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

Law (Smart Baseball), a senior baseball writer at The Athletic and former special assistant to the general manager for the Toronto Blue Jays, takes a thought-provoking look at human behavior through the lens of major league baseball. Building upon the work of psychologist Daniel Kahneman and others, Law uses the sport to explain “some key ideas about how we think and make decisions” in a way that will appeal to sports fans as well as business-minded readers. For example, research on how umpires call ambiguous pitches, which could arguably be either a strike or a ball (they are much more likely to follow a ball with a strike, and vice-versa) makes clear the concept of anchoring bias, in which the mind’s estimate of probability is affected by previous information. Another factor in faulty decision making is what he calls availability bias (a “cognitive illusion where you misjudge the frequency of some event or characteristic because of how much you can remember seeing it”)—a plausible explanation for the selection of Joe DiMaggio, with his 56-game hitting streak, as MVP in 1941, despite Ted Williams’s historic statistical season. Law’s take is as entertaining as it is informative. This intelligent and accessible work is a grand slam. (Apr.)