September 30, 2025 · 10 min read

book business

The Only Rule Is It Has to Work

The Only Rule Is It Has to Work is all about taking advantage of incentive mis-alignment. It’s a practical book on what happened when two baseball stat-heads took over a seventh-tier minor league team in California.

The players wanted to get called up to a higher league. The coaches wanted to win games using statistics. It turns out, this is a tough combination. This is one of the lowest leagues in baseball. Any players the Stompers had access to were passed over by hundreds of scouts, coaches, and teams with more resources. Every player had something wrong with them. And it was up to the coaches to figure out what this issue was, and figure out if they wanted to live with the deficiency.

The players were misaligned by wanting to satisfy their dream of getting called up to a better league, or to satisfy their ego. Few cared about the Stompers. For every player, this was a quick stop before they got their big break. This could lead to ego-issues, losing players pre-maturely, and more problems.

The coaches wanted to win games, but they quickly realized stats were good enough for groundwork. But they needed more if they wished to compete on a shoestring budget. After accepting players into their club and compensating for their “why’s”, they had to become armchair psychologists and therapists for their players.

It turns out, players don’t like being called to the bench because it's the statistically correct course of action. Nor do they like being pulled from the lineup, or told to play a different position. Turns out, everything is a people and coordination problem.

Highlights

• And so we have a reason he’s here, which was important; without knowing the “why,” we’d only be waiting to discover his weakness, which would undoubtedly show up at some point.
• But when I send an exploratory email, I get the same response I received from Sportvision: Cool project. How can we help?
• Pointstreak, which handles data entry for many professional, semipro, and amateur leagues across the country. For a seasonal fee of $1,400—it should probably be more, but the Pacific Association cuts costs by buying one account for everyone instead of one per team—Pointstreak keeps track of pitch-level results for every game, compiling full-season stats that are accessible by anyone through a web portal. In theory, these results are accurate and complete. In practice, they’re imperfect.
• But I’m looking for reasons to say yes to him, rather than reasons to say no.
• But how does he get to this point in his life without anybody else seeing this, you know? How come no better team gave him a chance, no other league gave him a chance?” That’s the question. That’s always the question. Why is he available to us? Finding the right “whys” is what is going to separate us from the other teams in the league.
• The owners’ objective,” he tells me, “is basically this vision of a family of four leaving the game, the kids got to high-five the mascot, they got a foul ball, they’re walking to their car and saying, ‘What a fantastic night at the park. By the way, who won?’
• I see how heartbroken Theo is, knowing that, at this level, the player is responsible for his own, potentially expensive recovery—and that, if it takes too long, the player will likely have to leave the country.
• We should be asking it sincerely: What is this guy’s “why,” and does the “why” matter to us?
• If you’re so good, why are you writing to us? This is a terrible, fallacious bit of reasoning; every player we ultimately sign will be, by definition, available to us, and many of them, we hope, will be valuable parts of a winning team.
• It was a poor man’s college diet. I literally drove to Walmart every morning, bought discounted rotisserie chicken for $4.86, and a bag of iceberg lettuce, and one loaf of French bread. I had to make the bread last the whole week, and after three it would be no carbs. And then work out every day. It was a whole chicken, so it wasn’t like I was starving—I was eating well, but it was just good protein, good lean. And seven bucks.”
• And because our incentives aren’t aligned with those of the big league teams that went back for fortieths from this buffet before we were seated, we might unearth a few “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure” type
• Sam and I are guilty of these sins—not because we wouldn’t welcome the input of a seasoned on-site observer, but because we have no time, no travel budget, no scouting staff, and next to no video. Stats are our specialty, but they’re also our only resort.
• The first rule of child psychology is that it applies throughout all of life.
• Yes, we’re risking our reputations. But I’m more worried about how we’ll look if we don’t do this, if we show so little conviction in our tactics that we flee after one failure.
• This shouldn’t matter, but pitchers love the win. Taking it from them is like bait-and-switching a kid’s dessert at the end of the meal. This turns out to be a substantial obstacle to managers pulling pitchers as early as they should, but it can be avoided by manipulating the starter/reliever roles ever so slightly
• As I see it, there are four possibilities: 1. Santos wasn’t at his best because of a nineteen-day layoff after Southern’s conference-title game. 2. Santos is good, but Brook is a bad evaluator. 3. Santos isn’t good enough for the Frontier League, but he is good enough for the Pacific Association. 4. Santos sucks, and he somehow struck out twelve D1 batters per nine innings without any transferable skills.
• It wasn’t just my bosses. I’d grown tired of arguing, with my wife, with people on the Internet, with friends who thought that the Notorious B.I.G. was a better rapper than Ghostface Killah. Once I started trying to win an argument, I found myself rotating every fact to suit my position. This was true of the facts that came out of my mouth and also of facts that went into my ears, which I heard only deeply enough to deflate or reposition. Conversation became an exercise in bullshit.
• I read an article in the New Yorker that made me intensely happy to be argument-free. Its premise, based on the work of political scientists, was that the worst thing a president can do to advance his positions is to state them; as soon as he does, a huge number of people will position themselves in opposition, and “
• If you tell them they are wrong,” he wrote, “do you make them want to agree with you? Never! For you have struck a direct blow at their intelligence, judgment, pride and self-respect. That will make them want to strike back. But it will never make them want to change their minds. If you are going to prove anything, do it so subtly that no one will feel that you are doing it.”
• the only way our minds are changed is by slow absorption, the feeling that other people we respect all believe different things than we do. The best argument is, essentially, peer pressure.
• The problem, as I explain sheepishly when friends, colleagues, and podcast listeners come to games, is bandwidth. We hadn’t imagined how time-consuming writing preseries scouting reports would be. We hadn’t anticipated how many hours we would spend with tech support so that our pitch databases would be complete. Mostly, though, we hadn’t expected the entire season to be hijacked by a six-week struggle over the way we use our damned close
• I walk into Yoshi’s office and say I want to talk. Yes, he says, that’s great, because he wants to get my help on some things. I’m stunned. I’m losing my angry face. He pulls out that night’s lineup and asks what I think. I stare at it. Uhhhhhhhh. I say I’d rather see Taylor Eads that night instead of Daniel Baptista, with a lefty on the mound.
• This turns out to be one skill where Pacific Association pitchers can more or less match their big league role models. Some skills are like this. We’ve observed, for instance, that pitchers in our league often have MLB-quality pickoff moves—even better than MLB-quality, in some cases, because they can balk with near impunity. “
• You think that you’re this whole big screen, like a big rectangle,” he said. “But you’re actually a collection of all these little squares in here. And each one is a part of the game that you have to learn and polish. In affiliated ball, they start with the first square and they polish it until it’s perfect. Then they go on to the next square, and they polish that one. Eventually you’ve polished every spot and you’re a complete ballplayer, you know how to play the game. But nobody does that for you here
• But we’ve found that vastly oversimplifying things is the best way to make these cases.
• If pressed, I would have acknowledged on Opening Day that all our players had agreed to go out with us only to make better teams jealous. But as the season settled into a comfortable routine and we watched strangers become companions, their emotional states ebbing and flowing with our wins and losses, it was easy to convince ourselves that our players were happy to be here and that they were as invested as Sam and I in the Stompers’ success. Everyone we love eventually leaves us, if we don’t leave them first, but we’ve evolved to be good at forgetting painful facts. Hearing Isaac declare his ambition out loud was like discovering that your girlfriend has an active OkCupid profile or a malignant mole.
• decline in the team’s self-reported mood and self-confidence ratings, which we discover when we unlock the survey safe at the end of the season.
• Action feels good,” Theo says after that win. “So good,” I respond. “I can’t think of a single thing we’ve actually done this year that I regret. Only the things I haven’t done.” “We should do things.” “We should do things.” So we try. Anything to make tomorrow different from today.
• Factoring in playing time, Chavez’s offense was about 2.5 times more valuable than anyone else in our league, even though he missed the last 15 percent of the schedule. Yet the Barry Bonds of the Pacific Association was considered a borderline candidate for high-A, which is three levels below the big leagues. Baseball is hard.
• We would still make mistakes, but fewer that were driven by bad process, the front-office equivalent of throwing the ball to the wrong base. The next time, we’d know not to hire someone with whom we wouldn’t work well. We’d know not to rely only on our powers of persuasion to the total exclusion of our power to put our foot down. We’d know that our spreadsheets are probably more predictive for pitchers than for position players. We haven’t lost our belief that data can help people build better baseball teams. We’ve just gained a greater appreciation for how hard it can be to collect and communicate.
• But once we’d survived our first stumbles, the game got slower. In time, maybe we would get meaner, more aggressive, quicker to cut bait. “That may be the lesson I learned (or hope I learned) from this year,” Theo tells me months after our last loss. “I really wish I could go back in time to release Walker. Probably never even let him make the team.