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

“Law’s take is as entertaining as it is informative. This intelligent and accessible work is a grand slam.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Baseball is a sport of decisions. Some are small and seemingly routine—what pitch to throw, when to pull a pitcher from a game—while others—when to trade the best prospects in baseball for a chance to win now, or when to offer hundreds of millions of dollars to a twenty-eight-year-old superstar—are so big they can determine the future of a franchise. With choices like these, the science of decision-making has long shaped the behavior of players, managers, and entire baseball organizations. While some of their decisions show clear motivations, others leave us with the age-old fan question: What were they thinking?

Blending behavioral science, baseball lore, and data-driven analysis, author Keith Law tackles some of the sport’s most iconic blunders, missteps, and head-scratchers, showing how these bad calls have their roots in all-too-common real-world behavior and feature the kinds of misjudgments we frequently encounter in our everyday lives. Whether it’s the harm of always relying on the status quo to produce the right result or using recent good events to predict the future, bad decisions that plague us in life often find their way to the baseball diamond with disastrous results.

The Inside Game is a lively, entertaining book that challenges some of baseball’s most-accepted dogmas and presents a new way to appreciate the game’s success as well as its failures.

“The Inside Game addresses . . .why life explains baseball. Inside these pages the senior baseball writer for The Athletic website examines the assumptions that animate baseball—both on the field and in the opinionated realms of fandom.” —Wall Street Journal

“In a market saturated with baseball books, Law’s stands out by exploring key decisions in the game. Highly recommended for serious followers of baseball and readers interested in how statistical analysis and trends can be applied in any sport.” —Library Journal