Will Byrnes's Reviews > The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves

Identifying the questions you must ask and the data or evidence you will need is the first step in decision-making, and you can do that more effectively once you’re aware of the pitfalls posed by the cognitive biases and illusions I’ve cited in this book.

Bob Feller is reported to have said “Baseball is only a game, a game of inches, and lots of luck.” There is plenty of truth in that. But with the technological advances we have seen in the last decade, it may be that baseball has become a game of microns and milliseconds.

The benefit of having so much more data available today than has ever been at the fingertips of field or general managers, not to mention bookmakers and bettors, (that means you, Pete) is that what’s been considered revealed wisdom in the national game can now be subjected to ever more penetrating analysis. What that analysis reveals is that many presumably valid ideas have now been shown to be demonstrably false. So why do so many baseball pros continue to rely on notions that are nonsense? Keith Law has some answers for that.

Keith Law - image from The Athletic

In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith argues that what makes a so-called free economy productive is that people will act with a rational self-interest to pursue desired ends. Did Smith ever actually meet people? Sure, we have the capacity for rational thinking. And we even use it sometimes. But it is only one factor in how decisions are made. Decisions must, for good or ill (mostly ill), pass through a gauntlet of possible errors and biases. Law has pulled together a rich collection of poor excuses. We are all subject to biases, fallacies, aversions, and other non-rational forces of one sort and another, but ferreting out where irrational tilt lies is in the realm of psychology, and its dismal relation, economics.

Law has been known to take on purveyors of bullshit before. You might enjoy his Twitter exchange with evolution-denier, Kurt Shilling, here. ESPN actually suspended his Twitter account for a while (without suspending Shilling’s) which suggests that they have a lot of evolving to do. He took considerable umbrage with purveyors of baseball-related bullshit in his first book, Smart Baseball. Tilting at the windmills of bovine droppings is clearly Law’s thing. And we are all the better-informed on account of that.

In the highlighted paragraph at the top of this review, Law makes clear that while it is baseball that he is using for his examples, it is a wider reality that he hopes to influence. In doing so he espouses the wisdom to be found in a seminal work of behavioral science, Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, which is referenced throughout. He bolsters his analysis with references to research done by other experts as well.

There are thirteen chapters in the book, well fourteen if you add the Conclusion, each looking in some detail at particular types of bias, showing how that bias, or those biases impact decision-making, by players, umpires, field managers, team owners, and probably you and me. He offers not only backup on the theories behind each, but demonstrates the applicability of the theory with very real-world baseball examples. If you are averse to strong-opinions, Law may turn you off. He showed some rough tonal ledges in his first book, mostly absent here, but if you still believe that your best hitter should bat third, and that Joe Dimaggio deserved the MVP over Ted Williams in the year when the former hit in 56 consecutive games and the latter hit 406, you should be prepared to back those opinions up with facts, because Law can, and he makes perrsuasive arguments.

One thing that Law does not do is dabble much in politics. It is clear from his introduction that it is his intent to show how biases enter into our judgments in all sorts of ways. Baseball is the lens through which he shows how diverse biases impact decisions in a bad way. But he wants to show how they impact all our decisions. Political creature that I am, a full Notre Dame (before the fire) of clanging bells was pushing my application of Law’s lessons to the political arena. Here are a couple of examples.

Law looks at the success of manager Bob Brenly’s 2001 World Series vs the Yankees. The D’Backs won the series despite, not because of, Brenly’s decision-making. Law offers a considerable stack of judgmental errors Brenly made that should have resulted in his team being drubbed. Yet, the D’Backs won, and thus Brenly will evermore be known as a World-Series-winning manager. This is outcome bias. Results matter more than anything. But only if you are not interested in the future. Could a bad manager expect to have success going forward with the same set of instincts? Not bloody likely. Law quotes Thinking, Fast and Slow for this:

We are prone to blame decision makers for good decisions that worked out badly and to give them too little credit for successful moves that appear obvious only after the fact.

Fifty two Americans were taken hostage in Iran on November 4, 1979, after Iranian students took over the American embassy in Tehran. In April, 1980, President Carter ordered a rescue mission. The attempt failed, and Carter’s re-election prospects were irretrievably damaged as a result. There were plenty of other forces at play, including the GOP indulging in secret negotiations with Iran to encourage them to hang onto the captives until after the November 1980 elections, and the ABC show Nightline dedicating their nightly coverage to the “Hostage Crisis,” making sure to keep the issue at the top of everyone’s consciousness for the entirety of the election season. Whatever one may think of Jimmy Carter as president, it was a daring move to attempt a rescue. The failure was not his. It was in the implementation of Operation Eagle Claw. Yet, Carter took the blame for it, unfairly in my view. Results matter, but they are not all that matters. The unsuccessful resolution of the hostage crisis before the November 1980 elections doomed Carter, even though he made the best decision possible under impossible circumstance. He might have lost anyway, but the failure of the rescue mission made that loss a certainty.

The illusory truth effect.

Why do we cling to truths long after they’ve been disproven or lost their usefulness? Is it really just a matter of hearing something preached as true so frequently that our minds accept them not just as fact, but as the default perspective that must be actively dislodged by the jaws of life? Yes, as it turns out.

In his examples, Law writes about batter protection in a lineup. (A batter will get a juicier selection of pitches to swing at if the batter following him is a more dangerous hitter.) Turns out there is no real statistical evidence to support the notion. Yet, through persistent repetition over time, by people who should know better, belief in lineup protection persists.

Can any of you offer a real-world number for how many times you have heard Donald Trump speak the words “no collusion?” I doubt any of us who do not live in caves really can. And if you are an adherent to right-wing media, Fox, Rush, Sinclair, or the like, you are probably speaking it aloud in your sleep, to the alarm of your bed-partner. Despite a detailed commission report that offers fine detail on just how that collusion was carried out, there are still people who believe that Trump did not collude with Russia in his 2016 presidential campaign. There are probably even people who are not of the cultish right who harbor doubts about it. It is pretty clear that repeating something over and over and over and over and over…continued ad nauseum, has the same effect on reason that the Colorado River had on the landscape of the Grand Canyon.

I could go on, but you get the idea. Law identifies a passel of these, including anchoring, availability, hindsight, optimism, order, outcome, recency, status quo and survivorship biases. He tosses in a handful of fallacies, some aversions, and a soupçon of other irrational tiltings.

I do not really have any gripes with the book, but there was one instance in particular in which I thought Law tilted the wrong way.

When a specific fact or example comes to mind more readily, we tend to overemphasize that fact or example—maybe we ascribe too much importance to it, or perhaps we extrapolate and assume that that example is representative of the whole. This phenomenon is called availability bias, and I think it’s one of the easiest biases to understand but one of the hardest to catch in yourself, because it’s not just natural, but easy. Your brain is just doing what you asked, right? You thought about some question, and your brain went right to the hard drive and pulled out something relevant. Your brain didn’t go to the archives, although, and it probably just gave you one thing when you actually needed the whole set.

I believe Law dismisses a concern that should be obvious. For example, he regards the selection of the last place Cubs’ Andre Dawson for the 1987 MVP as a travesty, given that his numbers were bested by several players in the league. But that presumes that numbers are the only things worth considering in casting those ballots. Dawson, as Law notes, had taken on collusion by MLB ownership in their attempt to protect the notorious reserve clause. He offered the Cubs a contract with the salary left blank. He would play for any amount of money. It forced the Cubs’ owner’s hand, and helped advance the cause of possible free agency. His statistical value as a player may have been well below that of some other players, but his courage, and sheer value to the game was unparalleled. It was for this that he was likely rewarded by MVP voters. In this instance, Law contends that it was Dawson’s being in the news every day in coverage of the free agency issue that won him the award, the availability bias of frequent and recent repetition that moved voting Dawson’s way.

But do not be put off by that. There is a vast amount to love in The Inside Game. It offers a way to explain not only why so much misunderstanding bedevils baseball, but how such misunderstandings permeate all human activity. It is a look not just inside how baseball decisions are made, but how perspectives and decisions are arrived at inside our own heads.

2020 was a lost year for baseball, entirely for the minors, and largely for the top tier. 2021 again offered a 162 game season. Given that hospitalizations for Covid in Spring 2021, despite increasing numbers of people being vaccinated, have been increasing, made that prospect less than certain. The first game of the season for my Mets, for example, did not go off as hoped because at least one Washington Nationals player had come down with Covid, and at least four others were contact-traced into quarantine. You may find yourself with a few baseball-watching hours freed up by such forms of misery. If so, you can sustain your connection to the national pastime by passing some productive time with Keith Law. It will help you prepare for what games are actually being played in MLB, given whatever plague is making the rounds when you get to it, and offer you the bonus of offering insightful information about the wider world, and how we frail humans function. Check this one out. It’s the right call.

Review posted – March 27, 2020

Publication dates
----------April 21, 2020 - hardcover
----------April 6, 2021 - trade paperback

=============================EXTRA STUFF

Links to the author’s personal, Twitter and FB pages

You should know that his personal site is for things unrelated to sports. He had a blog on ESPN, but one must sign in to get the full benefit, and he no longer work there. These days he is a sen ior baseball writer for The Athletic, also a pay site. You can find his podcast for them here.

My review of the author’s prior book
-----2017 - Smart Baseball

Interview
-----Hittin' Season - Episode #376 - with John Stolnis
Thanks to GR friend (although, sadly, a Phillies fan) Regina Wilson for letting us know about this excellent interview

Items of Interest
-----Baseball Prospectus - Going Streaking by Russell Carleton
-----Fangraphs
-----Wiki on Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow
----- Wiki on Richard Thaler’s book Nudge
-----Wiki on Richard Thaler’s book Misbehaving
-----Baseball’s reserve clause
----- Operation Eagle Claw