The Only Rule Is It Has to Work

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  For Jessie,

  who didn’t think a concert was a dumb first-date idea.

  —B.L.

  For my dad,

  who taught me what to take seriously.

  —S.M.

  THE SONOMA STOMPERS OPENING DAY ROSTER

  THE REST OF THE TEAM, IN ORDER OF DEBUT:

  • Josh McCauley RHP

  • Jose Canseco, DH

  • Ryusuke Kikusawa, RHP

  • Aritz Garcia, SS

  • Taylor Eads, OF

  • Santos Saldivar, RHP

  • Brennan Metzger, OF

  • Dylan Stoops, LHP

  • Cole Warren, RHP

  • Peter Bowles, OF

  • Connor Jones, OF

  • Matt Rubino, C

  • Eddie Mora-Loera, SS

  • Eric Mozeika, RHP

  • Chad Bunting, OF

  • Keith Kandel, OF

  SPRING TRAINING INVITEES

  • Kyle Breault, INF

  • Collin Forgey, OF

  • Jesse Garcia, LHP

  • Billy Gonzalez, C

  • Marcus Kimura, INF

  • Danny Martinez, INF

  • Caleb Natov, RHP

  • Will Price, OF

  PROLOGUE

  In April 2015, the River City Rascals, a professional baseball team just west of St. Louis in the independent Frontier League, invited six left-handed pitchers to spring training, and entering the last day of intrasquad games Paul Hvozdovic was the only one left. His throwing partner, a lefty who had also been on the team the year before, had been the fifth one cut, and it was clear to them both that nothing remained in Paul’s way. He was going to make the team. The throwing partner congratulated him and shook his hand. Paul called his dad, called his girlfriend, told them anything could happen but it sure looked good.

  Then he gave up a solo home run in that final scrimmage, and afterward he got a text message from his manager. These texts at the end of spring training, innocuous and inviting on their surface, always had a hidden, ominous meaning. Paul walked down the hall to the manager’s office, knowing he was getting cut. The River City Rascals wouldn’t carry a left-handed pitcher at all; they wouldn’t even carry the full twenty-four-man roster they were allowed, opting to save money by employing just twenty-two players to start the season. Paul’s dream was somebody else’s unnecessary business expense.

  He thanked his manager for the opportunity, then told him he was probably going to hang up his spikes for good and head back home to northern Virginia, where his girlfriend and his future (whatever that might be) were waiting for him. The manager told him to stick around for a couple of weeks—maybe he’d find a spot once the season started—but that was too painful for Paul. He suddenly realized how much he hated baseball, hated the anxiety of standing on the mound knowing that he was always a bad outing away from feeling the rejection he felt now. He stewed about the politics of these decisions, the seemingly arbitrary designs that stoked some guys’ careers and smothered the careers of others. He thought about all the time he had invested in something he believed would pay off, and how this manager had probably known all along that it wouldn’t. Baseball hurt too much. He was done.

  He called his agent, Brian McGinn, and told him that’s where he was leaning. Brian didn’t pretend Paul was going to be some sort of major league millionaire. He and Paul both knew the reality: Paul had just been cut by an independent minor league that was nine promotions from the majors. But, Brian said, “you’re in the prime of your career, and you’ve never been given the right opportunity. If nothing else, this is the perfect chance to see the world.”

  The world was a place called Sonoma, two thousand miles west of anywhere Paul had ever walked, somewhere in California in what was exotically described as “wine country.” There was a team in Sonoma that had seen something in his college stats and called his agent a month earlier, trying to convince Paul to come to a lower-level club that would give him a bigger role. It would mean a pay cut, from $600 a month to $500; it would mean moving backward, now ten promotions from the majors; it would mean, Paul feared, losing his girlfriend of four years, who was sick of seeing her boyfriend disappear every summer to pursue opportunities that could barely be called such. But it would also mean validation, that the sport hadn’t rejected him after all. He chose validation. He felt, just as suddenly, at peace once more. He even went to the Rascals’ Opening Night game, and with his execution commuted he was free to enjoy it. His girlfriend dumped him that day, by text message.

  The next morning Paul got into his Buick and drove west. He had no navigation, other than some pictures of freeway interchanges printed out from the Internet. He had no motel reservations. He just drove until he had to stop for gas, and then he drove some more. He’d been on long drives on the East Coast, but he’d never seen the world change like this. He finally saw the flat of Kansas, and he finally climbed the mountain ranges in Colorado. He drove 95 mph and watched cars pass him on his left. He detoured only to follow signs for minor league ballparks, just to see them. Eventually he would notice it was 2:00 a.m., and he’d find a motel, collect the Burger King bags and Red Bull cans from his car, sleep a few hours, and hit the road again.

  He thought about going back to his girlfriend, but as the Buick went farther the cost of turning back got greater. Eventually, you’re halfway through the desert and it feels like the only way out is forward. Or you’re halfway over the mountains and the only way out is down. And after the deserts and after the mountains, well, hell, you’re already there: The radio stations become Bay Area stations, and just like that you’re pulling up to the office of the Sonoma Stompers at 234 West Napa Street, just as they directed you to on the phone, and soon you’re in the office shaking hands with the owner, and somebody’s telling somebody else about your incredible stats, and they’re giving you a card that’ll let you eat free at Mary’s Pizza Shack, and it turns out the bartender there lets some of the players live with her family every summer. And then you’re walking around the downtown square, with its historic city hall and no chain businesses, and there are ducks and two playgrounds and a farmers’ market, and this doesn’t feel anything like the cold business of rejection that River City was. And now there’s no part of you left that wants anything but to be here and pitch and maybe turn into a big deal.

  * * *

  This was our Paul. We knew him as a name on a spreadsheet. We had never seen him, never watched video of him, never held a radar gun for his pitches, never shaken his hand or assessed the swagger in his gait, never looked at his parents and extrapolated what it meant for the future development of his body, never inspected his elbow ligament through an MRI machine, never studied his temperament on the mound to deduce whether he was a thrower or a pitch
er, whether he could bear down, whether he’d take it one day at a time. All we knew about Paul was that the previous season he had struck out one hundred batters and walked eight for a Division II school called Shepherd University. He had gone 11-1 with a 1.80 ERA. On a spreadsheet of 2014 college seniors, adjusted for level of competition and various other factors, and sorted by Column R—where we’d devised a metric for overall performance—Paul Hvozdovic was at the top. Not near the top; at the top. We had a spreadsheet that said Paul Hvozdovic had been the best senior pitcher at any level of college baseball one year earlier.

  At a banquet marking the first day of Sonoma Stompers spring training, we talked to player after player, wondering at each introduction if this was Paul. He was one of the last players we met. He was sitting away from the crowd at the end of a long table, talking in short and patient sentences to a Dominican pitcher who spoke no English. We told Paul why we’d brought him all the way here from Missouri, why we’d diverted him from his retirement plans, why he didn’t have a girlfriend anymore. We told him about the spreadsheet, and we told him about what had happened when we’d sorted by Column R. Paul looked at us doubtfully.

  “Your spreadsheet’s some shit,” he said.

  * * *

  Our trip to Sonoma was no less likely than Paul Hvozdovic’s. Since childhood, we’ve both loved baseball and searched for deeper understanding of the sport through mathematical means. We were fantasy junkies before our tenth birthdays, the kind of kids who studied minor league numbers to figure out which rookie cards were the best investments, and the kind of preadolescents who mailed trade suggestions to our favorite team’s general manager. (Note: this was Sam.) That’s what made baseball so different from any other childhood hobby: It came preloaded with a numerical puzzle. Every cardboard back in a pack of baseball cards contained a table, and in that table we learned the power of a story told through numbers. Those tables challenged us, as they’ve challenged baseball fans forever, to be smarter. From a childhood immersed in those tables, we grew up to be details-obsessed calculators who will spend five minutes figuring price-per-ounce at a supermarket to determine the best way to allocate our spreadsheet-ordered food budget. (Also Sam.)

  We are apostles of sabermetrics, a term named for the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) and coined by the discipline’s most influential thinker, Bill James, to describe “the search for objective knowledge about baseball.” Over the past two decades, the sabermetric movement has plowed across Major League Baseball like a glacier, leaving a strange-looking landscape behind: Ivy League–educated twenty- and thirtysomethings with Wall Street experience replacing weatherbeaten general managers who came up as players and scouts; precise defensive positioning supplanting guesswork and gut feel; strict pitch counts and swelling bullpens crowding out complete games. Every major league franchise has its front-office nerd cave, home to quants with wall-worthy credentials and technical skills that could earn them fortunes in the financial sector.

  We loved to play as much as Paul does, but our lack of tools killed our careers early. And yet our lives have still revolved around the game. Each of us has served as editor in chief of Baseball Prospectus, the leading media outlet devoted to data-driven baseball analysis. In our writing, we speak this new, analytical language of sports, drawing on advanced statistics to explain the changing game and pass judgment on player acquisitions. The point of baseball management isn’t to produce tables and spreadsheets, of course; the point is to make the right decision every time, to give players every resource and advantage available, and to reject “because we’ve always done it this way” as the answer to any question. And, oh, are there ever questions: Why don’t teams try two-man outfields and five-man infields against extreme ground ball/fly ball hitters? Why don’t they deploy their best relievers at the most important times, instead of wasting them in low-leverage situations where they’re likely to record a “save”? Why don’t they have statistically inclined coaches in the dugout who can crunch the numbers before managers make game-changing moves?

  The question underlying our entire careers, though, is more personal: Do we really know what we’re talking about? It was unanswerable, untestable—until last summer. Through a series of unlikely events, we found ourselves running the baseball operations of the Sonoma Stompers, an independent minor league team north of San Francisco. We were given the latitude to put our theories about baseball to the test in real life, with real players. If we wanted to sign players based on a spreadsheet and arcane calculations, we could. If we wanted to employ unorthodox defensive shifts, we could. If we wanted to use relievers to start the game and starters to finish, we could do that, too. There were no rules, except for one that our players demanded: Whatever we tried had to work.

  “Analysis is valuable, certainly,” wrote Baseball Prospectus’s founder, Gary Huckabay, in 2001. “But there are limits to its utility.… Our models are built on enough assumptions about baseball, data, and the world that we need to turn a skeptical eye on them at every opportunity, just like we do to conventional wisdom. What we don’t know could fill a book.”

  This is that book.

  * * *

  Because there are two of us, and because there are some events that happened to only one of us, we’ve decided to tell our story in alternating chapters. Ben has written chapter 1, Sam has written chapter 2, and so forth. If you can follow the action in a baseball game from the top of the inning to the bottom and back again, you shouldn’t have any trouble here, either.

  1

  NOT JOKING AT ALL

  Sam is sitting in the passenger seat of his 2011 Honda Fit, which is parked inside his garage in Long Beach, California. I’m sitting in my 2005 fading, faux-leather desk chair, which is parked inside the small office in my Manhattan apartment. Sitting between our sound-dampening sanctuaries (where we’re trying not to wake Sam’s wife or my girlfriend) is former Los Angeles Dodgers general manager Dan Evans, who’s in an Arizona hotel on a spring training scouting trip, talking to us on Skype.

  It’s March 2013, just after midnight my time, and Sam and I are interviewing Evans for the latest episode of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast we record for Baseball Prospectus. Midway through the call, we ask him about his new job, a side gig as the commissioner of the Northern League, an independent circuit that he’s trying to bring back from the dead. Indy leagues are like the minors, except that they’re even more minor: They employ professional players, but they aren’t affiliated with major league organizations. This means they don’t take orders from above, but it also means that most of them are in perpetually critical financial condition, one down year away from drowning in debt and leaving only ripples behind. The Northern League, which fielded teams in Minnesota, South Dakota, Iowa, and Ontario, was founded in 1993 and winked out of existence in 2010. Now Evans is trying to wink it back in again. And to do that, he tells us, he needs investors to take on teams.

  “If you’re asking,” I say, “Sam and I will take one team.”

  Everyone laughs, but cohost telepathy tells Sam I’m serious. I sense the same about him.

  “I wonder how many people in this conversation are joking, because at least two of us are not joking at all,” Sam says.

  Evans responds by extolling the virtues of indy-league life. “Unlike a minor league franchise, where you have no say in the players … everything in the independents is under your jurisdiction,” he says. “For some people, that’s really intimidating. For other people … they see that and they go, ‘Oh my gosh, this is my real fantasy team.’”

  We don’t need any additional selling. We spend the rest of the podcast distracted, sending silent text messages to each other and trying to contain our excitement. Once we’re off the air, we ask Evans if he was just humoring us or if it’s safe for our hopes to be high.

  “Down the line, if you guys are really serious, I would actually entertain something like that,” he says. We feel as if a real GM has just walked us to the w
ar room where teams talk strategy, flashed his credentials, and assured security that we’re with him. After Evans is off the line, Sam and I instant message into the night. We’re already playing out all the implications, wondering which ideas we’d test out if we owned a team and could be the bosses of our own baseball sandbox. “I might not sleep again until we have a baseball team,” I say to Sam.

  Once the sun is up and I can send emails without looking like a vampire, I contact our boss, Joe Hamrahi, the president and CEO of Baseball Prospectus and a friend of Dan Evans. Joe, can we buy a baseball team? Can we? Can we?

  “They want a lot of money,” Joe writes back. He keeps me in suspense until the answer to my “How much money?” follow-up appears: “$250,000.”

  I have three minutes to mull over that massive-sounding amount before another email arrives. “By the way, that’s just the admission fee,” Joe adds. “Then you have to come up with the capital to operate the team, pay the players, the front office, lease the ballpark, run concessions, etc. And you’re not talking about real players here. These are has-beens and guys looking for some shot at getting into real baseball.”

  Well, hell, so are we. Sam and I aren’t old enough to be “has-beens” in every respect, but we qualify when it comes to our childhood hopes. Sam was that skinny ten-year-old who pictured himself hitting the World Series–winning home run. Like every amateur hero before him, he sprinted around the imaginary bases as though the earth were crumbling behind him, leaping and skipping, pumping a fist, throwing a helmet, voicing the cheers of each of the thousands of fans who sounded so loud in his head. Over the course of a quarter century, that pretend applause went silent. In the saddest perversion of a sports-movie montage, it became increasingly clear to Sam that he would never hit that home run. He was too shy, then too small, then too distracted, then too old. Finally, he was simply too realistic.