THE ONLY RULE IS IT HAS TO WORK.
THE ONLY RULE IS IT HAS TO WORK. My first book of 2019 is THE ONLY RULE IS IT HAS TO WORK by Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller. Lindbergh and Miller are two sabermatricians (think Moneyball) who were given the opportunity to apply sabermetric theories to a real baseball team—-albeit a team in an independent league, which is the lowest ranking of professional leagues.
The first thing that surprised me was that Lindbergh and Miller undertook this experiment to see how applying “advanced statistics” would work in practice. Yet the first one third of the book is devoted to their concern with building a team with good “team chemistry”, more than with the predictions that can be made based on past statistics. Team chemistry is a traditional problems for baseball managers—and the approach to the issues by Lindbergh and Miller was traditional for the most part.
The discussion of the personalities of the players was fascinating, partly because Lindbergh and Miller are very good writers and partly because I have never seen team chemistry discussed in any detail. Of course, baseball writers would lose access to players if they wrote about it.