In truth, the decision to keep playing Davis almost certainly has more to do with his $17 million salary this year and the $93 million the Orioles owe him beyond 2019 in salary and deferred payments, which will have the team sending him paychecks through the 2037 season. Considering the amount of money the team has committed to Davis, his situation might be less suited for a manager like Hyde than it is for someone like Richard Thaler, the Nobel Prize-winning economist at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business.

To Thaler, the Orioles’s refusal to sideline Davis is a classic example of the sunk cost fallacy, an economic principle he detailed in his book “Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics.”

“A classic example is you order some dessert at a restaurant and it costs $15,” Thaler said in a phone interview. “You take a couple bites and you realize you were already full and this dessert is really rich, but you feel like you can’t waste the whole thing. So you eat more of it than you should.”

Ideally, Thaler said, the correct decision is to ignore any cost that has already been paid and evaluate the situation strictly on its own merit. One of his favorite illustrations of sunk cost, he said, is deciding whether or not to attend a basketball game you had purchased tickets for even though attending would mean traveling through a blizzard.