The Inside Game

Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves

By: Keith Law

Narrated by: Rhett Samuel Price

In this groundbreaking book, Keith Law, the ESPN baseball writer and author of the acclaimed Smart Baseball, offers an era-spanning dissection of some of the best and worst decisions in modern baseball, explaining what motivated them, what can be learned from them, and how their legacy has shaped the game.

For years, 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 smart, incisive, and eye-opening book, Keith Law applies Kahneman’s ideas about decision making to the game itself.

Baseball is a sport of decisions. Some are so small and routine they become the building blocks of the game itself—what pitch to throw or when to swing away. Others are so huge they dictate the future of franchises—when to make a strategic trade for a chance to win now, or when to offer a millions and a multi-year contract for a twenty-eight-year-old star. These decisions have long shaped the behavior of players, managers, and entire franchises. But as those choices have become more complex and data-driven, knowing what’s behind them has become key to understanding the sport. This fascinating, revelatory work explores as never before the essential question: What were they thinking?

Combining behavioral science and interviews with executives, managers, and players, Keith Law analyzes baseball’s biggest decision making successes and failures, looking at how gambles and calculated risks of all sizes and scales have shaped the sport, and how the game’s ongoing data revolution is rewriting decades of accepted decision making. In the process, he explores questions that have long been debated, from whether throwing harder really increases a player’s risk of serious injury to whether teams actually ""overvalue"" trade prospects.

Bringing his analytical and combative style to some of baseball’s longest running debates, Law deepens our knowledge of the sport in this entertaining work that is both fun and deeply informative.

Best Baseball book ever

Combines decision theory with advanced stats in an easy to understand and entertaining baseball book.

Interesting Read

This book combined baseball and stats/economics. I was in heaven. My only complaint was that it was a little too long. By the last chapter or 2 I felt as if he was beating a dead horse. I do recommend the book to other geeks who love baseball.

Get the hardcopy

The narration is truly terrible and made it nearly impossible to enjoy the subject matter.

Narrator wasn't a good fit

Great text, narrator was a bad choice. He used many accents for people who are US born and don't speak with accents. Many accents were very strange. That fact that he didn't ask Keith Law how to pronounce Joey Bag-o-donuts is strange. I know it's a thing you only recognize if you're from the tri state area, but the narrator sounds like he's reading from a science textbook when he says that phrase.

Great Book, Quirky Performance

So the book itself was great but I found the reading off it to be slightly strange I thought the voice was pleasant overall and not enough to prevent me from recommending this book. But some of the "impersonations" were distracting, and there were a couple mispronunciations that caught me off guard.

still a good book, definitely worth a listen