Table of Contents
Introduction 1
1 The Case for Robot Umpires: How Anchoring Bias Influences Strike Zones and Everything Else 9
2 Never Judge an Iceberg by Its Tip: How Availability Bias Shapes the Way Commentators Talk About Sports 25
3 Winning Despite Your Best Efforts: Outcome Bias and Why Winning Can Be the Most Misleading Stat of All 42
4 But This Is How We've Always Done It: Why Groupthink Alone Doesn't Make Baseball Myths True 61
5 For Every Clayton Kershaw There Are Ten Kasey Kikers: Base-Rate Neglect and Why it's Still a Bad idea to Draft High School Pitchers in the First Round 79
6 History Is Written by the Survivors: Pitch Count Bingo and Why "Nolan Ryan" Isn't a Counterargument 95
7 Cold Water on Hot Streaks: Recency Bias and the Danger of Using Just the Latest Data to Predict the Future 111
8 Grady Little's Long Eighth-Inning Walk: Status Quo and Why Doing Nothing Is the Easiest Bad Call 134
9 Tomorrow, This Will Be Someone Else's Problem: How Moral Hazard Distorts Decision-Making for GMs, College Coaches, and More 152
10 Pete Rose's Lionel Hutz Defense: The Principal-Agent Problem and How Misaligned Incentives Shape Bad Baseball Decisions 169
11 Throwing Good Money After Bad: The Sunk Cost Fallacy and Why Teams Don't "Eat" Money 186
12 The Happy Fun Ball: Optimism Bias and the Problem of Seeing What We Want to See 203
13 Good Decisions™: Baseball Executives Talk About Their Thought Processes Behind Smart Trades and Signings 212
Conclusion 234
Resources 236
Acknowledgments 239
Notes 241
Index 255