Sunday, December 11, 2022

Review of "The Inside Game"

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 Ourselvesby 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.

Link: Amazon.com: The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves eBook : Law, Keith: Kindle Store


No comments:

Post a Comment