The Monkey Cage

I am resuming my irregular Soccernomics blogging. One of the fun insights of the book is that no soccer club from any capital of a democratic country has ever won the European cup. The exception is Real Madrid which gained its status under fascism (the club was always strongly associated with Franco). Benfica from Lisbon also did very well under dictatorship. Instead, in democracies, the cup has largely been won by teams from industrial cities, such as Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, Nottingham, Milan, Munich, Eindhoven, Marseille, and Turin.No team from Paris or London has ever won. More generally, in authoritarian states, teams from the capital (and government seat) tend to win national titles with much greater regularity than in democracies.

Their explanation is a mix of resources (mostly coming from the state in authoritarian states but from the private sector in market democracies), capture (the state tended to interfere in the success of capital city teams in authoriarian states whereas industrials did so in democracies), and attention (not much else to do for fun in industrial towns). They also argue that this is all about to change as clubs are increasingly being financed by globe-trotting billionaires.

I am not sure if parallels exist to other regions (Latin America?) or aspects of social life. If it is true that authoritarian governments have tended to privilige investment in capital cities more than democracies, it would be interesting to see if these legacies persist once states become democratic. Any way, fun stuff to ponder.

ps. The authors have to make an exception for AJAX Amsterdam, which has won the cup four times. While Amsterdam is the Dutch capital, the government seat is in The Hague, which has had a dreadful team. Moreover, PSV Eindhoven, a team from a small industrial (Philips) city has also won the cup and has won more national titles in recent years than AJAX.

Posted by Erik Voeten at 01:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Last week, I finally read Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski’s Soccernomics. Like Freakonomics, the book is a collaborative effort between a journalist and an economist that popularizes economic analysis of some (really very important) aspect of social life: soccer. Part of the book is soccer’s Moneyball: an attempt to show how smart use of soccer statistics can help one make better decisions about soccer; such as what players to acquire and sell. The other part is more like Freakonomics: an attempt to use economic analysis of soccer as a way to understand broader social phenomena, much like the soccer and civil war paper I blogged about earlier.

For anyone who enjoys soccer and has an interest in social science, the book is a delightful read (although I inevitably have some gripes). Over the next few days, I plan to write a few blogs about some of the issues tackled in the book that may be of interest to Monkey Cage readers. I start with their analysis of racism in hiring soccer players and coaches.

Continue reading "Racism and Soccer" »

Posted by Erik Voeten at 07:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Rebels of the Angolan Front for the Liberation of the Enclave of Cabinda (Flec) have attacked the team bus of the Togo national team as it was entering Angola from the DRC to play in the African Cup of Nations. At least two players were injured and the bus driver was apparently killed. Togo’s star player and one of the best forwards in the world (Adebayor) escaped the attack without injury. This all comes after the violence surrounding the World Cup qualifier between Algeria and Egypt and the peculiar defection of twelve players from the Eritrean soccer team to escape repressive conditions at home.

I am sure this will raise doubts in the minds of many about the wisdom of holding the World Cup in South Africa this summer. I am not quite willing to go that far. South Africa is a country with a great deal of crime but no real resistance that seeks to overthrow the government. High profile sporting events have long attracted terrorist and rebel attacks, not just in Africa (just think of the Munich Olympics). Anyway, this is terribly tragic news for those involved.

Posted by Erik Voeten at 03:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

No, not the latest unemployment figures, but our draw for the opening round of the 2010 World Cup final: United States, England, Slovenia, and Algeria. According to Eric Wynalda, “This is the best draw we’ve ever had in any World Cup.” Only 188 days until the June 11th kickoff!

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 02:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

This comment by Tyler Cowen on Sarah Palin’s poor Scrabble strategy reminds me of my blog a few months ago with six suggested Scrabble reforms. Without further ado:

Continue reading "Scrabble flashback, and why Tyler Cowen is being too hard on Sarah Palin" »

Posted by Andrew Gelman at 02:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh wanted to become one of the owners of an NFL football team, the St. Louis Rams. It didn’t work out — he’s just too controversial, said league pooh-bahs. Bosh!, said Rush, blaming an “on-going effort by the left in this country — to destroy conservatism, to prevent the mainstreaming of anyone who is prominent as a conservative.”

Blackballing a prominent — much loved in some quarters, much despised in others — media figure is an especially interesting step, to say the least, in light of some of the unsavory characters to whom the NFL establishment has not objected — the worst of whom was undoubtedly the notorious George Preston Marshall, the virulently racist owner of the (you guessed it) Washington Redskins. Anyway, into the fray has jumped, of all sources, the Wall Street Journal, to refute Limbaugh’s talking point: “In truth,” notes Steve Kornacki in the October 16 issue of the Journal, “if prominent conservatives were barred from owning NFL teams, about a dozen franchises would be for sale.” Here are the particulars. Anyway, to sort everything out properly, we’d need a experimental design in which some left-wing mirror image of Rush Limbaugh tried to buy into an NFL franchise.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 08:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Amid all the media blathering about why the 2016 Olympics aren’t going to be in Chicago — can you believe it? they lost out to such cheesy places? this really shows that Obamamania has run its course! etc. — comes an analysis that’s quite revealing about Chicago’s last-place finish in the compeition, which seems to have turned much more on the frosty relations between the USOC and the IOC than anything else. It’s a good read — and a good rejoinder to the inside-the-Beltway tendency to see everything that happens in the world as a direct response to or reflection on what goes on in this city.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 08:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Washington Redskins may be starting a new player, Chad Rinehart, at offensive guard this Sunday. A reporter, trying to get some inside dope on Rinehart, asked Redskins center Casey Rabach what nickname the Redskins players have hung on him. “Rhino,” Rabach responded — a moniker that seems appropriate for a behemoth offensive lineman.

But the reporter, not knowing enough to quit while he was ahead, pressed on: “Why ‘Rhino?”

Rabach’s response:

“Rinehart’s an awful lot of syllables, so Rhino kind of flows off the tongue a lot easier …”

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 07:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It’s been a long season for the Nats. True, they somehow managed an eight-game winning streak along the way, but even with that they’ve compiled the worst record in major league baseball by far. And some of their losses have been epic. Take, for example, the one in which, with the score tied in the bottom of the ninth and runners on second and third with one out, the Nats’ pitcher was issuing an intentional walk in order to fill the bases and set up a double play possibility. A good move, strategically. But while the pitcher was beginning his delivery on one of the balls he was intentionally lobbing wide of the plate, he got his feet tangled up and stopped his pitching motion. “Balk!,” screamed the umpire, waving the runner in from third base to score a game-winning intentional-walk walk-off balk. It’s been that kind of year.

Anyway, on August 8, the Nats gladdened the hearts of the home crowd, not with the quality of their play on the field, but with the great rendition of the National Anthem that Glenn Donnellan, a violinist for the National Symphony Orchestra, played on his Louisville Slugger. And here it is.

[Hat tip to Chris Deering]

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 08:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

OK, Lee. Here’s something for you about baseball. OK, it’s really about baseball statistics, not baseball itself. That’s the best I can do, I’m afraid.

Posted by Andrew Gelman at 03:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

A week ago, eschewing considerations of personal reputation and safety, I dove into the shark-infested waters of baseball expertise and lore to consider the odd phenomenon of the absence of left-handed catchers in major league baseball. Various worthies deigned to instruct me in the sublime subtleties of the sport and to let me know, in effect, that this is all part of God’s Master Plan for Baseball. He designed the game, it would seem, in ways that make lefties inherently unsuitable as catchers. It’s hard, for example, for a lefty to make a snap throw to third base when there’s a right-handed batter; but never mind that right-handed catchers don’t seem to have any problem making snap throws to first base when there’s a left-handed batter.

Go figure. It is not within our humanly powers to grasp all the mysteries of God’s Master Plan for Baseball.

In a late-summer harmonic convergence of sorts, Gene Weingarten, in today’s Washington Post Magazine, takes up the question of, ahem, why there are no left-handed catchers in major league baseball. It seems that Weingarten recently attended an annual convention of sabremetricians (which must be about as captivating an event as, say, the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association), and, while there, decided to put the eternal question to the assembled experts.

I figured if anyone would know, it would be the SABR guys. So I walked around asking the question, and everywhere I asked it, vigorous debates ensued. Theories were propounded and shot down. For every explanation (it would be harder for a lefty to throw a runner out at third base), a valid counter-argument arose (it would be easier for a lefty to pounce on a bunt and throw to first). Theories ranged from the aesthetic (pitchers would get rattled seeing the glove on the unaccustomed side of the plate) to the tautological (no one becomes a lefty catcher because everyone knows there are no lefty catchers). To demonstrate the rightness of their theories, old men were squatting in a catcher’s crouch, trying to simulate young men squatting in a catcher’s crouch. It wasn’t pretty to watch. It was like watching donkeys try to imitate Seabiscuit.

I left the convention sadder, but no wiser. Then I had an idea. I phoned around and finally reached the greatest catcher in the history of the game.

Why are there no left-handed catchers, Yogi?

“That’s just the way it is,” he said, “’cause that’s the way it’s been.”

So now we know.

(Hat tip to Gina Lambright)

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 08:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Yesterday I posted about an interesting but never-happen proposal to institute “time-ins” in football. So far the main response has been that baseball is even slower and less action-packed than football. Well, of course it is. So what?

Coincidentally, this morning’s Washington Post carried this story about what’s being seen as the increasing misuse of time-outs in tennis, a trend that, because I don’t follow tennis closely, had escaped my notice.

I do recall that tennis was once considered a continuous-action sport. No dilly-dallying between points or games. Then television happened, and as it does to every other sport (at least the ones I watch), it slowed things way down to enable commercials to be run. That changes a sport. Makes it harder to gain and maintain momentum. Deprives better-conditioned athletes of some of their advantage. And so on. The strategic use of “injury” time-outs has the same effect, and insults the sport. I’m comforted that this is viewed as a problem in tennis, even if the football folks haven’t yet caught on to how much excitement all that standing around drains out of what’s supposed to be an action-packed, thrill-a-second, sixty-minute contest when it drags on for hours and hours.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 10:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Baseball is a great game. Yes, as George Will has said, it’s only a game, but “the Grand Canyon is only a hole in Arizona. Not all holes, or games, are created equal.”

One of the holes that Will considers unequal to baseball is obviously football, which in Will’s words “combines the two worst things about America: it is violence punctuated by committee meetings.”

George Will just isn’t a football type of guy, and that’s fine by me, because I’m not, either. It’s not the violence that rankles me — I can even sit and watch a boxing match on TV for a while. It’s the committee meetings part.

Football consists mainly of a bunch of grossly overweight guys standing around trying to catch their breath while waiting for the clock finally to restart so they can ply their trade for about six seconds, after which they’ll stand around for a while again. Look in on a game in which one of the teams uses a no-huddle offense and you’ll see all those huge millionaires on the defensive team sucking air after about a minute.

Anyway.

Those thoughts went through my mind the other day as I read about this clever idea for speeding football up a little and adding some really nteresting new strategic elements as well. Basically, one of the teams could call a “time-in” to get the clock going when it would otherwise be stopped, as it so often is. Nice. Fewer committee meetings. Never happen. But nice.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 01:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Back to baseball….

As my three year old son asked me yet again yesterday, “Daddy, tell me about David Wright”, it occurred to me that the Mets might actually be cursed. If not cursed per se, then is it possible that they are having the absolutely worst run of injury luck for any major league baseball team ever? So far this season, they have lost to injuries:

• Their four best position players: All Stars David Wright (3b) Jose Reyes (ss) Carlos Beltran (cf) and Carlos Delgado (1b)

• Two of the five original members of their starting rotation: John Maine, Oliver Perez

• Two highly touted rookies called up to replace injured startes: Jonathan Niese (p, who hurt himself covering first base) and Fernando Martinez (of, although he was kind of a bust this year anyways).

• A big off season trade acquisition in the bullpen: closer-turned-set up man: J.J Putz

And just to top it off, their starting second baseman, Luis Castillo, hurt himself walking down the dugout steps. Seriously, at this point the Mets injury report only lacks a catcher and a second baseman to be able to field one of the top teams in the National League.

So here’s the challenge: can anyone come up with a team that has been more decimated by injuries than the 2009 NY Mets? Please?

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 11:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

For some reason — maybe because it’s the dog days of summer and not much is happening in academia — I’ll be blogging for the next couple of days on sports-related topics. No, “The Monkey Cage” isn’t turning into SI.com, but some interesting sports items have caught my eye recently. Here’s one of them.

Hitting a baseball is supposed to be one of the most challenging feats in sports. I didn’t used to think so, but a few years ago, when I stepped into a batting cage, dialed the pitching machine down to maximum slow, and still couldn’t come close to making contact, I was forced to concur. Fortunately, I could rationalize it: I’m old. My reflexes have slowed, my hand-eye coordination has suffered, and my eyesight has dimmed.

Imagine the challenge, then, if you can’t see at all. Which is precisely the situation for players of beep ball. Here is the story, from the Wall Street Journal, and here is a brief video so you can see for yourself how it works. Looks like a great day for a ballgame. Let’s play two.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 08:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The sporting-goods companies are still turning out catcher’s mitts for left-handers, but their market is just for the kids. No big leaguers, because there aren’t any left-handed catchers in the big leagues. Never were very many; now, none.

I can remember a couple — fill-ins, though, not regulars or even second-stringers. But not for a long time. Maybe, I thought, I don’t remember the recent ones because I don’t pay nearly as much attention to baseball as I used to. But according to this piece in the Times, what seems to be going on isn’t inattention on my part, but closed-mindedness among basebal people.

Okay, I concede that even though a baseball field is basically symmetric, it’s also laterally biased: Batters run from home to first base, not from home to third. And that tends to point the action in a certain direction, and perhaps confers small advantages on those better suited to deal with its lateral bias. But there are biases and counter-biases: A right-handed Sandy Amoros couldn’t have caught Yogi Berra’s fly ball down the left-field line, for example. And even though it may be unusual for lefties to come to the top in other sports where they operate at a disadvantage (like golf, where the doglegs tend to go in the “right” direction for right-handers), some left-handers manage to do pretty darned well. But baseball? Lefties play first base, or pitch, or an outfield position. Third base, second base, sortstop? Nah. And catcher? Don’t even think about it. An endangered species? More likely an extinct one.

Too bad. Not that being a catcher is a glamour job. It’s dirty and hot and injury-prone and nasty and hard and requires an unusual mix of talents. I never, ever wanted to be a catcher, and it’s not a profession you’d want your kids to aspire to. Unless, that is, you’d like them to find a job where, if they’re any good at it at all, they’re likely to last for a long time and, notwithstanding the gnarled hands, arthritic knees, and beat-up feet they’ll get for their stoop labor, they’ll have spent years in The Show — the ultimate dream of every little boy of my generation.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 07:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (9)

This New York Times story instantly carried me back 42 years, to my senior year in college, when my buddies and I, trapped in the nothingness of a Minnesota winter, played an entire 162-game schedule of APBA baseball.

I managed the ‘65 Dodgers, against whom it was almost impossible to get a hit, let alone score a run. My roommate Bagger had the Giants. How well I remember the day that the Giants’ first baseman, my all-time favorite and future Hall of Famer, Willie McCovey, hit one of his vicious line drives between first and second. Well, this particular line drive conked the baserunner, who just happened to be Willie Mays, and in a weird conjunction of numbers on the ABPA cards, Mays was relegated to the Disabled List for the rest of the season. Bagger, who had a volcanic temperament, picked up the Willie McCovey card and started screaming at it: “You just put Willie F—-ing Mays out for the season! How could you do that?” And then he did something that haunts me still: Eerily calm, he meticulously tore the Willie McCovey card into shreds and threw them into the wastebasket. We were all stunned, in total awe of the violence we had just beheld — the conking of Willie Mays and the dismemberment of Willie McCovey. In a single toss of the dice, Bagger had contrived to lose not one but two superstars — a development that did certainly not stand his high-fllying Giants in good stead for the remainder of the season and made me even leerier than I had been before about rooming with Bagger. It might have been the most calamitous play in baseball history.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 08:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

It’s been a while since we’ve run an obit — which, when you think about it, is probably a good thing. But I couldn’t resist posting a link to this morning’s Washington Post remembrance of King Corcoran, “the poor man’s Joe Namath.”

Although we here at the “Monkey Cage” have an extremely broad conception of politics, this item has nothing at all to do with politics. King seems to have been too busy pursuing his other interests to bother about politics.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 01:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

So on Saturday nice George Hincapie — everybody loves George, one of the genuine good guys in professional cycling — is the maillot jaune virtuel (that is, he’s leading the whole race, timewise, but the stage isn’t over yet, so he could still fall short), but then Garmin (an American team) turns on the jets and pulls the peloton faster toward the finish line, in the process getting the current maillot jaune wearer, Rinaldo Nocentini, who rides for a different team altogether (Ag2r), closer and closer to the line and enabling him to make up time on nice George and dropping nice George back into second place rather than first. Too bad, as nice George is nearing the end of a fine career and it would have been so nice for nice George to get to wear yellow.

Well, it turns out that bad feelings have been simmering for months between Garmin and Hincapie’s team, Columbia (the other American team in Le Tour — no, Astana, the team Lance Armstrong rides for, is not American). Garmin did this deliberately, charges Columbia, to keep nice George out of yellow. I am insulted, pouts nice George. We were just riding our ride, protests Garmin. The Garmins are bad people who did my best buddy nice George dirty, proclaims Lance (who himself is considered bad people by lots of folks). Nice George, by the way, is also p.o.’ed at Lance’s Astana team, which used tactics during the race much like those employed by Garmin at the end. No, no, no, say the Astanas, we’re above that sort of thing. Columbia vows revenge, a frightening prospect when 150 or so highly caffeinated young men, all bursting with testosterone, some probably full of exotic drugs, any many of whom don’t seem to like each other very much, are riding bicycles very fast within just a few inches of one another.

You probably thought a bike race was an uncomplicated affair in which the competitors are just trying to ride as fast as they can for as long as they can. Silly you.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 08:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (11)

“Baseball is so much harder to televise than the other sports because it is a game of angles.” — Tim McCarver.

Tim McCarver was a major league catcher for many years and he’s been a major league announcer for just short of forever. He never shuts up, and some of the things he says even make sense.

If baseball is a game of angles, as he says, then the folks who sign Tim McCarver’s paycheck have been getting it all wrong. Here’s the story, as told by Slate’s Greg Hanlon.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 03:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

A few years ago, the National Basketball Association instituted a rule that prohibits its teams from drafting high school kids (as it had been doing with potential superstars like LeBron James). Under the new rule, draftees must be at least one year out of high school and at least 19 years of age. This has produced a “one-and-done” situation for college teams, which now are left to serve as proving grounds for top high school players during the year before they abscond to the NBA.

The NBA’s contract with the players will soon be up for renegotiation, and this rule will get a close look from both sides. Here are a couple of very different perspectives on it:

From Orlando Magic coach Stan Van Gundy:

I don’t like the ‘one and done.’ First of all, I don’t really understand how we get away with that as a league, that we tell a guy out of high school he can’t come and play in our league. The guy should have the right to make a living and to come into our league. And what I really don’t like is the way our system is set up. To me, and I know this sounds absolutely ridiculous, but kids should be going to college if at least part of what they want to do is get an education. To me, it’s sham.

From NBA commissioner David Stern:

I think there is a mixed view about what it does for the NCAA, but that wasn’t why we did it. This is not about the NCAA, this is not an enforcement of some social program, this is a business decision by the NBA, which is: We like to see our players in competition after high school.

Here’s more.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 09:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

One conclusion you might draw would be “Isn’t it great that they’re taking their studies so seriously!”

Unfortunately, other conclusions are possible.

Sometimes the alternative conclusions are, well, less savory.

Just say Roll, Tide, Roll! to see what they’ve come up with now.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 06:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

David Friedman suggests that, instead of limiting a football team to 11 men, you allow the team as many men on the field as they’d like, with the constraint that their total weight be below some 2400 pounds. It’s an interesting idea.

Commenters suggest the related idea of limiting the total height of a basketball team to 30 feet. Then we’d find out right away how tall these players really are.

I’m not saying these ideas are perfect, but they’re interesting.

Posted by Andrew Gelman at 09:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Good professional sports teams…

…according to this analysis by the Toronto Star.The Star gave points for winning percentages and playoff appearances in football, basketball, baseball, and hockey since 2000 to cities that had at least two major franchises.

Some comments:

(1) Both the CFL and NFL are included in the rankings.

(2) I don’t follow either the CFL or NHL. Vancouver must have had some powerhouses in those leagues.

(3) Sorry Beantowners. You’ve been overshadowed by a boring place in the Flyover Zone.

(4) The rest of the world relishes seeing the high-spending New York teams mired in twelfth place.

(5) The old saw about Washington (“First in war, first in peace, and last in the American League”) needs updating to “…Last in the National League, last in the NBA, Awful in the NFL, Grateful for Alex Ovechkin, and Not So Hot in War or Peace, Either.” The new century has not been kind to the nation’s capital.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 10:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Don’t get me wrong: I love baseball. Always have, always will.

But I have to say that baseball is, not to put to fine a point on it, boring. Long stretches of inactivity are integral components of the game’s charm — like all the players warming-up between every half-inning, or the pitcher throwing over to first five consecutive times to hold a baserunner close to the bag, or the batter backing out of the box to scratch himself right there on nationwide TV, or the lonely outfielder who’s never involved in a single play for the entire game, or the radio announcers babbling on and on to camouflage the fact that nothing is happening on the field.

Of course, baseball has its moments, and great moments they are, when everything happens at once: a hit-and-run play or a bases-loaded triple, for example. But those are the exceptions. (When’s the last time you saw a bases-loaded triple?) And I have to admit that sometmes the excitement becomes unbearable even when there’s virtually no real action: My most memorable in-person baseball experience was a no-hitter (i.e., nine innings of sustained immobility) that clinched the pennant (Mike Scott for the Astros).

To repeat: I love baseball, and I recognize that part of its pastoral essence is inaction. Still, over the years, for me the boring parts have gotten the upper hand; I’ve lost patience and can’t sit still long enough to watch a game. A couple of innings and I’m ready to move on. Like virtually everyone else’s, my attention span has shrunk. When I was growing up, I had a friend, Richard Krochock — sadly now deceased — who was so annoying that I used to say that I really liked him but I simply couldn’t stand spending any time with him. And that pretty well sums up my attitutde toward baseball these days.

Thus, when I read this in the Boston Globe’s invariably-interesting “Ideas” section today the light bulb immediately lit up in my head. The point of the piece is that nothing really happens on ball two. After two strikes, for examples, batters change their strategy, choking up and trying to make instead of swinging from the heels. After one ball or three balls, odds on various things happening change perceptibly. Ball one matters. Ball three matters. Strikes one and two matters. But ball two is just sort of there, filling in the space and taking up the time between ball one and ball three.

Ball two stands alone, above any of the other dull business on the diamond. The intentional walk at least adds a base runner to the game. The halfhearted throw to first to check the runner is a sign that the pitcher is feeling tension. But ball two signifies almost nothing.

Huh? Well, it turns out — according to sportswriter Joe Posnanski’s analysis of more than a million pitcher-batter matchups, that “Ball two is where the supposedly perfect tuning of baseball goes flat. As long as four is greater than three, there will be a slack moment at the heart of the game, when the hitter and pitcher are both content to put off the final reckoning.” That moment is ball two.

If you’ve ever tried to explain baseball to a neophyte, you’ll know that one of the first questions you’re likely to have gotten was why there are three strikes but four balls. Out of the mouths of babes sometimes come great insights. If ball two doesn’t really contribute anything to the dynamics of the game, if it’s just a time-wasting way station between ball one and ball three, then why not just relegate it to the bullpen, out of sight where it can’t hold things up? Just imagine how much more smoothly things would go if, with the count, say, 1-1, the pitcher threw a wide one and the count shot upward, not to 2-1 but to 3-1! It wouldn’t hurt a thing, and the quality of our lives (well, mine anyway) would be improved immeasurably. Why, I might even stick around for three innings, instead of just two, before changing the channel.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 10:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (14)

People become fans of a certain sports team for lots of different reasons. In honor of our guest-blogger, Jim Gimpel, I’ll stipulate that the most common reason is geography: If you’re an American and the U.S. hockey team is playing Canada, then those nice neighbors from the north are The Enemy and it’s cheer, cheer, cheer for the Good Old USofA. If you’re from the North Side, you’re likely to be fan of the Cubbies, but if you’re a South Sider, then it’s Go Go, Sox.

Of course, there are other reasons as well. I have a friend who’s a die-hard Cleveland Indians fan, even though, as far as I know, he’s never even set foot in that lovely city.

As for me, I cheer for teams with classy uniforms. That may be silly, but so are the other reasons why people cheer for certain teams. I don’t care at all about professional football, but when I see elegantly clad, fashion-plate teams like the San Francisco 49ers and the Oakland Raiders (maybe there’s something about the Bay Area — but consider the gold and green travesty of the Oakland A’s)), my heart starts going pitter-patter. They’re lookin’ GOOD. (Even the much despised Washington NFL team — whose team name is so awful that I refuse to utter it — Iooked great last season when they donned white pants.)

I grew up loving baseball, but never had a home team to cheer for. So the Dodgers and the Cardinals became “my” teams because their uniforms were so clearly superior to anything the opposition could muster. I never fell under the spell of he Yankee pinstripes, though I admit that their stripeless visiting grays are classy, and so are their hats. The Dodgers still look great, and so do the Cardinals when they’re not wearing those off-putting blue caps.

All the foregoing is simply to establish that I care how teams look. And that leads me to note one of the two most unappealing trends of the past decade or so in sports team uniforms. The one I’m not going to dwell on is the comically baggy shorts that many basketball teams, especially at the college level. The one that concerns me here, as it must any other baseball fashionista, is the tendency of today’s baseball players to wear their pants all the way down to the tops of their shoes — an abominaton that has robbed the game of the oh-so-aesthetically-pleasing sight of the stirrup overlaying the white sanitary hose, If you don’t know what I’m talking about, then (a) you are unaware of how far the once-dominant stirrup has fallen, in which case (b) I need to show you what you’re missing:

I could almost become a Yankee fan if Derek Jeter and his teammates would do the right thing and wear stirrups instead of tugging their pants legs down as far as they can possibly be tugged.

Do you think I’m the only person on earth who could possibly care about such stuff? Wrong again!.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 10:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

Lee’s entry on the silliness of U.S. Supreme Court judges reminds me of Jim Stallard’s hilarious No Justice, No Foul, published in McSweeney’s a few years ago. All judicial scholars must read this.

Posted by Andrew Gelman at 08:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The research — by Matthew A. Holsapple of the University of Michigan and Deborah J. Taub of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro — was based on survey responses of 459 undergraduates at a university in the football bowl subdivision of Division I of the National Collegiate Athletic Association. The participants were given three surveys. One measured their degrees of identification with and support for the football and basketball teams. The other two were survey instruments – previously developed by others and tested for validity — of “modern” sexist and homophobic beliefs…

…In the case of this study, the researchers found a clear, positive association between degree of sports fandom of the college students for their teams, and homophobic and sexist attitudes.

More is here. I haven’t looked for the paper, but there is no way that cheering for college sports teams causes you to become more sexist. Much more likely is that the kind of people who identify strong with college sports teams are more likely to have sexist or homophobic beliefs because of some other (unmeasured?) factor.

Posted by John Sides at 08:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (10)

Posted by John Sides at 09:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Despite the numerous strategies that have been covered, a single successful strategy does not exist that ensures a winning Rotisserie Baseball season. Research of every variable affecting a player’s value to a particular team is crucial. Attention must be given to both important scoring categories, such as stolen bases and saves, and to position scarcity. More importantly, effective use of the entire salary cap is imperative. The worst mistake any Roto owner can make is to have money left over at the end of a Draft Day.

The research on fantasy sports leagues is starting to emerge. The above is a quote from this master’s thesis by Steven Rowell. Prefer something a little more political?

…the current study indicates that fantasy sports reinforce hegemonic ideologies in sport spectatorship, emphasizing authority, sports knowledge, competition, male-bonding, and traditional gender roles.

That’s from this paper by Nickolas Davis and Margaret Carlisle Duncan.

But the real point of this post is a public service announcement. Political scientist and Monkey Cage reader Jon Bernstein runs a fantasy baseball league and the league is looking for a few more participants. The current participants are mostly, but not entirely, political scientists. This means that the term “League of Dorks” — see here — is even more applicable.¹

If you’re interested, send Jon a note (here). You can do your part to reinforce hegemonic ideologies.

¹ In graduate school, I helped out a friend who was participating in this league. While he went to a Dave Matthews concert, I took his place on draft day and helped draft his team. I’ll leave aside the question of why friends let friends see Dave Matthews, and simply say that these were some of the most interminable hours of my life. There are dorks, and then there are baseball dorks. I was hearing batting averages from 1987, vs. left-handed and right-handed pitchers, you name it. To top it off, the one time I went to the bathroom, my friend’s preferred catcher got drafted and then I had to settle for some guy who was injured. But don’t let this anecdote dissuade you.

Posted by John Sides at 03:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

From the Boston Globe, of all places, a learned disquisition on the (in)appropriateness of cheering for the same team year in and year out, here.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 08:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Confused about where your little genius should go to college? Never fear, for help is on the way. Surfline has just released its list of the Top Ten schools for surfer dudes and dudesses. The winner: UCSD. A surprise Top Ten finisher: the University of Rhode Island at #7. Click here for the full list.

[Hat tip to Inside HigherEd]

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 10:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

By now anybody who pays attenton to such things knows that President Obama has publicly filled out his NCAA men’s tournament brackets. Like millions of others, he played it close to the chest, sticking mainly with favorites and choosing North Carolina to go all the way.

So leave it to a statistics nerd (sorry, Andrew) like Nate Silver over at 538 to run the numbers (in this case, a logistic regression model) and to conclude that (1) Obama did indeed give the nod to favorites, just as a casual scan of his entries indicates, (b) but he also tended to favor teams from “swing states” in the 2008 election (North Carolina being a prime example). Just a couple of months into his term, and already he’s currying favor for 2012!

No doubt congressional invesitgations will now be initiated of such blatant partisan bias at the highest levels of an administration pledged to nonpartisanship.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 08:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Help is on the way from, of all places, the Wall Street Journal, which is now running a sports page. In separate articles published over the last several days, they’ve presented research findings that indicate:

• That some teams are consistently lucky. The WSJ cites the work of basketball statistician (there has to be a word for that, like sabremetrician for baseball statisticians) Ken Pomeroy, who has calculated the percentage of games a team “should” have won based on its performance and the strength of its opponent, here. The residual between that estimate and the teams actual winning percentage expresses, Pomeroy argues, how lucky or unlucky the team has been. By this measure, the nation’s luckiest tournament team this year has been Michigan State, followed in order by LSU, Louisville, Florida State, and Wake Forest. Lest you scoff, the two luckiest teams heading into last year’s tournament were Tennessee and Vanderbilt, each of which struggled in the tournament.

• That some teams are overseeded and some are underseeded. The WSJ has tracked the final score of every NCAA tournament game since 1985 to establish a baseline of how close any game should be, based on the seeds of the two teams. For example, if a #3 seed plays a #14 seed, the #3 should be expected to win by 11 points or so. With these baselines established, the WSJ has determined the extent to which a particular team (say, Kansas) has exceeded the average scoring margin, given its seed. Heading into the 2009 tournament, the teams that have done best by this measure over the years have been Kansas, Kentucky (which didn’t make the tournament this year), Louisville, and Boston College. And the underperformers? In order from the bottom in this year’s crop: Wake Forest, Oklahoma, and Michigan. Click here for a little elaboration.

• That some coaches produce more bang for the buck than others do. Using the Ratings Percentage Index (RPI) as the measure of performance over the last three seasons, the WSJ calculated the number of RPI points over 50 (a mediocre score) per million dollars in coach’s salary. By this measure, the worst buys among big-time coaches from 2006 through 2009 were Paul Hewitt, who’s on the hot seat at Georgia Tech, and Dave Leitao, who not so coincidentally has just been fired at the University of Virginia. Some very big names — Jim Calhoun (Connecticut), John Calipari (Memphis), Mike Krzyzewski (Duke), Rick Pitino (Louisville), and Tom Izzo (Michigan State), are mid-listers. At the top of the list? Oliver Purnell (Clemson), Jamie Dixon (Pitt), Jim Boeheim (Syracuse), and Bruce Pearl (Tennessee). Click here for the full list.

And, as an extra added attraction:

• That you shouldn’t get too excited if the team you’re cheering for is up by one at the half. They’ll probably lose, according to a study by Jonah Berger and Devin Pope of the Wharton School.

UPDATE: Over at his statistics blog, Andrew takes issue with the Berger/Pope analysis.

Okay, now you can put your money down.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 07:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Above is a bracket where victories are awarded to the team with better academic achievement. And what do you know? A truly outstanding team wins.

[Hat tip to Inside Higher Education.]

Posted by John Sides at 10:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (12)

The players are packing their bags and heading down to Florida or out to Arizona, and I couldn’t care less.

I grew up loving — living for — baseball. College football was popular, but pro football was no big deal, at least ‘til the Greatest Game Ever Played (Colts v. Giants in 1958), which is generally considered to have been the turning point for football’s popularity. Pro basketball was mainly a bunch of big clumsy white guys wheezing up and down the floor, and college basketball was, at many schools, a nice way for the football players to stay in shape during the off-season.

Baseball was It — for me and for millions of others. Football, ehh. Basketball, nott.

Alas. That was then and this is now.

At several points over the years, the Gallup Poll has asked random samples of Americans to name their “favorite sport for watching.” Here’s how football, baseball, and basketball have lined up. (I pulled down the data on which this chart is based from the Roper Center’s online iPoll archive.

What comes through clearly in these time lines is, first, the rise in the popularity of football and, second, the even more rapid decline in the popularity of baseball.

My own feeling is that this — at least the first trend I just noted — is too bad. Football these days strikes me as an excellent way for 350-pound brutes who start huffing and puffing after playing for three straight downs to wreck their knees and shorten their lifespans. Moreover, I think George Will got it exactly right when he proclaimed football a perfect reflection of how we now organize our society: three seconds of action followed by a thirty-second committee meeting.

I was a happy camper in the olden days, when there were eight teams per league, the teams had pretty much the same players season after season, the games — even the World Series games — were mostly played during the day, and football and basketball just weren’t important. Now the players, instead of being drunks, are druggies, the games last so long and end so late that they’re virtually unwatchable, there are so many teams that I can’t even name them all, and the players move around so much that there’s no real sense of continuity anyway. I don’t really care much about baseball any more, and the Gallup Poll figures indicate that I’m not alone.

Of course, the culture has changed in many ways that play to football’s defining characteristics and not to baseball’s — e.g., slam-bang action, periods of intense activity that are ideally suited to short attention spans, lots of violence perpetrated by anonymous, larger-than-life creatures who are dressed up more or less like Darth Vader, etc.Once every half dozen or so years, I hearken back to Chris Schenkel’s old line — “What better way to spend an autumn afternoon?” — and venture up to Penn State to take in a football game, and I confess to having watched the entire second half of the recent Super Bowl. But that’s enough. I’d rather be out riding my bike.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 08:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (33)

(This has been circulating virally and without attribution.)

After determining the Big-12 championship game participants the BCS computers were put to work on other major contests and today the BCS declared Germany to be the winner of World War II.

“Germany put together an incredible number of victories beginning with the annexation of Austria and the Sudetenland and continuing on into conference play with defeats of Poland, France, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Belgium and the Netherlands. Their only losses came against the US and Russia; however considering their entire body of work—including an incredibly tough Strength of Schedule—our computers deemed them worthy of the #1 ranking.”

Questioned about the #4 ranking of the United States the BCS commissioner stated “The US only had two major victories— Japan and Germany . The computer models, unlike humans, aren’t influenced by head-to-head contests—they consider each contest to be only a single, equally-weighted event.”

German Chancellor Adolph Hiter said “Yes, we lost to the US ; but we defeated #2 ranked France in only 6 weeks.” Herr Hitler has been criticized for seeking dramatic victories to earn ‘style points’ to enhance Germany ’s rankings. Hitler protested “Our contest with Poland was in doubt until the final day and the conditions in Norway were incredibly challenging and demanded the application of additional forces.”

The French ranking has also come under scrutiny. The BCS commented ” France had a single loss against Germany and following a preseason #1 ranking they only fell to #2.”

Japan was ranked #3 with victories including Manchuria, Borneo and the Philippines.

[Hat tip to Marc Stern]

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 08:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Can some acts of violence be explained by a society’s cultural norms? Scholars have found it hard to empirically disentangle the effects of cultural norms, legal institutions, and poverty in driving violence. We address this problem by exploiting a natural experiment offered by the presence of thousands of international soccer (football) players in the European professional leagues. We find a strong relationship between the history of civil conflict in a player’s home country and his propensity to behave violently on the soccer field, as measured by yellow and red cards. This link is robust to region fixed effects, country characteristics (e.g., rule of law, per capita income), player characteristics (e.g., age, field position, quality), outliers, and team fixed effects. Reinforcing our claim that we isolate cultures of violence rather than simple rule-breaking or something else entirely, there is no meaningful correlation between a player’s home country civil war history and performance measures not closely related to violent conduct.

That’s the abstract of a fascinating new study by Edward Miguel, Sebastian M. Saiegh, and Shanker Satyanath. You can check out the full study here.

(By the way, the player being red-carded in the clip above is Teddy Lucic, born and raised in Sweden and shown playing for the Swedish national team. Sweden isn’t a nation known for its culture of violence. But maybe it matters (or maybe it doesn’t) that Lucic’s father was Croatian.)

[Hat tip to James Fowler]

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 04:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

A couple of days ago I put up a tongue-in-cheek post about the increasingly dismal economics of of professional sports, here. Now I’m supplementing that with a for-real post on the same subject. All the following comes directly from a Reuters wire service item by Ben Klayman.

Smaller crowds are only the first domino to fall for U.S. sports leagues, which could see lower corporate spending, flat or declining revenue and stagnant team values in a global recession, analysts said. To cope with these problems, league executives have begun offering deals on tickets, cutting jobs and in the case of the National Football League, reopening its labor deal with players to reduce costs.

While revenue remains strong in many sports, officials no longer see the sector as recession proof. “We’ve taken an incredible leap with the pricing of tickets that is going to come back to haunt the major sports,” said Michael Cramer, professor of sports management at New York University. “It’s not just the people at the bottom end,” added Cramer, who is former president of Southwest Sports Group, which owns the Texas Rangers baseball and Dallas Stars hockey teams. “It’s the people at the top end that don’t have the money.”

Continue reading "Dark Financial Clouds Over Professional Sports" »

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 01:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Alas, the status of sports as a psychological buttress is now under ferocious attack. Sports franchises cannot survive without immense support from corporations. An overwhelming source of revenue is generated by leasing luxury boxes. But now, with some of the most revered corporations in American going under, sports teams can no longer count on the inexhaustible revenue stream generated by these behemoths.

That’s Joe Queenan in the Wall Street Journal, building a case that the federal government should do a skybox bailout at sports arenas as part of its response to the current financial disarray.

Without the emotional uplift provided to the American people by the ministrations of the Columbus Blue Jackets, the Arizona Diamondbacks, and yes, event he Utah Jazz, this society could descend into a maelstrom of depression from which it never re-emerges.

It’s a cute piece, as you can see for yourself by clicking here.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 02:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Back in the days when your nation’s capital had a horrible, perennially cellar-dwelling baseball team, the Senators, the catch-phrase was “Washington: First in War, First in Peace, and Last in the American League.”

Times have changed. The Senators left for Minneapolis. The reconstituted Senators left for Texas. And the newest Senators, now rechristened the Nationals (which had been the nickname of the original Senators and the reconstituted ones, if a team nickname can be said to have a nckname) arrived from Montreal, where they had been languishing as the lowly, attendance-starved Expos. And given all these changes, the old saw no longer pertained. Now it’s “Washington: First in War, First in Peace, and Last in the National League.”

Although my passion for baseball now lives only in memory, on occasion (and twice this season), I tag along with a friend and venture out to the Nationals’ new home field. The team is astonishingly bad and regularly embarrasses itself by devising new ways to display its ineptitude (as they did in both games that I attended this season). Still, those two nights have been pleasant, as it’s nice to sit out on a balmy evening in the shiny new ballpark, munching on burger and fries from the Five Guys concession and reliving my innocent youth.

All this by way of wind-up. Here’s the pitch. One of the few things I like about the Washington Nationals is their “curly W” logo. It looks great on their paraphernalia, especially on their caps. It’s a good logo. I was thus especially pleased to see that the curly W is actually inscribed in the outfield grass. That looks so very cool — cooler in person than in the picture above.

Being ignorant of anything that has to do with the real world, I was totally clueless about how the groundskeepers had created and were maintaining a grass tattoo. Because I’m certain that you’ve been wondering the very same thing, here, as a public service, is the answer, which turns out to be a combination of art and science, as reported in today’s Washington Post.

[Hat tip to Chris Deering]

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 07:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Bengie Molina homering in a game earlier this season

I have a friend who likes to say that every time you go to a baseball game, you see something you’ve never seen before. That’s literally true, of course, but you know what he means: Strange things happen at the old ball game.

Here’s the latest strange thing.

San Francisco’s Molina Makes Bizarre History
Washington Post
Sunday, September 28, 2008; D05

Nothing in baseball is impossible anymore. Not after what Bengie Molina did in the sixth inning Friday night in San Francisco.

For the first time in the grand history of this game, a player hit a home run — without actually scoring a run.

Molina’s home run trot never began. He stopped at first base with an apparent single after his deep drive off RHP Scott Proctor hit where the bricks intersect with the green metal roof of the right field arcade.

As pinch runner Emmanuel Burriss ran onto the field to replace Molina, Omar Vizquel, who was sitting in the dugout, told Giants Manager Bruce Bochy that he heard the ball strike metal.

According to the AT&T Park ground rules, a ball that strikes the roof is a home run. Bochy immediately requested an instant replay challenge and told crew chief Bill Welke that he didn’t want Burriss in the game.

Umpires emerged from the tunnel after a brief delay, Welke signaled a two-run home run, and Burriss laughed uproariously as first base coach Roberto Kelly gave him a push to round the bases. Official scorer Michael Duca consulted with the Elias Sports Bureau and confirmed that Molina would be credited with a home run but Burriss would be credited with the run scored. And Molina got credit for driving in two runs, even though they scored when he technically wasn’t in the game.

You can watch a very fuzzy video of the celebration after the umps reversed their call here.

[Hat tip to Chris Deering]

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 11:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I will stipulate right up front that I have never been a Lance Armstrong fan. I admire him for what he has accomplished on the bike, for biking in this country, and of course for his work for cancer survivors. But my first impression of him from long ago — that he was a self-centered a——-e — has proven to be my enduring impression of him.

Those of you who pay no attention to cycling may not know that the seven-time winner of the Tour de France has announced that he’ll return to racing next season on a limited basis, riding the Tour and a few other events, including the Tour of Georgia here in the USofA.

One unusual aspect of this news is that it comes from Armstrong’s people rather than from a team with which he has reached an agreement (echoes of Brett Favre). Armstrong’s presumptive (there’s that word again) team is Astana, which is essentially a continuation of US Postal/Discovery Channel and has Trek, with which Lance is closely associated, as a sponsor.

Note that the announcement of Lance’s return didn’t come from Astana. Indeed, so far the Astana team folks have been close-mouthed about it (except for George Hincapie, Lance’s main domestique over the years, who managed a smile at the prospect of his boss’s return to the peloton). This seems a bit unusual, and there are indications that Astana was caught off-guard by Lance’s announcement. For all I know, they’re happy as clams about it. But somewhere, deep down, I tend to doubt it.

Continue reading "Lance Returns" »

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 08:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

The visuals aren’t much — it’s from, um, radio — but Scott Simon’s interview with a guy who’s building a Wrigley Field-inspired cemetery for Cubs fans is worth a listen. Click here.

[via the Freakonomics blog]

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 02:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I couldn’t care less about the national medal count at the Olympics, as I tend to see the Olympics as a big track/swimming/gymnastics/etc. meet while the media treat it as a test of national potency and thus a reaffirmation of American greatness when the U.S. does well or as a sign of American decline when the U.S. doesn’t do so well.

But no matter what I think about the medal count, the New York Times website has a seriouslly cool interactive graphic tracing the medal counts all the way back to 1896. To see it for yourself, click here.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 08:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

This amazing photograph shows part of the haul that Toronto police recovered from a raid on a local bike shop. Pictured are stolen bikes in the possession of one shop owner, who had the bikes stashed in various locales — almost 3,000 stolen bikes. (That’s even more than the number of bikes in my basement.) Here is a New York Times story that provides some details. This guy certainly would be Public Enemy Number One on my list!

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 12:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

If you’re watching the track events in the Olympics, notice that when the sprinters get down into their starting blocks, some of them have their left foot back to push off with and others have their right foot back.

Big deal, eh?

Well, it turns out that it matters. The left-foot-backers are putting themselves at a disadvantage, and if they would only read the Washington Post or, now, The Monkey Cage, they would know better. In a relatively long race, it’s not enough of a disadvantage to matter, but in a short sprint — say, the 100-meters race — it can make, say, a tenth of a second difference. And a tenth of a second difference can be the difference between a gold medal and nothing.

How can this be?

Shankar Vedantam, in the Washington Post, lays it out in non-technical terms, in a summary of an article by Adam Eikenberry and James McAuliffe, forthcoming in Acta Psychologica:

…[T]he right hemisphere of the brain … plays a central role in reaction time, whereas the left hemisphere of the brain plays a larger role in overall movement control. When a task is primarily about reaction speed, people tend to be faster with their left hand because it takes less time for the right hemisphere to “talk to itself” than to tell the left hemisphere to move the right hand or foot.

But when it comes to movement — in the case of sprinters, coming off the blocks and beginning the first step — people tend to be faster with the right hand and foot. That’s because the left hemisphere plays a dominant role in movement generally and moving the right side in particular.

And, contrary to my own initial assumption, which was cued by the fact that I’m left-handed/footed/etc., it’s not a matter of laterality. This effect holds for both righties and lefties.

I’m not sure that any of this really matters to 99.44% of us. But if you’re a sprinter, it certainly does. Presumably it would matter to a cyclist, too: Other factors being equal, you’d want to start with your right foot up so you can more rapidly mash the right pedal down and beat your competitors off the line.

For the full text of the Vedantam article, click here.

[Hat tip to Bruce Dickson]

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 01:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Jerome Holtzman (pictured here with Don Zimmer — a great photo), the “dean” of baseball writers, inventor of the “save” statistic, and member of the Baseball Hall of Fame, has passed away. No crying in the press box.

Here is the New York Times obituary.

[Cubbies’ hat tip to Paul Wahlbeck]

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 10:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Now that we’re writing about baseball . . . what do you think of Phil Price’s observation about All-Star games from 1965 to the present (with N indicating National League wins and A indicating American League wins):

NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNANNANAAAAAANNNAAAAATAAAAAA

The “T” indicates a tie (in 2002): unlike regular games, there is no requirement that the All-Star Game continue until somebody wins, and pitchers are reluctant to pitch too many innings and potentially hurt themselves.

I was born into an era in which the National League won every game. Now, the American League wins (or, at least, doesn’t lose) every game. This is happening in a sport where even bad teams beat good teams occasionally, so it’s really mystifying. It would be possible to explain a small edge for one league or the other, that persists for a few years —- the league with the best pitcher will have an advantage, for example, and that pitcher can play year after year —- but these effects can’t come close to explaining the long runs in favor of one team or another. Predicting next year’s winner to be the same as this year’s winner would have correctly predicted 80% of the games in my lifetime…and that’s if we pretend the National League won the tie game in 2002. (If we pretend the American League won it, it’s 84%).

What would be a reasonable statistical model for baseball All-Star games, and why isn’t it something close to coin flips?

Posted by Andrew Gelman at 06:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Red Sox DH David Ortiz. (Note avoirdupois)

What’s the hardest position to play in baseball — the one that requires the greatest combination of skills, smarts, leadership, etc.? There’s obviously no right answer, and we could go around and around about it. At the end of the day, though, my answer would have to be “Catcher.”

And what’s the easiest position to play? Well, duh, the answer to that one would have to be “designated hitter,” wouldn’t it? I mean, lots of those guys look like members of a slow-pitch softball team (that is, 250 pounds seems to be their minimum weight), and the only exercise they get consists of bestirring themselves from the bench every three innings or so to lumber up to the plate and take their cuts.

Okay, now what’s the hardest position to play in basketball? I suspect that it wouldn’t take us as long to come to agreement on this one as it would for baseball. The answer just has to be “point guard.”

What’s my point here? Well, the current issue of Sports Illustrated contains position-by-position salary averages for various sports, and guess what?

The lowest-paid position in baseball: Catcher.

The highest-paid position in baseball: Designated hitter.

The lowest-paid position in basketball: Point guard.

I know, I know: Designated hitters are, for the most part, old guys and therefore better-paid, and home-run hitters, and therefore better-paid. But still, unless they’re getting paid by the pound, all this — not just the DHs, but the catchers and point guards, too — seems a little bit out of whack to me.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 11:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (23)

The other day I posted a lament that I, like millions of others, am being made stupid(er) by Google.

I take it back! I take it all back! I love Google.

The geniuses at Google Maps have created a facility that provides an unbelievably cool rider’s eye view of the entire route of the Tour de France. Not a map, but continuous on-the-ground images of the route for each of the 21 stages. You can click wherever you want to start and later, if you bonk during a mountain stage, you can click out. Missing, of course, are the bikes, the riders, and the millions of fans who line the route, but this is the closest you’re ever going to get to riding the Tour, so no complaints will be permitted

Try it out by clicking on this screen:

Or come back later to Google Maps, here

[Hat tip to Henry Farrell, who spotted this on the Foreign Policy blog]

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 07:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The University of Georgia’s mascot, Uga VI (Uga for University of Georgia, VI because he was sixth in the line of Ugas) has died of congestive heart failure at age ten. Uga VI, extremely handsome (a veritable matinee idol by bulldog standards), was the son of Uga V, the only college mascot to have graced the cover of Sports Illustrated. I don’t care about Georgia’s basketball or football teams, but I used to look in on their games in hopes of catching a glimps of Uga. While I was growing up, my family had two bulldogs, and they were “really” mine and, of course, my mother’s. Bulldogs are a noble breed, and although their looks scare off some people they’re wonderful companions if you can put up with all their snorting, drooling, and gas-passing, which I could. But they do tend to die young.

Long live Uga VII!

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 06:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The old “stirrup theory” of history held that the introduction of the stirrup, by enabling armed forces to mount attacks from horseback, fundamentally shaped the course of human history — an idea that always struck me as interesting but perhaps a bit overblown — sort of like the bird that flaps its wings in Brazil and sets in motion global forces.

Anyway, it’s now being argued that the bicycle was to women’s liberation as the stirrup was to warfare. I tend to take bikes more seriously than stirrups. Read about it here.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 09:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

In a wide array of sports, there’s a marked home field advantage. When you’re playing at home, you’re much more likely to win than when you’re on the road.

Why is this? It’s easy to come up with explanations — sleeping in your own bed and eating home cooking, not having to get stiff and worn out from travel, being cheered on by supportive fans instead of booed by hostile ones, having officials who are intimidated by the home crowd, knowing how to cope with the idiosyncrasies of the playing field itself (the Green Monster at Fenway, the ivy at Wrigley [pictured above]) and so on — and the multitude of possibilities has been grist for the mill of thousands of discussions in sports bars and on sports-talk radio.

As it happens, there’s actually some systematic research on this very question. Not that it makes much difference, because almost everybody “knows” the answer already and isn’t really interested in the facts, and because, as is so often the way with social science research, many of the research findings point in different directions. Anyway, Jonah Lehrer recently did a nice overview of such research for the Boston Globe, here. It’s worth a look.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 11:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Those of us who reside in the nation’s capital are reveling at the very idea of having “our” team, the Washington Nationals, playing in brand-new stadium (pictured above). The team is lousy and the fans are staying away in droves, but at least we can bask in the civic glory of having financed a dandy new playpen for the ballplayers. And now our mayor, who opposed that project while he was a member of the city council, has bought into the idea big-time, having signed onto a plan to spend $125 million or so to help build a new soccer stadium just across the Anacostia from the new ballpark. He’s also said to be flirting with the idea of erecting a new football stadium to try to lure the Washington [insert unmentionable profesional football team name here] back into the District from the crummy 91,000-or-so-seat house that Jack Kent Cooke built just a decade ago out in suburban Landover (nee Raljohn).

The local success story here that everyone is trying to repeat is the Verizon (nee MCI) Center, the basketball arena over on Seventh Street where the local Wizards and Mystics play. They, like the Nationals and the [insert unmentionable professional football team name here], aren’t very good, but the new downtown facility has sparked considerable redevelopment in a previously run-down part of town. That’s great, but what more generally can we learn from it?

Not much, it turns out.

There’s a fairly substantial research literature on this very question, and the results (though inevitably being somewhat mixed — this is social science, after all) give little aid and comfort to all the local developers and civic boosters whose idea of progress stems from an over-active Edifice Complex. Here is a nice piece by Dennis Coates, an economist at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, that splashes cold water all over developers’ claims about the benefits of public financing of sports facilities.

[Hat tip to Scott Adler]

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 08:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)

That’s Michael Avery, an eighth-grader from Lake Sherwood, California. Like many kids his age, Michael likes to play basketball.

After high school, Michael is going to play basketball in college. Not only that: He’s going to play at a perennial basketball powerhouse, the University of Kentucky.

Note that I didn’t just say that young Michael wants to play basketball in college, let alone at the University of Kentucky. I said he’s going to. In fact, he’s already accepted the scholarship offer that Kentucky coach Billy Gillespie extended to him earlier this month.

Now, I’m a close follower of college basketball. But this development — recruiting kids who are still in junior high — takes me completely off guard. I guess I just haven’t been paying attention, but I had no idea that it had come to this.

It shouldn’t have taken me off guard, because it turns out that this isn’t the first time it’s happened. Within the last couple of years, Southern Cal’s coach, Tim Floyd, has inked two middle school students, and Arizona’s Lute Olson has offered schollies to two kids who hadn’t even started eighth grade yet. And the same week that Michael Avery accepted his offer, Gillespie got another commitment for Kentucky, albeit this time from a veritable grey-beard — ninth-grader Vinny Zollo from Greenfield, Ohio. A recruiting analyst is quoted in Sports Illustrated as saying “It’s like an arms race. You’ve got to offer first.” Apparently this is now becoming standard operating procedure in the cutthroat business of recruiting for big-time college sports.

With so many successful programs pursuing this strategy, it occurs to me that academic departments should consider following their lead. If it”s good enough for the athletics department, then why not for the political science department, too? In fact, in my department there’s a very productive married couple who have two young daughters. These girls obviously have the political science genes and they’re growing up in an academically-oriented home. So why wait? Let’s sign ‘em up as faculty members before Columbia or UCSD hears about ‘em!

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 04:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

Every year the NCAA publishes a financial analysis of intercollegiate sports programs. Every year there is much bad news. The newly released NCAA report contains even more bad news than usual. Unprecedentedly bad news, even.

Is this because 2006 (the year on which the new report focuses) was an unprecedentedly bad year for intercollegiate sports? Not really. What happened is that this time around the NCAA tightened up on the reporting criteria and definitions. For example, in reporting gross revenues, many programs had previously thrown in what they received from within the institution (aka “internal revenue”), in addition to the revenues they received from outside via ticket sales, TV contracts, etc. (aka “generated revenue”). Thus, if you were losing big bucks and the school had to bail you out, the bail-out funds would show up simply as revenue. Via such accounting legerdemain, many schools looked like they were balancing their books or even turning a profit, when in fact they were living on subventions from central administration.

Now, though, athletic programs have to distinguish between internal and generated revenue. And guess what? Yup: The dismal economics of big-time college sports just got even more dismal, which is very dismal indeed.

Here are the core findings of the report, as summarized in Inside Higher Ed:

Sports program budgets are growing quickly, as are institutional subsidies. For the 119 universities that compete in the NCAA’s top competitive level, the Football Bowl Subdivision (formerly known as Division I-A), total revenues grew by 25.5 percent from 2004 to 2006, slightly faster than the 23 percent growth in expenses. But in the more important category — generated revenues, those actually earned by athletics departments, excluding other institutional support — rose by only 16 percent over the two-year period.

In the 2006 fiscal year, the latest of three examined in the study, only 19 of the 119 Football Bowl Subdivision institutions had positive net revenue, while for the rest, expenses exceeded generated revenues. (For the entire three-year period, only 16 athletics department turned a net profit.)

The median net loss for all 119 I-A programs in 2006 was $7.265 million. But for the 16 programs that generated more than they spent, the average new revenue was $4.3 million, while the average loss of those with negative net revenue was $8.9 million. That $13 million difference suggests a widening gap between the “haves” and “have-nots” in big-time college football, as the equivalent gap in 2004 was about $11.3 million.

At this point, somebody’s going to pipe up and say, “Okay, but sports programs generate big bucks for their school because of all those alums who relate to the it by following their teams.” That sounds good, but I’ve been following (and occasionally contributing to) the research literature on such issues for many years, and there’s just not much evidence that it’s true and there’s lots of evidence that it’s not. Sports teams — almost invariably men’s teams, and almost invariably football and basketball teams, and especially the ones with the best records year in and year out — do generate big bucks, but the main recipient of those bucks isn’t the school’s general operating fund or the French club or (sigh) the political science department. Rather, it’s the intercollegiate athletics program itself. Which, in a perverse sort of way, is sort of okay, because it saves the school the trouble of sending even more bail-out money over to the athletics folks.

For the full Inside Higher Ed story, click here. If you’re really interested, you can link to the full NCAA report via that story.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 08:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (13)

..Cleveland, according to an analysis on the Sports Illustrated website (click HERE for a ranking of all 30 major league stadiums).

And if you go to Cleveland, you can do the Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame the very same day. This is too good to pass up. Let’s all meet in Cleveland!

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 08:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As a quick follow-up to Henry’s post, here is some polling data on whether various nations should boycott the Beijing Olympics.

Denmark: 50% favor the boycott, 39% oppose it, 11% don’t know

France: 41% favor; 55% oppose; 4% don’t know. (53% would favor a Sarkozy boycott of the opening ceremony.)

Canada: 37% favor; 56% oppose; 7% don’t know.

United States: 31% favor a boycott; 48% favor a boycott of the opening ceremonies by elected officials. [NB: Zogby on-line poll]

Posted by John Sides at 01:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Dan Drezner and Steve Clemons argue it out over whether or not the US should boycott the Beijing Olympics (Steve says no, Dan says that it would be no harm if the West uses the threat of non-attendance to squeeze some concessions from the Chinese). For me, the interesting question is why the Olympics are so politically important, and how their importance seems to be changing. International relations scholars don’t have much to say about the politics of the modern Olympics (there’s a book by Christopher Hill, but that’s about it), but it’s surely an important international institution; as we can see from recent events, states pay a lot of attention to it. This was true of the original Olympic festival in Greece too; Martin Wight identifies the festival as one of the key institutions binding together the Greek city-state system (although the original Olympics had a military truce attached to it, so it was obviously more important in the ways that IR scholars usually measure importance.

The current debacle though seems to mark an important change in the politics of the Olympics. As best I understand it (I am open to corrections if wrong), in the past, Olympics politics have concerned inter-state rivalry, and have been driven by decisions on the part of traditional political elites. The US boycott of the Soviet games in protest against the invasion of Afghanistan in 1980 resulted from a decision by Jimmy Carter, and the tit-for-tat boycott by the Soviets and their allies of the LA games in 1984 resulted from a top level decision too. The dynamic driving the Beijing Olympics seems to me to be rather different; what we are seeing is that the politics of boycott is being driven by mass-publics, and most recently by protestors, rather than by political leaders. In the absence of the public unrest that has culminated in the recent protests in Paris, I doubt very much that Western political leaders would be muttering about not showing at the opening ceremonies - the geopolitical stakes of market access etc are likely more important to them than the fate of Tibetans. But given the widespread public reaction in the West, even leaders like Gordon Brown, who obviously want very much to attend, are having to insulate themselves from public pressures by taking other actions liable to annoy China (such as meeting with the Dalai Lama). In short, I think we are seeing how public opinion and organized cross-national opposition can create significant constraints on the ability of leaders to respond to what they see as the geostrategic necessity of keeping China happy. This is, as best as I am aware, a new phase in the development of the Olympics.

Posted by Henry at 12:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Thinking about attending the NCAA Final Four this year, but don’t have tickets and don’t want to pay scalpers’ prices, which sometimes run up into the thousands of dollars? Help is on the way, in the form of (yet another) futures market. For a small fee, you can buy “reservations” to follow your favorite team to the Final Four in the event that they make it. After you purchase, you can, if you wish, sell your reservations if the team’s fortunes are rising as the field narrows down to four, and score a nice piece of change. If your team falls short and you’ve held onto the reservation, you’re out the nominal cost of the reservation, but that’s it. Or if you’re a steadfast fan and have held onto the reservation and if your team turns out to be one of the charmed four, then off you to to cheer them on to victory, with tickets you’ve purchased at face value plus the reservations charge. On the other hand, if you didn’t purchase a reservation in the first place, you can enter the reservations market and purchase one at whatever someone is willing to sell it for at that moment — and that will entitle you to buy the tickets themselves at face value.

Pretty sweet, eh? Well, yah. But, hmm, doesn’t this sound a little like, er, ticket scalping, and isn’t that illegal in most places? Or maybe it’s not scalping — just plain old gambling? Hmm, I can’t decide. So who’s running this ticket-scalping-or-is-it-gambling operation? Why, it turns out to be a money-making deal for that self-righteous overseer of the morality of college athletes, the NCAA itself. If the NCAA catches an athlete consorting with gamblers or if it finds a player’s complimentary tickets in the hands of scalpers, it’s bye-bye time for the player’s college hoops career, and it’s public humiliation for the transgressor. But let the NCAA itself run the show, and it’s just free enterprise, and who could object to something as all-American as that?

Read all about it here.

[Hat tip to Scott Adler]

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 09:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Do the test. (And look out for cyclists.)

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 10:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I’m a biker.

No, I’m not that kind of biker. I’m this kind of biker:

(Okay, that’s not me. Notwithstanding the amazing resemblance, it’s actually Mario Cipollini, The Lion King, the most stylish cyclist in the history of the world. My role model.)

Anyway, I’m a “cyclist.” And a racer at that. Why, quelle surprise!, here I am, so very splendid in my red team kit — though not quite so splendid, I am forced to concede, as Mario Cipollini.

(More pictures and the headlined scary video are below the fold.)

Continue reading "The Joy of Bike Racing -- A Photo Essay with a Scary Video at the End" »

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 07:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Those who read this post a couple of days ago will be aware that the fate of the U.S. economy was riding on the outcome of yesterday’s Super Bowl game. Fortunately, God watches over small children, dumb animals, and the USA.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 09:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Those of us who detest professional football nonethless have a vested interest in the outcome of the upcoming Super Bowl. A victory for the New York Giants should line our pockets with money — or at least help keep our TIAA-CREF accounts solvent.

That, at least, is the implication of the Super Bowl Predictor of Stocks, which has correctly called the direction — up or down — of the following year’s Dow Jones Industrial Average 33 of 41 times, an 81% success rate.

The logic of the predictor is simple: If a team from the original NFL wins, the market is destined to go up; if one of the old AFL teams wins, the Dow is about to sink.

The Patriots of New England, one of the old AFL teams, are heavily favored. Even though I’m a devout non-fan of the sport, I’ll be pocketbook-cheering for an upset.

[Via William Power, “Win for the Patriots Is Win for ‘Da Bears,’” Wall Street Journal, 29 January, p. C2]

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 10:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

This morning’s Wall Street Journal contains a round-up of recent research by economists (here, full access gated) about various aspects of football and basketball, focusing on papers being presented at the annual meeting of the American Economics Association in New Orleans, which is going on right now. (The AEA meeting, as it happens, is being held at the same hotel where the LSU players — in town for tonight’s national championship game against TOSUFF (click here for an explanation) — are staying.) Justin Lahart’s article contains, among other things, descriptions of papers (whose authors include the inevitable Steven Levitt and the increasingly inevitable Justin Wolfers) about the advisability of going for it on fourth down (don’t) and the manner in which sports bettors take new information into account (rapidly but in a biased manner). A nice overview, at least for the capitalists among you who subscribe to the Journal.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 02:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Among sports fans, everyone seems to have an opinion about everything, including some of the more arcane strategic aspects of the game — whether the team should have punted on fourth and short or gone for it, whether it should have worked the ball into the post or sent up a barrage of three-pointers, whether it should have hit-and-run or gone for the long ball. Bill James makes a nice living doing the numbers on issues like these in baseball, and Jamesian modes of analysis have spread into other major sports as well.

In college football, a team’s chances for end-of-season glory raise another set of strategic issues about which conventional wisdom speaks confidently — so confidently, indeed, that it almost seems like a waste of time to check things out systematically. Sometimes, though, what is widely regarded as fact turns out, upon closer inspection, not to be true at all.

The pieces of conventional wisdom under consideration here arise because in big-time college football the final national standings are determined by poll rather than directly by on-field performance. That being the case, every year controversies flare about why certain teams end being ranked higher than other, ostensibly equally deserving teams. And every year, too, pundits and everyday fans trot out the same tired pieces of conventional wisdom.

In a recent paper, economist Trevon Logan (a faculty member at, appropriately, TOSUFF [The Ohio State University Football Factory]) puts this conventional wisdom to the test. His conclusions?

Continue reading "Football Schedules -- The Conventional Wisdom Is Wrong Again" »

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 09:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If, when I was a twelve-year-old growing up in a small midwestern town, you’d have told me that eventually I’d live within a few miles of two major league baseball teams, I would have been unimaginably happy. If you’d also told me that I would take no interest in these teams or, for that matter, in baseball itself, I wouldn’t have believed you. Baseball was that important to me. Now it’s not. Last season I watched, in person on on TV, a grand total of zero games, and this season I probably will do the same.

My current lack of interest in matters pertaining to the National Pastime explains why until yesterday I knew nothing about Bill James’s “Hall of Fame Monitor.” Bill James, for those who don’t already know, invented and is the foremost practicioner of sabermetrics, the statistical analysis of baseball records. It turns out, according to a Wall Street Journal article by Allen St. John, that James has been ranking today’s major leaguers in terms of their prospects for being granted entry to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY, where the sport’s greatest players are enshrined. I don’t know exactly how he does this, but in principle it sounds pretty straightforward. One could, for example, fit a logistic regression model for past players, using their single-season and/or lifetime records to predict whether they were subsequently granted admittance to the Hall; then one could substitute into the model the records of current players to determine the probability that they, too, would get in. Of course, in such an exercise certain assumptions come into play — perhaps most crucially, the assumptions that pertinent factors haven’t been left out of the model and that future selections will be based on the same considerations that have prevailed in the past. Those assumptions may prove to be inaccurate. For example, highest-ranked among today’s players is the embattled Barry Bonds, who would be a shoo-in based on his stats but could get blackballed based on his steroid-related misdeeds and, for that matter, his dour demeanor.

A player who scores at least 100 points on James’s scale has a 50-50 chance of making it into the Hall; those who score 130 or above are considered very serious contenders.

Here’s the list of leaders among position players:

Continue reading "Decking the Hall, Sabermetrically" »

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 11:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)