With the third pick in the 2021 MLB draft, the Detroit Tigers selected Oklahoma City high school fireballer Jackson Jobe. In previous years, there would have been nothing particularly noteworthy about the selection of a prized prep arm.
After all, high school pitchers are one of the four classes of players available in the draft – along with college pitchers, high school hitters and college hitters – and were selected with about 20% of all first-round picks between 1985 and 2012.
But the Tigers’ selection of Jobe sparked a debate, at least here in Detroit and in baseball circles, as many teams have started to move away from high school pitchers in the first round.
In Keith Law’s book “The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves,” he explains the concept of base-rate neglect, one of many cognitive biases that plagues baseball front offices – and people in general.
The example Law uses to illustrate base-rate neglect is MLB general managers’ lust for high school pitchers despite the available evidence that suggests this class of players should be avoided.
In his analysis, which looked at players taken in the first round between 1985 and 2012, Law found that high school pitchers reached the 10 WAR threshold – enough to be deemed a productive major leaguer – only 16% of the time, lagging well behind college pitchers (25%), high school hitters (26%) and college hitters (36%).
When zeroing in on just the top 10 – the elite of the elite – the results are equally, if not even more, damning. A college pitcher is still about 50% more likely to reach the 10 WAR threshold than a high school pitcher, while a college hitter is more than two-and-a-half times likely to reach that benchmark as a high school pitcher.
In other words, having all of that data at your fingertips and still going the high school pitcher route makes you a riverboat gambler. Given that the draft is the primary means of adding high-upside, cost-controlled talent to your pipeline, this sort of reckless behavior can prove costly – and can be the difference between a GM receiving a contract extension or getting fired.
In addition to base-rate neglect, Law delves into several cognitive biases – such as anchoring, availability and outcome biases – plus topics such as groupthink, moral hazards and the sunk-cost fallacy.
He effortlessly explores behavioral science, data-driven analysis and conventional baseball wisdom by weaving in examples from memorable baseball moments, miscues and misguided decisions, and shows how these biases and their associated pitfalls can materialize in our everyday lives.
Law is a senior baseball writer for The Athletic and is widely respected for his analysis of the draft and prospects. “Inside Game” is his second book, following in the footsteps of “Smart Baseball: The Story Behind the Old Stats That Are Ruining the Game, the New Ones That Are Running It, and the Right Way to Think About Baseball,” which was released in 2017.
Previously, Law was a senior baseball writer for ESPN and spent several years working in the Toronto Blue Jays front office. He is also a well-known Twitter presence and maintains a popular blog, The Dish, where he writes about food, music, movies, books and board games. In fact, his blog is one of the many influences for this blog.
And while he spends the first dozen chapters analyzing cognitive biases and those victimized by their own flawed decision-making, Law wraps up the book with a refreshing look at some of the better decisions made in recent baseball history, with a particular emphasis on decisions that appeared suspect or even flat-out wrong at the time.
The example that hit home for me was the story of the Boston Red Sox’s decision to draft Arizona State then-shortstop Dustin Pedroia in the second round of the 2004 MLB draft.
The Red Sox took Pedroia in spite of his stature – Baseball-Reference.com generously lists him at 5-foot-9 – and concerns around his grades in the five scouting tools: hitting, hitting for power, running, fielding and throwing.
Law says Pedroia was regarded as being obviously below average in the last four, with his lack of foot speed regarded as a fatal flaw for a prospective big league middle infielder.
However, as the story goes, the Red Sox were willing to overlook Pedroia’s perceived deficiencies in those four tools because of how strongly they believed in the first tool, his ability to hit. His hand-eye coordination was so elite that in his sophomore year at ASU, he generated three times as many extra-base hits as strikeouts. Overall, he hit .386 in three seasons at Arizona State, producing 91 extra-base hits and 108 walks against a measly 47 strikeouts.
The reason this example resonated with me is because I arrived at ASU for business school in 2006 and was a marketing graduate assistant with the Sun Devils baseball team in 2007, not long after Pedroia had been drafted away from ASU but before he had arrived in the majors and become a household name in baseball.
While at ASU, I heard so many Pedroia stories that he became a sort of baseball Bill Brasky in my mind. Brasky, of course, is an unseen character who was the subject of a series of sketches on Saturday Night Live, in which his Scotch-drinking, cigar-smoking friends loudly reminisce about his superhuman feats.
In “The Inside Game,” former Red Sox scouting director Jason McLeod recounts a Pedroia story that unfolded during a Red Sox trip to play the Rangers, while McLeod was traveling with the team. The public address announcer, going through his normal pregame routine, says to the crowd, “Welcome to the Ballpark in Arlington, home of your Texas Rangers!” Pedroia, pacing in the dugout going through his own pregame routine, suddenly moves to the top step and bellows, “Home of the team that’s gonna get their fuckin’ asses kicked tonight!”
The story was used to illustrate Pedroia’s almost irrational competitiveness and confidence in himself, which combined with his exceptional hitting tool, led to a major league career that may eventually result in enshrinement in Cooperstown.
Pedroia’s distinguished MLB career – two-time World Series winner, AL MVP, AL rookie of the year, four-time All-Star, and four-time Gold Glove winner – long ago validated the superlatives people with which people at ASU had described him. However, there was nonetheless something satisfying about reading Pedroia tales that were equally outrageous to the ones I remember hearing – and the decision-making process that led to his surprise selection.
But back to high school pitchers and the Tigers’ controversial selection of Jobe for a second.
Perhaps in the future, we will have definitive knowledge of a specific trait or traits that Jobe possessed that warranted his being part of a different class or sub-class of players – for instance, lightly used high school pitchers with exceptional spin rate, as the Tigers have publicly argued – and thus less likely to suffer the same fate as so many other blue-chip pitchers.
In the meantime, many will argue the Tigers are simply guilty of base-rate neglect, choosing to ignore decades worth of data for the specific case in front of them.
It makes for a fascinating debate and is just one of the many ways this excellent book will challenge how you think about baseball and maybe even your own everyday decision-making processes.
