The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves by Keith Law is a ground-breaking book by one of baseball’s smartest writers.
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 brilliant, sharp, and enlightening book, Keith Law applies Kahneman’s thoughts regarding dynamic to the game itself.
Baseball is a game of choices. Some are so little and routine they become the structure squares of the game itself—what pitch to discard or when to swing. Others are so gigantic they direct the eventual fate of establishments—whenever to make an essential exchange for an opportunity to win now, or when to offer a millions and a multi-year contract for a 28 year-old star. These choices have since quite a while ago molded the conduct of players, administrators, and whole establishments. In any case, as those decisions have gotten more unpredictable and information driven, realizing what’s behind them has gotten key to understanding the game. This entrancing, life-changing work investigates as at no other time the basic inquiry: What were they thinking?
Joining social science and meetings with chiefs, supervisors, and players, Keith Law dissects baseball’s greatest dynamic triumphs and disappointments, seeing how bets and determined dangers, everything being equal, and scales have formed the game, and how the game’s progressing information transformation is reworking many years of acknowledged dynamic. Simultaneously, he investigates questions that have for some time been discussed, from whether tossing more diligently truly expands a player’s danger of genuine injury to whether groups really “exaggerate” exchange possibilities.
Carrying his logical and confrontational style to a portion of baseball’s longest running discussions, Law extends our insight into the game in this engaging work that is both fun and profoundly useful.
Keith Law Books
| Smart Baseball: The Story Behind the Old Stats That Are Ruining the Game, the New Ones That Are Running It, and the Right Way to Think About Baseball | (2017) | Shop at Amazon |
| The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves | (2020) | Shop at Amazon |
About Thinking Fast and Slow
Kahneman work takes us on a historic visit through the brain and clarifies the two frameworks that drive the manner in which we think.
Framework 1 is quick, natural, and passionate; System 2 is more slow, more deliberative, and more consistent.
Kahneman uncovered the exceptional capacities—and furthermore the flaws and inclinations—of quick reasoning, and uncovers the inescapable impact of instinctive impacts on our contemplations and conduct. Kahneman reveals where we can and cannot trust our intuitions and how we can tap into the benefits of slow thinking.
About the Author
Keith Law is a Senior Baseball Writer at The Athletic, which he joined in January of 2020 after spending thirteen and a half years at ESPN.
Prior to joining ESPN.com in June of 2006, he went through a little more than four years as the Special Assistant to the GM of the Toronto Blue Jays, and preceding that had composed for Baseball Prospectus. Law moved on from Harvard College in 1994, and got a MBA from the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon in 1999, procuring Beta Gamma Sigma praises at Carnegie Mellon.
Law presently lives in Delaware, having fled New England after one winter too much, putting in a couple of years in the middle of living in Chandler, Arizona.
Other Books You May Like
The MVP Machine by Ben Lindbergh and Travis Sawchik: Two of baseball’s best sabermetric analysts take on how development is the next frontier in baseball analysis. These two look at how players and teams are using advanced technology to build better ballplayers.
Smart Baseball: The Story Behind the Old Stats That Are Ruining the Game, the New Ones That Are Running It, and the Right Way to Think About Baseball by Keith Law: Keith Law investigates the numbers round of baseball, demonstrating why probably the most trusted details are shockingly off-base, clarifying what numbers really work, and investigating what the ascent of Big Data implies for the fate of the game.
Future Value: The Battle for Baseball’s Soul and How Teams Will Find the Next Superstar by Eric Longenhagen and Kiley McDaniel: Law wrote the foreword for this one so you know that it is right up the same alley as this book. Two of baseball’s scouting experts take on the way teams scout players in the modern age.
The Inside Game Podcasts
Effectively Wild: Effectively Wild is a sabermetrics-based baseball webcast co-hosted by Ben Lindbergh of The Ringer and Meg Rowley of FanGraphs.
The digital recording debuted on July 28, 2012, and ran five days every week throughout the prior year progressing to its present three-times-each week release schedule in summer 2016.
Sports Info Solutions Baseball Podcast – Keith Law on Biases, Decision Making, and The Inside Game: Senior research analyst Mark Simon is joined by Keith Law to discuss his new book “The Inside Game.” Mark and Keith talk about the motivation for writing this book and what he would want someone to get out of it and much more.