so disappointed to learn that this book did not live up to its potential. I really had high hopes of it. As you and I have discussed before, baseball kinda rules our kids and therefor..."Yeah, there are parts that are good, but it gets bogged down and not in a good way. I don't think I can recommend it wholeheartedly to your GM son. I think there have to be better books out there on baseball for him to absorb! If their experiment actually worked, it might have been a different story. Unfortunately, their ideas were a lot better than their ability to sell their ideas.
It's about two baseball writers, Ben and Sam, who spend a season on the baseball operations staff of a team, the Stompers, in an independent baseball league. They have the idea that they will bring "major league" analysis to this team (normally independent leagues don't use a whole lot of metrics) and really use numbers to drive the management of the team i.e. crazy shifts, using five infielders, etc.
As a huge baseball fan, I thought this would be very interesting, but in the reality, Ben and Sam learned a lot, but not sure they learned a lot about using metrics to manage a team. What they learned is that baseball managers don't like being told how to manage much. And that if you recruit the best available baseball players, they get poached by better funded, more appealing independent leagues.
From the title, you think it's all going to work out in movie like fashion. But Moneyball it isn't.
To add to the issues, there's a lot of replication of spreadsheets in the book as well as texts which were all but unreadable on the Kindle edition. You may need a magnifying glass if you don't buy the dead tree version.
This book would have been a great 8 page article in ESPN Magazine, but as a book, it was not a home run. I will give the authors kudos for their total honesty, but while they seem extremely intelligent about numbers, I'm not sure they knew much about how to implement change effectively. The story was more about their thought process than a verdict on the success or failure of their theories.