There is an oft-told story in baseball about a conversation between Mickey Mantle and Ted Williams. The two future Hall of Famers met one day during batting practice before a Yankees-Red Sox game. Williams asked Mantle a series of probing questions about the mechanics of his swing and his approach at the plate. Williams imparted some wisdom of his own, which Mantle tried to adopt. The result: a zero-for-25 stretch at the plate.
It shows two extreme approaches to baseball. Williams was known as the game’s foremost student of the finer details of how bat and ball came together, but Mantle had no use for that level of study. “Hell,” he said years later of his approach, “I just used to go up there swinging.” There is some modesty in that statement, but it still gets at an important point: Not everyone thinks about his or her actions with the same depth of introspection.
In hitting, either approach can work, as the remarkable careers of both sluggers show. But for much of baseball and for much of life, generally, unconscious biases and misconceptions can have more harmful effects. In The Inside Game, Keith Law explains some of the errors in thinking that hold us back, illustrating lessons from behavioral economics with examples from baseball’s past and present.
A senior baseball writer for The Athletic, Law devotes a chapter to each of a selection of logical errors we make in daily life. Some he explains by discussing managers’ moves on the field, such as how a good outcome often causes us not to examine the bad process that created it. This is “outcome bias,” and the example Law cites is the Arizona Diamondbacks winning the 2001 World Series despite a series of demonstrably bad decisions by their manager, Bob Brenly. Had a few balls gone a different way, Brenly would have been pilloried, but it all worked out, so he was cheered.
Other examples involve front-office decisions. Law explains the problem of “base-rate neglect” through the example of the amateur draft. There is a consistently lower success rate in drafting high school pitchers than college pitchers (or batters of any age). Yet teams still fall for high school pitchers and justify the decision to draft them by citing successful examples of pitchers drafted out of high school, such as the Dodgers’ Clayton Kershaw, who has won the Cy Young Award three times. Teams are starting to wise up to this one but still take far too many high school arms high in the draft, in Law’s estimation.
Front offices also fall prey to one of the most stubborn logical errors: the sunk cost fallacy. The problem is familiar: Once we have invested considerable resources in doing something, we will continue to do it even when the returns are negative.
Law explains this by highlighting a scenario familiar to many baseball fans: a team starting a highly compensated veteran instead of a less-heralded novice, even though the older man’s production has declined so much that the young player would almost certainly put up better numbers. He focuses on two recent cases: the Los Angeles Angels continuing to play Albert Pujols and the Detroit Tigers doing the same with Miguel Cabrera. Law takes no issue with either man’s past performance, nor could anyone. Both are sure Hall of Famers. But he questions whether their teams should continue to field suboptimal lineups just because they already cut the check.
It is a fair question, one no doubt asked by plenty of baseball fans in Los Angeles and Detroit. Pujols was among the best in baseball after the 2011 season, when he signed a 10-year, $210 million deal with the Angels. Going by wins above replacement, or WAR, which measures a player’s performance against a hypothetical average player, each season he played with Los Angeles was worse than any he had before with St. Louis. In 2017, he had the lowest WAR (-1.9) and the highest annual salary ($26 million) on the team.
Cabrera’s story is the same. His 2014 contract extension was for eight years and $248 million. His 2015 and 2016 seasons were good, but, in the three years since, he was hardly a factor in the Tigers’ offense. Yet both men continued to play. In Cabrera’s case, it was almost understandable: Detroit’s 2019 team finished a league-worst 47-114 and had few players who would have been much better than Cabrera. Pujols’s 2017 Angels were not league-leaders, either, but there were several bench players, including Cameron Maybin and Eric Young, Jr., who would have made a bigger impact.
If you are appalled at the idea of benching Pujols for Maybin or Young, you understand the Angels’ quandary. Pujols will join the immortals in Cooperstown one day, while memories of most of his teammates will fade. But in 2017 he was worse than his teammates, and the Angels gave away games by refusing to recognize it.
It’s as hard for the Angels and Tigers front offices to understand the problem as it is for the average person: Once you’ve spent the money, it’s gone. So, if the experience is bad, why keep repeating it? Part of the concern, Law notes, is reputation: No one wants to look like an idiot, least of all a team’s manager or general manager. As with many bad decisions, this one comes with a large dollop of pride.
There are other factors, though, that stats can miss. Benching any player has an effect on him, but benching a future Hall of Famer will shock a team and its fans. It is controversial, even inflammatory. Beyond what it says about the player himself, it also speaks to the team’s sense of loyalty. Losing a starting job is no small matter, and a team that drops a player too quickly will be seen as a bad place for future free agents, mindful of their own playing time and legacy, to sign. People make the sunk cost mistake because of their reputation, but reputation is real. Losing money and games is worse than just losing money, but doing so can preserve a sense of goodwill around the team that money cannot buy.
Law is not wrong. The sunk cost fallacy is a very real economic mistake. But it does show something that is increasingly on people’s minds lately: that there is a limit to how much economics should govern our lives. It gives us a lot of answers about how to allocate goods and services most efficiently, and applied economics has bettered people’s lives through the spread of capitalism. Whether in managing a baseball team or your own life, there are fallacies and errors to be avoided. Law’s book is a good guide to that, told in a readable, engaging manner and using examples any baseball fan can understand. But as in every revolution in thinking, we should be wary of overcorrecting to fix the errors he shows us.
Kyle Sammin is a lawyer and writer from Pennsylvania and the co-host of the Conservative Minds podcast. Follow him @KyleSammin.
