I enjoyed reading this book and I think it explained actions in the brain in a scientific way that would still be interesting to neuroscientists and hard-core baseball fans alike. I found this book, which was put together by a life-long cub fan, to be extremely interesting and informative. It did an excellent job of describing a basic event in baseball like a batter preparing to hit a pitch and explaining how this event happens in the brain through the use of things like the mirror system.The sections of the book and my summary/opinion of them are listed below. For the most part, the chapters open up with a Cub's game that is a good example of what is going to be discussed about. After the example, such as a fan's emotion or a baseball player's slump, is mentioned, the explanation for the neurological mechanism responsible for this event is followed by other research done by others, possibly psychologists or anthropologists, who back up the neurological mechanism.Chapter 1: The Depths of Loyalty: Exploring the Brain of a Die-hard fanBegins with the author talking about his experience growing up as a Cubs fan and how a brain for a fan of a perennial losing team works differently than the brain of fan whose team is doing well in the way that the "losing brain" is trained to delay gratification because winning is rare. Furthermore, this chapter mentions common behavioral framework that is relevant for a Cubs fan such as structured event knowledge stored in the frontal lobes and emotional states represented in the brain-stem and limbic regions. Overall, pretty basic brain information meant to just ease the reader in to both the fandom of the Cubs and the working of the brain.Chapter 2: Developing Talent: Expertise and the BrainAbout how the key to doing something well is not genes but actually practice, somewhere in the realm of 10,000 hours of practice to master something like hitting a curveball. Comparisons between expert and novice violinsts showed that experts required less brain volume to complete a task. Using a fMRI, it was shown that practice also strengthens the connections between different areas in the brain. I found this part to be one of the more interesting areas of the book because they wrote about how focus and practice can make one good at almost anything through the brain rewiring itself.Chapter 3: Why Did Casey Strike Out? The Neuroscience of HittingAbout how hitters use their brain and things like the mirror system, which is something in the brain that recognizes a movement when preformed by others, in this case a pitch, to hit better. I thought this was extremely interesting because I had never heard of the mirror system before but it does make some sense because the possible greatest hitter of all time was also a pitcher.Chapter 4: Curses!Mentions how the believe in superstition, which is abundant in baseball, is due to the brain being "stubborn" and demanding to fill in missing information in a cause-effect pattern leading some to believe that certain things led to a good game. Again, it was really interesting to see all of the research that showed how any species can become superstitious and how people can feel like they are in more control of a situation because of something they did.Chapter 5: Risks and Asterisks: Neurological Enhancements in BaseballAll about the use of drugs like steroids and amphetamines and how they may both hurt and help the game. Didn't seem to mention too much neurological science (more biochemistry) in this chapter, so I wasn't a fan.Chapter 6: Baseball and HandednessThis chapter was really interesting because it talked about the asymmetries in brain hemispheres and how that affects people, mainly ball players, causing left handed players, normally considered the best hitters, to be more dexterous and have a better muscle memory. I found this part extremely interesting because I am ambidextrous and it made me wonder if my brain had any asymmetries or how mine would compare to other single hand dominant people.Chapter 7: It Isn't Whether You Win or Lose, It's Whether You Win: Agony and Ecstasy in the BrainTalks about the 5 stages of depression and the reward circuit and how these act in the brains of fans experience the ups and lows of the baseball season followed up with research. Also mentions that even with the strong levels of despair experienced as a Cubs fan, hope springs eternal.Interesting Quotes:"The play in baseball is not solely determined by physics, chance, size, strength, and speed. It is also influenced by the effects of novel game situations on the ability of the player's nervous system to make good decisions, plans, and executions.""Emotions have immediate, visceral components-such as the heart rate and adrenaline surge baseball fans might experience while watching their team's shot at a World Series slip away. But emotions also have a more thought-based or cognitive component that comes into play. In general, emotion can be thought of as a collaboration between a set of structures deep in the brain called the limbic system and the most forward part of the outer covering of the brain in the frontal lobes, the prefrontal cortex."In my opinion, this book does an excellent job of informing the reader of the workings of the brain while relating the function to a situation with which the readers are already familiar. While it talks about a wide range of baseball topics like hitting and superstition, it always includes scientific research and other examples found in the world to explain why these things are going on inside of the brain in a very simple but intellectual way.I would recommend this book to any sports fan, any neuroscience fan, or anyone interested in the infrastructure of the brain but doesn't want to read something that might be too dense.