How Major League Baseball umpires strategically allocate their limited attention
Written by James Archsmith – Assistant Professor of Agriculture and Resource Economics, University of Maryland. This article was taken from the January 2026 edition of the RES Quarterly Newsletter.
This article is also based on and adapted from James Archsmith’s research (et al.) originally published in The Economic Journal (135/671): “The Dynamics of Inattention in the (Baseball) Field”.
Information processing is not costless. As Herbert Simon famously noted, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. We “pay” attention, suggesting mental effort is costly. But is it also a depletable “pot”, such that a rational agent could or should choose to use and manage it as a dynamic optimisation problem? While the concept of rational inattention — forgoing full information collection when the costs outweigh the benefits — is well established in theory, observing it dynamically in the wild has proven elusive.
How do workers manage their mental energy over time? Do they become fatigued by past decisions? More intriguingly, do they strategically conserve mental energy now because they anticipate needing it for a difficult decision later?
In our recent paper, The Dynamics of Inattention in the (Baseball) Field, we tried to shed light on these questions by using a unique high-frequency dataset: decision-making by Major League Baseball (MLB) umpires. Umpires are highly-paid professionals doing mentally challenging work we can observe in a workplace characterised by high stakes, rapid-fire decisions and intense scrutiny. The baseball field serves as a remarkable natural laboratory for understanding the economics of attention, and has been used by other economists to study other behaviours.
The high-stakes laboratory
Assessing the dynamics of attention in most professions is fraught with difficulty. In corporate or medical settings, it is rarely possible to objectively measure the “correctness” of every decision, nor is it easy to quantify exactly how important one decision is compared to another, or how difficult each is.
Baseball solves these econometric challenges. In a single game, a home plate umpire makes approximately 120 decisions on whether a pitch is a “ball” or a “strike”. Since 2008, MLB stadiums have been equipped with PITCHf/x technology, a camera system that tracks the ball’s trajectory with millimetre precision. This allows us to observe the objective truth of every pitch and determine instantly how well any particular umpire, on any particular workday, is doing their job.
Crucially, we can also quantify the importance of each decision using a metric called “leverage” — which quantifies how much a specific call could alter the probability of a team winning the game. A decision made when the score is tied in the ninth inning is much more consequential than one made during a blowout in the second inning.
The budget of attention
Our analysis of over 3mn decisions reveals that umpires are highly rational, yet constrained, economic agents. First, we confirm the static prediction of rational inattention theory: umpires perform better when the stakes are higher. As leverage increases, error rates drop. When the game is on the line, umpires focus their attention to get the call right.
However, the rich empirical setting lets us probe the dynamics in an unusually granular way. We find strong evidence that attention is a depletable stock — a “budget” that must be managed. We observe a “backwards-looking” fatigue effect: umpires who have faced not just more decisions, but more difficult, high-leverage decisions early in an inning perform worse on subsequent pitches, other things being equal. This is consistent with the psychological theory of “ego depletion”, where the act of exercising self-control or intense focus at one moment draws down a limited cognitive resource.
"The baseball field serves as a remarkable natural laboratory for understanding the economics of attention, and has been used by other economists to study other behaviours"
The forward-looking agent
Most strikingly, umpires appear to be forward-looking. In most economic settings, observing whether an agent anticipates future cognitive costs is nearly impossible. Does a surgeon rush a routine procedure because they expect a complex trauma case to arrive in an hour? It is hard to say, because the arrival of the trauma case is uncertain and difficult to quantify.
In baseball, however, the rigid structure of the game allows us to compute a “rational expectation” of future stakes. Using historical data from millions of game situations, we can calculate the probability that high-leverage decisions will arise later in the current half-inning.
We find that when an umpire expects high-stakes decisions to occur in the future, their performance on the current pitch declines. This suggests a sophisticated form of intertemporal substitution. Umpires essentially “consumption smooth” their mental effort; they conserve their limited stock of attention during low-stakes moments to ensure they have enough in the tank for the crucial decisions they anticipate later. This type of stewarding of a depletable stock of mental resource is analogous to how a football player might manage their stock of physical resource across a match — for example, by running at more moderate paces in less important moments early in games, in anticipation of having a “better” use for their physical energy later.
Implications for the workplace
These findings extend to the office, hospital and courtroom. Decision-making quality is dynamically interdependent; the quality of a decision made at 4pm depends on the difficulty of the decisions made at 9am.
There is, however, a silver lining. Baseball games are divided into half-innings, separated by breaks of approximately two minutes. We find that the depletion effects we observe within an inning do not carry over across these breaks. The short respite appears sufficient to replenish the umpire’s attentional stock.
This suggests that in cognitively demanding professions, the structure of the workflow matters. Rather than a continuous grind, workflows that allow for frequent, short breaks may be essential for maintaining decision quality. For the “industrial athletes” of the modern economy, managing the budget of attention is just as critical as managing financial capital.