The Shift: The Next Evolution in Baseball Thinking

by Russell A. Carleton

The most dangerous thing in the world is the correct answer to the wrong question, because it often stops further examination. A person can honestly say, “But I’ve got the right answer.”

Our second rule of probabilistic thinking is that a small effect, repeated over and over again, can be as important as a large change that happens once.

The most you can do in baseball (and life) is to understand what things make it more likely that the outcome will end up in your favor, but then live with the reality that “more likely” is not a guarantee of anything. In baseball, we have to live with the fourth rule of probabilistic thinking. Sometimes you do everything right and it doesn’t work.

Sometimes people make bad decisions because they don’t have a word that allows them to conceptualize the problem in the correct way. If there was a word that meant “the fact that his team isn’t losing” we could say things like “The Braves have sent him out there to protect the groffle.” Alas, we lack the word. The words that we do have tell the same story of loss aversion.

“If the opposite of your core strategy choices looks stupid, then every competitor is going to have more or less the exact same strategy as you.”