Score One For Sabermetrics!

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller host a daily podcast about baseball and write analytically about the sport: Lindbergh for FiveThirtyEight, Miller for Baseball Prospectus. Last summer, they got the chance to put their data-driven, empirically minded approach into practice, taking over operations for the Sonoma Stompers of the independent league. This is nearly as low as professional baseball gets, with a budget not anywhere near the same ballpark as Oakland's supposedly tight budget in Moneyball. But Lindbergh and Miller pull a few strings, call in some favors, and bring something like major-league-quality advanced stats to the Pacific Association. They also use players' prior stats to try to build a roster of undervalued talent, ending up with a mix of their spreadsheet guys, returning players, and their sabermetrics-doubting manager's favorite players.