When managers trust their gut, they’re sensing the data, too

Joe Maddon, then the Chicago Cubs manager, during a game at Wrigley Field in Chicago, Sept. 25, 2016. (Sally Ryan/The New York Times)

By RUSTIN DODD / THE ATHLETIC

When Joe Maddon managed in MLB, he put his favorite saying on a hoodie: “Feel is the gift of experience.”

Maddon, 71, managed 2,666 games in his career, including 67 in the postseason, which meant he had a lot of experience. One of those moments happened to come in Game 7 of the 2016 World Series, when his Chicago Cubs were in Cleveland, trying to end a 108-year title drought.

With the score tied 6-6 in the top of the ninth inning, the Cubs’ Javy Báez stepped to the plate to face Cleveland reliever Bryan Shaw. There was one out and a runner on third base. Báez, a notorious free swinger, had a history of waving at low breaking balls on 3-2 counts. Maddon had looked at the data. With the count full, Maddon had a flash of clarity: If Shaw threw a low slider, Báez would chase it and strike out.

Maddon thought about Don Zimmer, who had worked alongside him years earlier with the Tampa Bay Rays. Zimmer prided himself on his feel and would tell Maddon: If it comes into your mind, you do it.

So he did the unthinkable: He asked Báez to bunt with two strikes, hoping to score the runner from third with a safety squeeze.

For Maddon, it was pure intuition — a blend of data, experience and expertise coming together in an instant. Then the pitch came, Báez bunted foul, and he was out on strikes.

“Intuition failed me,” Maddon said. “But I really thought it was the right thing to do in the moment.”

Was Maddon’s gut call a misguided mistake, or was it a case of intuitive decision-making that didn’t work?

It’s a debate that reappears each October as baseball managers walk the playoff tightrope. Every game offers dozens of tactical choices — lineups, bullpen use and the occasional safety squeeze. The sample sizes are tiny, but the outcomes are not.

In the era of big data, decisions are often shaped by front-office analysts and statistical models that map out plans and matchups before each game. Thus, the age of sabermetrics presents an easy debate: data versus gut.

But for researchers studying decision-making, the role of data is not at odds with intuitive decision-making. In fact, it’s at its core.

“Intuition and data are often framed as if they’re opposites,” Jennifer Lerner, a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, said in an email. “But research shows that intuition is often the distillation of years of experience with data and patterns.”

The concept of intuition is often misunderstood, seen as biased by impulse, emotion or heuristics — mental shortcuts that allow for quick decisions — or as a mystical quality of discernment that only some possess.

Instead, it is often a vital part of the decision-making process. Lerner has taught fire chiefs, who must rely on intuitive feel when managing a strategy in an unpredictable situation. The “gut feel” they use is not guesswork; it is grounded in decades of experience, enabling them to recognize a situation and respond more quickly.

“By contrast, they view it as dangerous when a rookie firefighter trusts their gut,” she said. “Without sufficient experience, what feels like intuition is often just bias or noise.”

There are no perfect decisions in October. Baseball is too unpredictable. Yet the challenges managers face can reveal something about how we make decisions.

Before Game 1 of the 2015 World Series, Kansas City Royals manager Ned Yost penciled in shortstop Alcides Escobar at the top of the batting order. On paper, it was an odd move. Escobar was an undisciplined hitter with an on-base percentage under .300 and an on-base plus slugging percentage in the low .600s. Not exactly leadoff hitter material.

Yost knew the numbers. During the regular season, he had even tried to move Escobar down in the lineup. But over two years, including the 2014 postseason, the Royals won 63% of their games when Escobar led off and around 50% when he didn’t.

The way Yost saw it, he was doing what made sense.

“I didn’t feel like it worked,” Yost said. “It worked. I felt like that was right, and I didn’t care what anybody said.”

In Game 1 against the New York Mets, Escobar led off with an inside-the-park homer.

The case of Escobar illustrates a fascinating contradiction about intuition touted by Laura Huang, a professor of management and organizational dynamics at Northeastern University. When decision-makers or business leaders try to explain their gut feeling, they often end up talking themselves out of a decision.

For instance, if Yost had tried to validate the Escobar move using rational logic, he might have been more likely to default to the numbers or make a safer choice.

As Huang likes to say: Intuition “whispers” while data “screams.”

“We’re not very good at listening to what whispers,” she said.

Huang, an engineer, began studying intuition while earning her doctorate at the University of California, Irvine. She began with a dissertation on “the impact of gut feel on entrepreneurial investment decisions.” What she found intrigued her; she followed it with a 2025 book, “You Already Know: The Science of Mastering Your Intuition.”

Huang argues that people should disentangle the ideas of “intuition” and “gut feel.” In her view, intuition is better viewed as the process — the subconscious combination of data and experience. The resulting judgment, Huang says, is “gut feel.”

In the MLB postseason, most managers try to tame the unpredictability through preparation. The process includes data analysis and modeling, seeking out the best matchups using advanced metrics. The preparation, of course, requires its own form of intuition. Someone has to decide which metrics will be most useful.

“There’s ideas,” Cubs manager Craig Counsell said this month. “Not firm plans.”

When Yost managed the Royals in the playoffs in 2014 and 2015, he sat down with his coaching staff and mapped out games in advance, a process designed to eliminate on-the-fly decisions. He preferred rigid bullpen roles, no platoons and few pinch hitters.

“When a situation would pop up,” Yost said, “we already knew what we wanted to do.”

For other managers, a postseason game requires thinking like a master at chess. When Terry Collins managed the New York Mets in the 2015 postseason, he recalled a line he heard from Jim Leyland: “Managing is about being two innings ahead of the other guy.”

In Game 4 of the National League Championship Series that year, Collins called on 42-year-old starting pitcher Bartolo Colón to face Kris Bryant, the NL rookie of the year, with two runners on base in the bottom of the fifth. It was an unlikely spot for Colón, but Collins had a feeling.

“It’s just those instincts about, ‘Hey, look, I think Bartolo’s the guy for this instance,’” he said. “I knew he was probably going to hit it, but I knew he’s also going to hit it on the ground.”

Colón ended up striking out Bryant.

There are plenty of instances of managers seemingly defaulting to data. In the 2020 World Series, Rays manager Kevin Cash pulled Blake Snell after 5 1/3 scoreless innings. Snell had thrown only 73 pitches and struck out nine, but the top of the Los Angeles Dodgers lineup was ready to face Snell for a third time.

“I felt Blake had done his job and then some,” Cash said then.

In this postseason, New York Yankees manager Aaron Boone faced similar scrutiny when he pulled Max Fried after 6 1/3 scoreless innings and 102 pitches in a loss to the Boston Red Sox. The criticism was built on previous postseasons, when Boone was judged for being too preprogrammed.

In Game 2 of the 2019 American League Championship Series against Houston, Boone aggressively pulled starter James Paxton after 2 1/3 innings, unleashing a parade of relievers. As Chad Green was cruising through six batters — recording 21 strikes in 26 batters — the Yankees had mapped out the next pitching change.

Before Green even struck out Kyle Tucker to begin the fifth, Adam Ottavino had been told he would face the next hitter, Houston’s George Springer. The Yankees followed the script, and Springer hit a game-tying solo homer in a game the Astros won in 11 innings.

“The game is not a big picture,” Maddon said. “The game is a small sample size. That’s where you have to rely on the experience of your group.

“It could be boldness. It could be being able to see things in advance. It could be reading faces. It could be sensing the mood. It could be the pitching coach saying the starter doesn’t have his stuff, so be on alert. All that is feel, and that is the gift of having done it before, often.”