The Only Rule Is It Has to Work: Our Wild Experiment Building a New Kind of Baseball Team

It's the ultimate in fantasy baseball: You get to pick the roster, set the lineup, and decide on strategies-with real players, in a real ballpark, in a real playoff race. That's what baseball analysts Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller got to do when an independent minor-league team in California, the Sonoma Stompers, offered them the chance to run its baseball operations according to the most advanced statistics.



We tag along as Lindbergh and Miller apply their number-crunching insights to all as...