For baseball fans, it's the ultimate fantasy: picking the roster, setting the lineup, deciding on strategies--all with real players in a real ballpark.

That's what baseball analysts and stats crunchers Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller got to do for one full season when a minor league team in California offered them the chance to run its baseball operations according to the most advanced statistics. For Lindbergh and Miller, both baseball writers and hosts of Effectively Wild, the daily Baseball Prospectus podcast, it was a dream come true that put their statistical theories to the ultimate test.

Ben Lindbergh joins us this afternoon to talk about their new book, The Only Rule Is It Has To Work: Our Wild Experiment Building a New Kind of Baseball Team.