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.

©2020 Keith Law (P)2020 HarperCollins Publishers

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

Ruined by narrator

Excellent book by the finest baseball analyst working today ruined by a somnolent narrator. Infuriating.

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

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.

Solid, if overstated, takes on baseball’s sacred truths

The book itself is solid, though often I find myself pointing out holes in Law’s arguments using Law’s own arguments. He has a tendency to evangelize, often overswinging in order to make his points. Overall, Inside Game gives you solid if unspectacular WAR (Words Above Replacement).

The narrator, on the other hand, is Rockies-signing-Ian Desmond level bad. He was so flat that at first I wondered if it was actually AI. Then he started doing accents.

There were bad attempts at mimicking people that speak with accents. There were weird attempts to do accents for people that do NOT speak with accents. There were no accents from any specifically distinguishable region, dialect, or individual.

Somehow this open mic-level reader managed to both make the case both for and against the need for human narrators. Uncanny.

Not great.

The author's personality and sense of humor are a plus. The reading is inconsistent. I think this book is just the right level if you are a baseball fan who doesn't pay too much attention and are interested in the economic principles. If you have a lot of knowledge about either, the level will be too low.

Amazing book.

If you are looking for a great baseball book, this is it. If you are looking for a great statistics book, this is it. If you a looking for both, you can beat it. But it is also a great book on human nature and life choices too. Great read/listen for sure.

Great content, distractingly poor narration

I hate leaving negative reviews, but I’m so bothered by this. I don’t know who decided that this was acceptable quality audio for an audiobook, but it’s not. I should have listened to the sample first. The audio is so overprocessed that it’s hard to understand in many cases, and is not helped by the narrator’s diction. Consonants are damped and unclear. It’s unfortunately very distracting and takes away from the content, which is great. I’ll probably stick to the Kindle version.