Wednesday, October 31, 2007

Marketing a Winner 

Most pre-season marketing campaigns promise some pizazz but not much more. Come see the Amazing Mets! Blast off with the Rockets! Let's go crazy with the Wild! This one from the Arena Football League is a little different:
How confident are the Arizona Rattlers that they'll make the playoffs in 2008? They are offering a money-back guarantee to their season-ticket holders: A trip to the playoffs or a full refund, no strings attached.

"We are putting millions of dollars on the line," said Rattlers managing partner Brett Bouchy. "However, we have full confidence in our new coaching staff, and look forward to returning to the playoffs in 2008."

The campaign, unveiled Tuesday, is unique in the fact that there are no caveats, clauses or fine print. If the Rattlers do not make the playoffs, fans will be refunded 100 percent of the cost of their season tickets by the team -- period.

...The Rattlers were 4-12 last season and missed the playoffs.
I'd say that's sticking your neck out. Maybe if they fail, the team can make it up on concessions. ;)

Thanks to Kurt R for the link.

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permalink posted by Skip Sauer @ 8:49 AM

Stadiums, economic development and slot machines 

Here in Maryland we are in what seems to be a never-ending battle over the merits of allowing slot machines into the state. The original battleground was whether slots at Maryland's horse race tracks could save the declining horse-racing industry and generate revenues for the state which seems to be in a chronic deficit situation. The budget deficit is an interesting phenomenon because the state ranks first among the states in per capita income and generally falls in the bottom half for spending.

But now we get the conjunction of slots and stadium led economic development. In today's Baltimore Sun, an article discusses where the city of Baltimore would like to put a slots parlor. The location is just a stone's throw from M and T Bank Stadium, home to the Baltimore Ravens.

Check out the photograph taken from that location showing the warehouses on property seized by the city with the M and T Bank Stadium looming in the background. The picture clearly shows the (lack of) economic development the 10 year old stadium brought to that South Baltimore neighborhood. Also look at the map in the story. I especially like the "Temporary Greyhound Bus Station". As we all know, bus stations are one of the significant benefits stadium led-development advocates claim will result from their projects.

permalink posted by Dennis Coates @ 8:16 AM

Thursday, October 25, 2007

Ticket Prices and Team Quality 

The Kansas City Royals have raised ticket prices for next season by 15%. This announcement comes on the heels of another not-so stellar season. It also comes after taxpayers in Jackson County* approved a tax increase to help pay for renovations to Royals Stadium. So given that background, it's no surprise that Royals senior vice president of business operations Kevin Uhlich has trotted out that good ol' war horse:

“Dayton Moore’s mission is to make this into a contending team again. We haven’t been to the playoffs in 22 years. To get back there, we needed to improve our international presence, our scouting, add minor-league teams. This requires money, and frankly, we couldn’t do that with our present budget.”

We sports economists are skeptical about such claims about the connection between ticket prices and player/scouting/etc. payroll. A more likely claim is that there is correlation between ticket prices and payroll, but no causal relationship. Both are driven by an increase in demand for the game. This increase pushes up ticket prices and it increases the demand for players etc. which, in turn, drives their salaries upward.

Colleagues Ken Park, Soonhwan Lee, and I have a paper that we are revising that looks at the long-run elasticity of ticket demand of individual baseball teams using an attendance time-series demand model for several Major League Baseball teams (rough draft here. I hope to have a revised draft up soon). We estimate the Kansas City Royals have a long-run elasticity of demand of 1.46. If so, then without an increase in the demand for tickets, an increase ticket prices generates less revenue for the team, not more.

So something doesn't add up. Could it be that Kansas City is simply seeing a surge in demand for their games, a surge that seems to be league-wide for the most part, even given how poorly the Royals have played over the recent past (0.426 WPCT in 2007, 0.383 in 2006, and 0.346 in 2005 along with last-place finishes in the AL Central in each of those years)? They drew less than 18,000 fans per game in 2005 and 2006 but almost 20,000 fans per game in 2007. Could it be that they are simply adjusting their prices towards some equilibrium in response to a demand shift?

*Jon Meyers noted in the comments that it was the voters of Jackson County, Mo. that passed the tax increase to renovate Kaufmann Stadium, not Johnson County. I have made the correction and I thank Jon for noting my mistake.

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permalink posted by Phil Miller @ 7:35 AM

Wednesday, October 24, 2007

MLB, Same as it Ever Was 

The arrival of the Colorado Rockies to play at Fenway tonight in game one of the World Series is sure to be heralded as sign that the new era of baseball economics is working. One writer at mlb.com goes so far as to say "Avoid logic at all cost... Parity = removal of logic." We won't avoid logic here at TSE, nosiree!

One can't argue with the idea that lessons can be drawn from the Rockies' success. They are relatively low in the spending rankings, listed as having the 25th highest of 30 payrolls in the 2007 database at USAToday.com. Like the 1999-2004 vintage Oakland Athletics, they built a successful, low budget team around a different model from the typical organization. But what does history say about the upstart Rockies? Are they a unique harbinger of change?

To examine the question, lets consider the data on playoff appearances since the league expanded to 30 teams ten years ago, and how playoff success matches up with spending. The top spending team during this period are the NY Yankees, who have an immaculate 10 appearances over ten years. Third in the spending category and second with 8 appearances are the Braves, whose average payroll rank is 6. Second in spending (average rank 5.7) and third in appearances are the Red Sox, with 6. The Red Sox and Yanks are so dominant that no other team from the AL East has managed a single playoff appearance in the past ten years.

What may seem novel about this year are the playoff appearances of three teams with below median payrolls. But this is not out of step with recent history. In 2000, there were also three playoff teams with below-median payrolls, and there has been at least one such team among the eight contenders in each year since: two in 2001, two in 2002, three in 2003, one in 2004, one in 2005, and three in 2006. It is hard to discern a trend in these figures.

The Red Sox and Yankees account for four of the last nine world series champions, and the Sox are heavily favored to win again. But even if the Rockies pull off the upset (they are currently given a 33% chance at tradesports), you don't have to go back very far to find a close parallel. The 2004 Marlins upset the league's biggest spender (the Yankees, of course) with a team ranked 25th in payroll.

Spending money on players doesn't guarantee a world championship, of course. But as the Sox and Yanks demonstrate, plenty of money plenty well spent sure increases your chances.

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permalink posted by Skip Sauer @ 9:09 AM

Sandomir on the Rangers vs. NHL Lawsuit 

We previously discussed the NY Rangers antitrust suit against the NHL, demanding that they be able to run a website independent of the other 29 teams. Like MLB and the NFL, the NHL has moved to a "unitized" internet business model. Here is NY Times sports media beat writer Richard Sandomir's take on the suit:
The rhetoric of the Rangers, and their parent, Madison Square Garden, features phrases like "unrestricted power," "illegal cartel," "seizure," "crackdown" and "blatant expropriation of team assets."

There is a Marxist twist to this. Not Karl, but Groucho. The Rangers could well have cited in their legal papers the far funnier Marx, who once said, "I wouldn’t belong to any club that would have me for a member."
Sandomir has some useful facts and analysis as well. Recommended.

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permalink posted by Skip Sauer @ 7:29 AM

Saturday, October 20, 2007

MLB Money Machines 

Here are two stories on megabucks in MLB. First, estimated revenue for 2007 tops the $6 billion mark, to go along with this year's record attendance. Bud Selig attributes the results to parity: "those numbers are astounding. A lot of it can be attributed to all of the new ballparks. But competitive balance is the primary reason." Tom Hardicourt has the story.

With this revenue gusher as support, could it be that Alex Rodriguez is actually worth $30 million a year over ten years? Chris Isidore thinks so. Isidore's analysis is usually not far off the mark. But banking on continued revenue growth to offset the inevitable decline in productivity over ten years seems a foolish bet to me. Rodriguez is now 32 years old and is thus near his peak productivity (statistically speaking, a 32 year old ballplayer is past his peak). A five year contract makes more sense to me.

permalink posted by Skip Sauer @ 8:37 AM

Thursday, October 18, 2007

Why Study Sports Economics? 

I am a bit late to the party on this. About two weeks ago, Justin Wolfers wrote his thoughts on why people study sports economics. Summarizing Wolfers' key points:

  1. Sports provide unique opportunities to test economic theories.
  2. Sports shapes broader national debates.
  3. Professional sports are an important part of the economy.
  4. Sports participation is an important activity.
  5. Sports provides a useful teaching metaphor.
  6. Doing research on sports is fun.

JC Bradbury at Sabernomics adds one of the primary reasons to study sports:

I agree with all of these, but I think he is missing one. Sports markets are themselves unique and interesting. For example, Simon Rottenberg’s curiosity about baseball’s reserve clause—how it affected the allocation of talent across a league—led him to discover (nearly) the Coase Theorem before Ronald Coase. Mohamed El-Hodiri and James Quirk were the first model the unique structure economic structure of sports leagues, which I think economists still do not fully understand. (There are other examples, but I am on my way to a meeting.)

Add to that Walter Neale's 1964 QJE paper on the "peculiar" economics of sports. Neale noted that the best position for a typical firm to have is monopoly. In sports, a monopoly spells disaster (who will you play????). That peculiarity is interesting to think about and study.

Sports leagues are interesting per-se because they are, essentially, cooperative arrangements that blend single-entity styled cooperation with cartel-styled cooperation with a dash of economies-of-scale cooperation (for example, having the league handle team websites, as in MLB, to standardize their development and to avoid duplicating costs). These cooperative arrangements are also interesting to think about and study.

The labor market for talent is also interesting. Modeling the market as a competitive labor market gives us some insights on wages using a simple and familiar model, but it has its shortcomings. One of the shortcomings deals with the question of "does all the available talent play in the league?" In leagues such as the Bundseliga or the English Premier League, as I understand them, a lot of top-notch talent plays in other national leagues throughout the world. In that sport's labor market, there are many teams competing for that talent and there are many top-notch players, so the competitive market model is at least a plausible way to think about labor market for soccer.

But what of leagues like the NFL? There are no other similar leagues anywhere in the world that play this game at this level. It is accurate to assume that all the best available football talent plays in the NFL and if a team wants to sign additional players, it must lure them from other teams in the league. That raises some interesting questions on competitive balance, among other issues.

So why study sports? Wolfers makes valid and useful points, but his list is incomplete. Many of us study sports because they are simply interesting.

Dave Berri has some thoughts here.

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permalink posted by Phil Miller @ 10:55 AM

Wednesday, October 17, 2007

A Better Football Poll? 

The BCS has finally made its appearance and we now “know” that Ohio State is the number one team in the land.

Okay, we really don’t “know”. The BCS combines two things people don’t like: Computer polls and Human polls. Hostility towards computers picking teams is pretty widespread. And it turns out, some people aren’t too thrilled with the human polls either. Here is what Todd McShay of ESPN The Magazine (October 22, p. 98) had to say about the coaches and media who vote in the polls:

“… voters are right now irresponsible. Coaches can’t pay enough attention and end up having grad assistants vote. Media members have to focus on the teams they cover. It’s just insane that the NCAA doesn’t have a paid group of former coaches and players whose full-time job is to watch games, then rank the teams.”

What McShay is asking for sounds quite similar to the Harris Interactive Poll. The big difference is that it doesn't appear that the NCAA is paying for the Harris poll. So would the world be a better place if the NCAA paid for a poll?

Let’s think about this in terms of costs and benefits. McShay wants the NCAA to hire a group of former coaches and players to watch college football games. Let’s imagine the NCAA pays each coach or player $10,000 per year to do this job (which is a very low wage for a full-time occupation). If 100 coaches and players are hired, the NCAA poll is going to cost $1,000,000. That seems like a pretty substantial cost.

Now what are the benefits? Presumably we are now going to have a poll that is more “legitimate.” Experts are now going to focus their attention on watching all the games. And consequently, we are now going to “know” who the best team is in the land.

But is this really true? Here are just a few of the problems with this suggestion.

1. Even if these people are paid to watch football all Saturday, they cannot possibly watch all the teams. So every voter is still going to have gaps in their knowledge.

2. And even if you could watch all the games (which you can’t), the sample of games is too small to determine the best team. For example, who is the better team, South Florida or Ohio State? Voters now say Ohio State. Computers say South Florida. Who’s right? Right now Ohio State has played seven games while South Florida has played six. But these games were against completely different opponents. So not only is each sample too small to tell us much, we don’t even have two samples that are comparable.

3. Beyond these technical problems is an economic issue. Costs for a firm are justified because they lead, either directly or indirectly, to a revenue stream. But how does having McShay’s poll enhance the revenues of the NCAA? Will more people go to the games because they believe in McShay’s poll? Will this lead to more television viewers? One could even argue that having a poll that is less controversial would actually reduce the attention paid to the NCAA, and therefore reduce revenues.

In the end, I think it would be “insane” for the NCAA to follow McShay’s suggestion. In fact, the decision to let people provide free polls to the NCAA seems perfectly rational and reasonable. The current arrangement increases attention paid to the sport and hence boost revenues. And with a cost of zero, every member of the NCAA has to love these polls.

permalink posted by David Berri @ 1:43 AM

Monday, October 15, 2007

Sports economists win Nobel prize 

OK, not quite, but the work of Leonid Hurwicz, Eric Maskin and Roger Myerson has much relevance to sports economics and the design of sporting contests such as leagues, championships and so on. Their key insights relate to the design of mechanisms when agents have private information. The economic framework for analysing these problems (e.g. ensuring that rules are “incentive compatible”, i.e. the payoff to breaking them is not greater than obeying them) was laid down by these guys, and insights into the regulation of monopolies and so on were important consequences of their work. It’s not hard to think of a whole host of current sports issues to which their work is relevant: incentives and revenue sharing; creating mechanisms to prevent match fixing; doping. Moreover, the notion of a sports competition itself can be thought of as a mechanism designed to elicit maximum effort from contestants.

permalink posted by Stef Szymanski @ 5:36 PM

Thursday, October 11, 2007

An Odd Ruling in Spain 

The facts:
In the UK, players can sign professional contracts at 16, two years earlier than in Spain, with the result that a number of Spanish teenagers have joined Premier League teams in the past four years.
The decision:
Barcelona yesterday won a £2.1 million lawsuit against Fran Merida, Arsenal's 17-year-old midfield player, which could have serious implications for other clubs in Britain.

The court in Spain ruled that Merida, who quit Barcelona after eight years in 2005 and joined Arsenal less than a year later, had infringed his contract with the Primera Liga club.
How can you breach a contract that by law you are unable to sign? Moreover, how can you be held personally liable? My hunch is that Barcelona's suit aims to get the law changed to protect their investments in young players. Nevertheless, the court's ruling seems bizarre.

permalink posted by Skip Sauer @ 4:38 PM

Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Root, Root, Root for the Green Team? 

Brendan Koerner has an article Slate Magazine with the great title, Are the Yankees Bad for the Environment? The fun title is a bit spoiled by a distinctly mediocre economic analysis of the environmental impact of the "Big Four" professional sports. Basically, the article creates back-of-the-envelope calculations for the amount of energy used at a stadium or arena for a single game as well as the energy used in transportation to and from the stadium. NFL games, with the highest average single game attendances, create the biggest carbon footprint per game while MLB teams, with the largest annual attendances are deemed least environmentally friendly over the course of a season.

Of course, the biggest problem with the analysis is that the writer implicitly assumes that in the absence of sporting events, fans would simply have stayed at home with the AC and lights off dining on vegetables grown in the backyard and cooked in a solar oven. In other words, the article calculates gross environmental impact instead of net environmental impact just as economic impact studies published by proponents of publicly financed stadiums generally publish gross rather than net economic impact figures for frachises and stadiums. This error causes the author to almost laughably conclude that Arena football is the most environmentally friendly sport due to low attendances and small arenas.

permalink posted by Professor Vic @ 7:49 AM

Tuesday, October 09, 2007

On James, Balance, and Baseball Research 

While the post below is critical of James' approach to the question of research on competitive balance, it is something of a typical academic's complaint: we've been there and done that and you didn't tip your hat to us, etc. etc.

But the premise of James' call for a change in the direction of baseball research is absolutely sound. Many in the media, and Bud Selig, but not Hal Bodley, are singing the praises of "parity," as if the shrinking gap between the best and worst clubs this year is responsible for MLB's record attendance.

I'm on the record (podcast, at 2:00 mark) as being skeptical of this claim. As I state, I've "looked at the data" but that is no substitute for a careful, sustained research effort on the question. The consequences of tinkering with the rules of the game and the rules on the business side are potentially serious. James is right that the question of parity in baseball should be, will be given close attention in the coming years by baseball researchers, and even baseball professors, as Bloomberg Radio host Tom Keene described me last week, twice!

permalink posted by Skip Sauer @ 12:38 PM

Bill James on Competitive Balance 

Bill James is bored with basketball:

The NBA's problem is that the underlying mathematics of the league are screwed up. In every sport, there is an element of predetermination and an element of randomness in the outcomes. Who will win the championship next year is not entirely a crapshoot. We know that Kentucky has a better chance of winning the NCAA basketball title than Nebraska does - next year, or in 2019. If we knew with certainty who was going to win the title next year, then we could say that the championship was 100 percent predetermined, 0 percent random.

In the NBA, the element of predetermination is simply too high. Simply stated, the best team wins too often. If the best team always wins, then the sequence of events leading to victory is meaningless. Who fights for the rebound, who sacrifices his body to keep the ball from rolling out of bounds doesn't matter. The greater team is going to come out on top anyway.

He proposes a solution for this problem: to tweak the rules in order to increase the randomness of the outcomes. One solution is to go "back to shorter playoff series" in which upsets are more probable. In other words, a half-step towards the knockout structure of the wildly popular NCAA basketball tournament.

More generally, James calls for studies of what makes leagues, as opposed to teams, click.
What is the "perfect balance" point, at which leagues tend most to thrive? I don't know, because it hasn't been studied.

Do leagues thrive when the best teams are in the biggest cities? Or is it actually better for the league if the best teams are in smaller cities, like a Green Bay, which can "adopt" the team and make it its own?

Do leagues grow rapidly in periods of innovation and development, or do leagues prosper more in periods of stability? Is it better for a league if the player provides his own equipment, or is it better for the league if the league controls the equipment?

Nobody really knows.

We've spent a long time studying what is good for the Red Sox, the Patriots, the Celtics. The issue of what is good for leagues is virgin territory. It's time to step back and look at the bigger picture. People ask me all the time: Where is baseball research going in the next generation? This is where it's going.
These are interesting questions that deserve careful study. But while people have been complaining about the "meaninglessness" of NBA games for decades, the league continues to prosper. As Dave Berri noted a while back:
If the argument [on the importance of competitive balance] is to be believed, the NBA should be dying at the gate. But this season the NBA set a record for attendance. And this follows the 2004-05 campaign where the previous record was set.

So what do we know? The NBA does appear to have a problem with competitive balance. The NBA does not, though, have a problem with attendance.
The answer to Dave's question -- what do we know? -- is about the same as Bill James'. Not much. There are a good many mysteries associated with the popularity of sport, and particularly the tremendous worldwide increase in the popularity of league sport over the past half-century. But while the answers are elusive, the study of competitive balance is not "virgin territory." Anyone answering the call of Bill James (and perhaps Bill himself) might profit from using google scholar, a fabulous little tool. The result it delivers is not consistent with the notion that this is "virgin territory:"


At 3,290 results, the scholarly literature on competitive balance is small relative to, say the literature on the "minimum wage." But it is a start, and there are some well known results. One tentative conclusion from people who have been thinking about this issue for some time (i.e. most of us), is that while competitive balance is clearly essential in some degree, the payoff function around the optimum may be really flat. The two most successful leagues in the world, the NFL and EPL, have vastly different degrees of balance, suggesting other factors are likely much more important in generating fan interest (there is lots of discussion and speculation in the posts collected here).

Bill James understands what it's like to bark in the dark, so it is both odd and unfortunate that he'd pontificate erroneously on a subject in which he is late to the party. Yes, the issues are interesting and may even be important, so the call for study is welcome. But let's not forget that some of the hard work is already underway.

Thanks to co-blogger Dave Berri for sending the link. Dave offers commentary along similar lines (and has primacy rights, whatever they may be), along with a compact list of references at Wages of Wins.

Update: See this post for a concise statement of what I think is absolutely correct in Bill James' article.

permalink posted by Skip Sauer @ 11:09 AM

Monday, October 08, 2007

Facts and Figures 

Just for the record, here are some pieces from the past week with notable information. From Austin, Eric Dexheimer paints a picture of "The Longhorn Economy." Where the budget has now crossed the $100 million mark, or $210,000 per student athlete. Tuition, room and board are about $7.6 million, relatively small potatoes. "Class checkers " and "quality control" supervisors run about $30,000 per year, each. Plenty of swag, and la de dah, 'there's a lake of stew and of whiskey too, you can paddle all around 'em in a big canoe, in the Big Rock Candy Mountains.' Until you get arrested, that is. (Hat tip to Tom in Houston).

Also of note from last week, Chris Isidore tallies the cost of the Mets' collapse at CNNMoney.com. Depending on how far the Mets could go, the figure runs from about $1 million to$15 million, not much by Texas standards ;). One of the nice things in Isidore's piece, and worth copying down, is his account of how the collective bargaining agreement defines the distribution of post-season revenues between teams and players. Even the Mets, as one of the four second-place teams to not make the post-season, get a small sliver of it.

permalink posted by Skip Sauer @ 7:49 AM

Saturday, October 06, 2007

"Sports Autonomy" in the European Union 

Greg Mankiw notes a BBC story on FIFA President Sepp Blatter's latest missive on autonomy for sporting organizations in the Europe. Blatter and his comrades want a rule restricting the number of foreign players on a team, ideally a "6 + 5 system," the equivalent of a local content rule. The title of Greg's post, "The Latest in Trade Restrictions," neatly captures the essence of Blatter's ploy, although though this issue has brewing for some time.

Phil Miller pointed this out and asked a sports economist's question: what I thought such a rule would do to competitive balance. A complete answer would require an examination of just how binding a rule such as a 6 domestic player minimum would be throughout Europe. But in the English Premier League, it is obvious that the best teams are very well stocked with the best foreign players. Arsenal - currently on top of the league standings - put out an all-foreigner side these days more often than not. The proposed rule is aimed directly at them, and the other big English clubs. The constraint would bind on them, and some of their top foreign players would move to clubs that are historically weaker. But the next best alternative is likely still in England -- the EPL is the world's richest league, with the most at stake and hence the highest demand for talent. Offsetting that flow would be English players moving to the top clubs. Within England, the talent gap between the top and bottom clubs would shrink.

TSE has been following the autonomy issue in the EU for some time. The EU says sport does not require exemptions to rules governing commerce. Blatter objects, but his "autonomy" argument is weak. He states that "players are more artists than workers," an echo of "baseball is entertainment, not commerce" in the flawed Supreme Court decision which gave MLB its antitrust exemption. Moreover, he says this as if English artists could be blocked from painting in Paris under French Law (they can't, as such a rule would breach EU competition policy). And further, Blatter claims that "football players are not employees in the conventional sense of the term. You need 11 of them on the pitch, and it is not at all the same thing as being an employee in a given company." What an absurd, shameless statement!

As I said in June, I think the real purpose behind the autonomy ploy is to protect the domestic only league restriction that governs European soccer.
The home-grown requirements are not exactly anti-trust issues, but still require exemption from EU competition rules. Regardless, the push to protect that rule is a smokescreen to protect UEFA's "domestic-only" rule for league competition. That is the rule which prohibits, for example, Belgium, Holland, and Scotland from forming a league and actually generating some decent competition among their larger clubs. EU guidelines clearly prohibit such nonsense, yet the domestic-only leagues persist.
Stefan Szymanski, has some thoughts and links to related issues of governance in European Football here. The comments of Arsenal's Arsene Wenger on this issue, as usual, are also worth reading.

permalink posted by Skip Sauer @ 11:36 AM

Thursday, October 04, 2007

18 Minutes of Me, & More Moneyball 

I talked with Tom Keene on Bloomberg Radio's "On The Economy" program Tuesday evening (the direct link to the podcast is here). The discussion was on the economics of baseball, record-setting attendance, the joys of parity -- and my strong suspicion that they are vastly over-rated in the current discussion -- and lots on Moneyball-related issues. It was a very pleasant discussion. But when Tom asked me about the failure of the Mets to make the playoffs, I naively used the word "catastrophe." And though we spent all of 20 seconds on the Mets, the headline for the show is "Sauer, Economist, Calls Mets' Collapse a Catastrophe." Color me amused.

Those of you interested in the nitty gritty of the Moneyball discussion may want to read a recent paper written with Jahn Hakes. In "The Moneyball Anomaly and Payroll Efficiency", Jahn and I argue that the mis-pricing of on-base percentage is tied to "plate discipline." We extend the period of analysis of our 2006 paper to over 20 years, from 1986-2006. We find that returns to plate discipline are weak prior to 1995, become sporadically significant in the late 1990s, and increase sharply in 2004 and 2005. The paper is forthcoming in the International Journal of Sport Finance, in a special issue focused on the Moneyball theme. Ours is surely not the last word on the subject.

permalink posted by Skip Sauer @ 8:36 AM

Tuesday, October 02, 2007

Election Promises and Sports Funding 

With the date of the Australian federal election expected to be called soon (Prime Minister Howard declared he wouldn't announce the date last week because it was Grand Final week in the Australian Football League and the National Rugby League), here is an interesting story by Josh Gordon of The Age newspaper in Melbourne.

The Age has estimated that the Federal Government has promised at least $129 million in funding for sport-related matters, and the Federal Opposition has promised at least $32 million. To put this in context, the AFL (the most popular league in Australia) generated about $270 million in revenue in 2007; though many of the election promises relate to funding for capital works (including plans to maintain the water supply to sporting ovals through the massive drought gripping this nation).

permalink posted by Robert Macdonald @ 9:05 PM

Congratulations to the Rockies 

While many pundits expound on the Mets' phenomenal collapse and the Phillies' race to the top of the NL East, few had paid much attention to the rise of the Rockies to claim the NL wild card spot. The Rockies won 14 of their last 15 games, the last 14 of which came against division brethren. More importantly, those 14 were against teams that finished with winning records. You can't say that about the Phillies. You can't say that about the Cubs. You can't even say that about the Mets, which makes their collapse even more mind-boggling. Give the Rockies their due. They had a great finish to the season against some tough customers and they had a miracle comeback last night.

Unfortunately that finish will come with an asterisk in the minds of some. It looked to me as if Matt Holiday did not touch home plate to score the winning run in the bottom of the 13th. His hand clearly was knocked off the plate by Padre catcher Michael Barrett and Holliday's hand was blocked from the umpire's view by Barrett's foot. The umpire, judging by his delayed and casual call, wasn't sure if he touched home plate. If he did, it was by the oil on his fingertips and it is tough to see how the umpire can give the benefit of the doubt to the Rockies. Maybe this is evidence of home team bias on the part of the umpire. Had the game been played in, say, the Canary Islands, would the call have been reversed? We'll never know. Likewise, we will never know how the game would have played out had Holliday been called out.

Still, it was an exciting game and a great conclusion to the Rockies season.

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permalink posted by Phil Miller @ 5:51 PM