The psychology trick that saved baseball

Baseball used The Scarcity Loop to come back from the dead.

These three MLB rule changes changes leverage the powerful psychology of slot machines.

Post summary

• Professional baseball was dying. Attendance and viewership were tanking, especially among young people who could keep the game alive.

• Then, in 2023, the MLB implemented massive rule changes that leveraged tactics perfected in casinos in the 1980s, which led to a surge in slot machine gambling.

• The result: Baseball is back. Viewership is booming, especially among young people.

• We’ll break down how the MLB stole from Vegas’s playbook to make the game great again.

• We’ll also explain what this tells us about human attention and how we spend our brief and precious time on earth.

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Baseball was facing an existential threat. In the 2010s and early 2020s, ratings were plummeting, and young people—the next generation to keep the game alive—stopped watching.

The reason for baseball’s decline was simple: Boredom.

Games dragged on for more than three hours. And it was a dull three hours at that.

Pitchers took way too long to throw. Few batters got on base or stole a base. For any excitement, fans had to wait around for a rare home run.

Common sense and a century of psychological research show that we quickly stop paying attention to things that give us nothing. Psychologists call this stopping of unrewarding behaviors “extinction,” and it’s apparent in every animal we’ve studied.

When it came to causing the extinction of attention, baseball was turning into the comet that killed the dinosaurs.

And so it was, leading into the 2023 season, the MLB made sweeping rule changes to save our nation’s pastime. Whether they knew it or not, they stole directly from a playbook developed in casinos in the 1980s.

In my book Scarcity Brain, I visited casino laboratories in Las Vegas and learned about The Scarcity Loop. It’s the most powerful habit loop for grabbing our attention, holding it, and driving behavior.

The Scarcity Loop was perfected in slot machines in Las Vegas in the ‘80s. Read more about the loop and it’s three parts here.

Before then, slots made little money, and few people played them. But after the introduction of The Scarcity Loop, slot machines surged and began raking in 85 percent of casino revenue. We now spend more on slot machines than we do on books, movies, and music combined.

Once baseball inserted The Scarcity Loop into games:

• Viewership increased by double digits—anywhere from 10 to 27 percent and growing.

  • The figure among people 18 to 36 jumped 69 percent. That’s the most important demographic for the survival of baseball.

• Attendance is the highest it’s been since the mid-2010s.

Sports commentator Bill Simmons recently called baseball’s resurgence “one of the most important things anyone did this century. Baseball, to me, is pretty entertaining again. I can't believe they fixed it.”

Baseball is back. Here’s how the league leveraged The Scarcity Loop to make it happen.

The big problem: Boredom

If you haven’t watched baseball since the Obama administration, I don’t blame you. That shit was boring.

Boredom primarily comes from predictability. Decades of research show that our attention drifts when we know what’s going to happen.

Several factors made baseball predictable and dull:

The rise of Moneyball

In the early 2000s, teams began treating baseball as an equation—using statistics and mathematical probabilities to score and prevent runs.

For example, teams would analyze each hitter’s historic batting data and position their fielders exactly where the ball was most likely to land.

The result: Most batters got thrown out. Action on the field plummeted.

• Slot machine parallel: Before the 1980s, slot machines were predictable. Their analog reels could only offer a limited combination of wins. Only five percent of games won. Hence, no one played slots.

The home run obsession

Because mathematical fielding made getting on base harder, batters stopped trying to amass singles and doubles.

Instead, they swung for the fences. Smashing the ball over the wall was the only way to get around optimized defenses.

• They’d wait for the perfect pitch, leading to more strikes and balls.

• They changed their swings to have more of an uppercut, which also increased the likelihood of striking out.

Home runs are exciting, but they don’t happen all that often. Most at-bats were either strikeouts, walks, or outs.

Fans would wait … and wait … and wait for a player to smash a home run. In the meantime, not much happened.

• Slot machine parallel: If we think of a home run like a slot machine win, early slots rarely won. Recall that they paid out only 5 percent of plays. Like fans watching a game, gamblers would wait and wait for something interesting to happen. Nothing would, so they’d quit playing fast.

Slow pitching

With hitters approaching every at-bat like a home run derby, pitchers responded by taking their sweet time between pitches to get things perfect—oftentimes more than 30 seconds.

They’d also throw frequent “pick-offs,” which is when the pitcher throws the ball to a base to try to get an on-base runner out. This rarely worked, but pitchers would throw endless pick-offs. It only added dead time without any action. Here’s an excessive example from the 1980s:

Particularly in close games in the final few innings, the game would drag on because the pitcher was seemingly intent on doing anything other than throwing a pitch.

Toward the end of close games, “time stopped,” as Simmons put it.

• Slot machine parallel: Old slot machines were relatively slow to play. You’d have to pull a big, awkward handle on the side of the machine and wait as the reels spun and went clunk, clunk, clunk. The average game took more than 10 seconds.

Fewer steals

Steals are the most exciting event of a game that isn’t a home run.

But steals only make sense if you assume the next batter will hit the ball in the field, because it gets you closer to home plate.

With batters swinging for the fences, the risk of getting thrown out stealing a base became too high. If the batter hits a home run, you’re going to score anyway. So why risk it?

Teams attempted far fewer steals, taking away even more action.

• Slot machine parallel: This is similar to our examples above. Slot machines before the 1980s gave gamblers very little action. You’d play and play, and get nothing and nothing.

Competition from faster, action-packed media

The rules of baseball hadn’t changed all that much since the early 1900s. Back then, life was slower: We read newspapers and listened to games on a new invention called radio.

But now, a sport where little happened was competing with a world of media where something was always happening.

Think TikTok and Instagram Reels, manic YouTube videos, or reality TV shows with quick cutaways of people screaming at each other.

• Slot machine parallel: Before 1980, far more gamblers played table games like blackjack, craps, and roulette. That’s because those games were more action-packed. The odds you’d win on one of those games were between 40 and 49 percent. So why play slots, where something good only happens 5 percent of the time?

Baseball’s solution: The Scarcity Loop

In the 1980s, a gambling savant in Las Vegas named SI Redd began tweaking his machines.

Redd understood the psychology of extinction. He digitized slot machines and perfected The Scarcity Loop—adding more action and faster playing speed—to turn slots into attention vacuums. Slots boomed, and casinos got rich.

Here’s how the league implemented rules in 2023 that leveraged The Scarcity Loop.

No more Moneyball fielding shifts

The MLB stopped letting players shift their fielders around batters. This increased the likelihood that a player would get on base.

The result: Batting became unpredictable again—more at-bats led to more excitement of a player getting on base, rather than an out or walk.

• Slot machine parallel: Vegas began programming machines to have something exciting happen more often. With Redd’s innovations, 30 to 45 percent of slot games would “win.” His secret was programming the machines to give out smaller wins far more often. Many of these “wins” were actually less than the bet (e.g., you “win” 50 cents on a $1 bet). This might seem weird, but research shows that our brain registers these “losses disguised as wins” in the same way as true wins, leading people to gamble 33 percent longer.

Add a pitch clock

A century of behavioral science tells us that faster events hold attention more than slower ones.

The MLB put pitchers on the clock. Pitchers now have 15 seconds to throw a pitch with empty bases and 18 seconds with runners on base. The MLB also limited the number of pickoffs a pitcher can throw, eliminating a lot of dead time.

The average game went from 3 hours 11 minutes in 2021 to 2 hours 36 minutes in 2024.

Simmons said, “The pitch clock is the greatest thing they've ever done.”

• Slot machine parallel: Slot designers removed the cumbersome handles on the machines and replaced them with spin buttons, which halved the time between games. The average slot gamer went from playing 400 games an hour to 900.

Make steals great again

The MLB expanded the bases from 15 square inches to 18. That made it easier to steal a base.

Limiting the number of pickoffs also incentivized stealing. Once a pitcher is out of pickoffs, a base runner can be far more aggressive.

The numbers don’t lie: In 2024, there were 3,617 total stolen bases, the highest since 1915.

This added far more action to the game.

• Slot machine parallel: This is similar to the point above: By programming exciting events to happen 6 to 9 times more often, slot machines became far more fun to play.

The bigger picture

Our ingrained attraction to The Scarcity Loop developed millions of years ago to help us survive.

We evolved as hunters and gatherers, where finding food was a gamble: We didn’t know where the food was or when we’d find it, so the random action embedded in the act had to grab us and compel us to act—or else we’d die.

Today, corporations leverage the powerful psychology of The Scarcity Loop to drive our attention to many things. The loop was perfected in slot machines, but it didn’t stay in Las Vegas.

It’s being used by social media companies, online retailers, dating apps, finance apps, media sites and so much more to capture our attention—often at the expense of our mental and financial well-being. (Read Scarcity Brain to learn all the ways the loop is used today).

One of my favorite quotes of all time comes from William James, the father of American psychology.

He captured something profound about this brief stint of consciousness we all have and call life. In the end, he said, our life is ultimately a collection of what we pay attention to.

And now, the MLB is using the scarcity loop. That, I think, shows how the loop can be used for good or bad. It’s revived America’s pastime, brought more communities together around teams, led to more experiences where we watch games together, and made more kids interested in getting outside and playing baseball again.

The scarcity loop is all around us. The question we all face is what loops are we going to fall into?

Have fun, don’t die, thank God, baseball is back.

-Michael