Sam Miller, the editor in chief of Baseball Prospectus, spent last summer taking his devotion to analytics to a new level. An independent minor league team, the Sonoma Stompers, gave Miller and fellow number cruncher Ben Lindbergh (a staff writer for FiveThirtyEight) a chance to run its baseball operations while relying solely on advanced statistics.
The resulting book, titled "The Only Rule is It Has to Work,'' will be released by Henry Holt and Co. in May.In advance, Miller sat down with us near his San Carlos home to discuss the rapidly expanding world of baseball analytics. Q: What's your baseball background?