The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves

The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves

by Keith Law
The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves

The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves

by Keith Law

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Overview

In this groundbreaking book, Keith Law, baseball writer for The Athletic and author of the acclaimed Smart Baseball, offers an era-spanning dissection of some of the best and worst decisions in modern baseball, explaining what motivated them, what can be learned from them, and how their legacy has shaped the game.

For years, Daniel Kahneman’s iconic work of behavioral science Thinking Fast and Slow has been required reading in front offices across Major League Baseball. In this smart, incisive, and eye-opening book, Keith Law applies Kahneman’s ideas about decision making to the game itself.

Baseball is a sport of decisions. Some are so small and routine they become the building blocks of the game itself—what pitch to throw or when to swing away. Others are so huge they dictate the future of franchises—when to make a strategic trade for a chance to win now, or when to offer a millions and a multi-year contract for a twenty-eight-year-old star. These decisions have long shaped the behavior of players, managers, and entire franchises. But as those choices have become more complex and data-driven, knowing what’s behind them has become key to understanding the sport. This fascinating, revelatory work explores as never before the essential question: What were they thinking?

Combining behavioral science and interviews with executives, managers, and players, Keith Law analyzes baseball’s biggest decision making successes and failures, looking at how gambles and calculated risks of all sizes and scales have shaped the sport, and how the game’s ongoing data revolution is rewriting decades of accepted decision making. In the process, he explores questions that have long been debated, from whether throwing harder really increases a player’s risk of serious injury to whether teams actually “overvalue” trade prospects.

Bringing his analytical and combative style to some of baseball’s longest running debates, Law deepens our knowledge of the sport in this entertaining work that is both fun and deeply informative.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780062942739
Publisher: HarperCollins
Publication date: 04/06/2021
Pages: 272
Sales rank: 640,869
Product dimensions: 7.80(w) x 5.20(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Keith Law is a senior baseball writer at The Athletic, and before joining The Athletic, he was a senior baseball writer for ESPN Insider.  Previously he was also special assistant to the general manager for the Toronto Blue Jays, handling all statistical analysis, and he wrote for Baseball Prospectus. He lives in Delaware. 

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

1 The Case for Robot Umpires: How Anchoring Bias Influences Strike Zones and Everything Else 9

2 Never Judge an Iceberg by Its Tip: How Availability Bias Shapes the Way Commentators Talk About Sports 25

3 Winning Despite Your Best Efforts: Outcome Bias and Why Winning Can Be the Most Misleading Stat of All 42

4 But This Is How We've Always Done It: Why Groupthink Alone Doesn't Make Baseball Myths True 61

5 For Every Clayton Kershaw There Are Ten Kasey Kikers: Base-Rate Neglect and Why it's Still a Bad idea to Draft High School Pitchers in the First Round 79

6 History Is Written by the Survivors: Pitch Count Bingo and Why "Nolan Ryan" Isn't a Counterargument 95

7 Cold Water on Hot Streaks: Recency Bias and the Danger of Using Just the Latest Data to Predict the Future 111

8 Grady Little's Long Eighth-Inning Walk: Status Quo and Why Doing Nothing Is the Easiest Bad Call 134

9 Tomorrow, This Will Be Someone Else's Problem: How Moral Hazard Distorts Decision-Making for GMs, College Coaches, and More 152

10 Pete Rose's Lionel Hutz Defense: The Principal-Agent Problem and How Misaligned Incentives Shape Bad Baseball Decisions 169

11 Throwing Good Money After Bad: The Sunk Cost Fallacy and Why Teams Don't "Eat" Money 186

12 The Happy Fun Ball: Optimism Bias and the Problem of Seeing What We Want to See 203

13 Good Decisions™: Baseball Executives Talk About Their Thought Processes Behind Smart Trades and Signings 212

Conclusion 234

Resources 236

Acknowledgments 239

Notes 241

Index 255

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