Reading time has been sparse lately with a move to an new home, but now that we are settled in, time to get back to writing reviews. Easing back into it with this library book that was first released in 2019 and was a decent read. Here is my review of "The Inside Game"
Title/Author:
“The Inside Game: Bad
Calls, Strange Behavior and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves” by Keith Law
Rating: 4 of 5 stars (very good)
Review: Hundreds, if not thousands of
decisions are made every day by every person.
Of course, some have more consequences and importance than others, but
they are still decisions that are made. Many
who enjoy baseball say they do so because it can resemble real life very
often. This book by Keith Law can
actually show the correlation – not because baseball decisions such as the Los
Angeles Angles giving a 10 year contract to an aging Albert Pujols reflects
what most ordinary people will do, but because of how this type of decision was
made.
I used this particular baseball decision in this review for
two reasons. One, Law himself refers to
this one several times throughout the book and twice for different fallacies
that he describes. Most of the book focuses
on bad decisions made in baseball and the biases or fallacies that were used to
come up with that conclusion. Examples
of these discussed in the book is recency bias (familiar to many in situations
outside of baseball as well as with the game), outcome bias (using Bob Brenley
winning the World Series as the manager of the 2001 Arizona Diamondbacks despite
making some poor managerial choices) and base rate neglect (why some high
school pitchers are still drafted in the first round despite the low percentage
of these pitchers who will make the major leagues). Law writes about these and other reasons that
poor decisions could be made in baseball and in other areas.
It was these other areas that made the book a little
underwhelming for me – I certainly didn’t want to pick this up to read about the
falsehood of linking vaccinations with autism, but there was a considerable amount
of text given to this topic. But when
Law stuck with baseball, even when talking about the fictional “Joey Bagodonuts”
to illustrate a point, I did enjoy it and there was enough baseball in the book
to make this a decent read.
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