How ‘moneyball' came to the Sonoma Stompers

Editor's note: Last summer, a pair of baseball stat freaks, Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller, were hired by the Sonoma Stompers to advise the team using their 'sabermetrics' theory of player management. After a lightning-fast start to the season, the Stompers finished a respectable second in their league. Lindbergh and Miller, meanwhile, went on to write a book about their Stompers experience, 'The Only Rule Is It Has to Work' (Henry Holt, 2016). The following is an excerpt detailing their introduction to Arnold Field, the Stompers and the city of Sonoma.

Organized baseball has been played in Sonoma for more than a century, and the locals still brag about the days when Joe DiMaggio played summer ball in Sonoma County. Arnold Field, the Stompers' home park, stands just up the street from Sonoma Plaza, the site of the Bear Flag Revolt, a one-month uprising of American settlers against the Mexican government in 1846, in the opening days of the Mexican-American War.

Start at the north end of the plaza and stroll past the one-story homes and wine-tasting rooms on First Street West, and you'll soon arrive at Arnold Field, which is shrouded in greenery until you're almost on top of it and can spot the light towers stabbing out of the treetops. The field, which is also home to Babe Ruth baseball in the summer and high school football in the fall, has unusually elongated dimensions: It's Lilliputian down the lines (304 to left, 311 to right), shallow in the alleys (331 and 345), and Brobdingnagian to center (435), where the tallest of the hills surrounding Sonoma serves as a scenic batter's eye.

Most players, I learn that night, earn significantly less than $1,000 a month and live off the largesse of local host families, regular folks who let players sleep in a spare room (or two, or three, plus sometimes a couch, a trailer, the garage, or a corner of the kitchen) in exchange for season tickets and nothing else. A player's incentives clause could be a case of beer, and a struggling team might have to slash salary to make its meager payroll in the second half of the season.

The park's official capacity is 1,450, though the Stompers rarely test its limits. On the day I visit, they come pretty close, more because baseball dignitary Dusty Baker is visiting and signing autographs than because of the playoff implications of the game against the Vallejo Admirals.

Earlier in the month, the Stompers' general manager Theo Fightmaster signed 67-year-old former major leaguer Bill 'Spaceman' Lee and started him against Pittsburg as a publicity stunt. Lee went 5 1/3 innings in a 6-3 Stompers win, becoming the oldest pitcher ever to win a professional game.

Fightmaster the man is as memorable as Fightmaster the surname. As a big, bad-bodied first baseman, he topped out in junior college, save for the one time when he tried to walk on to Arizona State. He quickly walked off, although he left with a story about getting into an intrasquad game against Dustin Pedroia. He tried coaching and fantasy games, but they didn't scratch his, er, sports itch, so he started writing about baseball for local media outlets.

Despite his martial name, he's an easygoing guy, thoughtful, quick-witted, and cultured. The Stompers are a family affair for him — his wife is wandering around, sometimes selling concessions; his mom, in a Black Eyed Peas sweatshirt, is here, too — but it's a more-than-full-time job, of which only a few hours a day are spent doing what he wants to do: baseball stuff.

During the hours I spend with him, I see Theo scramble to assign a ceremonial first pitch, clean up litter, tend to ticket and concession sales, keep kids from infiltrating the field, and send a beer (Lagunitas, a Stompers sponsor) to Baker.

At most games, he watches an inning or three before he has to grill burgers or replace tapped-out kegs, or go back to the Stompers' office to count tickets and wish they'd sold more.

He's always stressed about expenses and looking for ways to recoup costs: Any fan who turns in a foul that falls in the stands gets a snack item for free, because each ball costs the club about five bucks. Once, a visiting manager asked Theo for an on-the-house hot dog. Theo had to turn him down.

This, of course, puts a tremendous strain on his ability to eke out victories. He doesn't have a vast scouting network — he compares his player-acquisition process to Plato's Allegory of the Cave, trying to draw significant information out of brief, flickering shadows.

'What about Moneyball stuff?' I ask. 'Is there much opportunity to do that sort of stuff here?'

'You could definitely find inefficiencies,' he says. 'But if I had another set of hands, I'd have them handing out programs or selling sponsorships, not scouting our opponents.'

Excerpted from 'The Only Rule Is It Has to Work: Our Wild Experiment Building a New Kind of Baseball Team' by Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller, published by Henry Holt and Company, LLC Copyright © 2016 by Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller. All rights reserved.