Wednesday, December 05, 2007
MLB's Hall of Fame Shame
As executive director the players union, Marvin Miller single-handedly (in the sense of being a uniquely strategic and effective leader) won freedom of contract for major league baseball players by obliterating the odious "for life" interpretation of baseball's monopsonistic reserve clause. In doing so he erased much of the damage from one of the most bizarre and inexplicable Supreme Court Decisions in our country's history (The Federal League Case of 1922), breaking a logjam that subsequent courts and congresses could not breach.
More than any person I can think of, Miller merits a place in the Hall of Fame. Why is he not there? Pettiness, it seems. Helyar provides the background to this year's tally, along with commentary from Miller himself.
Miller's leadership reformed the reserve clause system. This led to a significant transfer of income to players from owners, who were ultimately forced to pay market prices. The owners responded with a twenty year long, Sisyphus-like ordeal of lockouts and strong-arm tactics in an attempt to turn back the clock in the labor market. Miller and the players were unfairly tarred by the media's brush throughout this period. Yet the game did not suffer from free agency, as economics implies. Indeed, the commissioner himself now proclaims the financial state of the game to be better than ever.When I called Miller at his Upper West Side apartment in New York on Monday night, he wasn't seething about the Hall of Fame vote. He was listening to the soundtrack of "Guys and Dolls" and letting his wife, Terry, handle the seething. But he, too, had a sense of deja vu.
"They seem to be the same kind of small-minded, vicious people as the owners were when I came in," he told me, though, ever the cool, rational man, he wasn't taking it personally."I'm only mad at myself," he said. "After the first time on the ballot, I should have just withdrawn my name from consideration. My judgment of my chances was, 'Never.'"
But Terry Miller and others talked him out of it. That first time, he drew 44 percent of the votes. And, indeed, he climbed to 63 percent the next time around, just 10 votes shy of what he needed for the 75 percent that would get him in.
Kuhn [MLB's commissioner and Miller's foil in the 1970s] made it onto only 17 percent of the ballots in the last round of voting conducted under the old process earlier this year.
Then the Hall of Fame changed the format. Instead of allowing all Hall of Famers to vote for "veterans" nominees, it created three new panels. Nominees in the "executive/pioneer" category were no longer being considered by 81 voters, but by 12, and that group is comprised primarily of former MLB executives.Voila!Kuhn, a longtime Hall of Fame board member, got 10 votes. Miller got three.
Vladimir Putin couldn't have done it better; Cooperstown couldn't look worse.
If there were ever a time to make peace between MLB, former commissioner Kuhn, and Marvin Miller, the Hall of Fame vote is a fit and proper place to do it. But MLB's executives have indeed succeeded in turning back the clock, once again cloaking their legacy in shame.
Sunday, March 11, 2007
NCAA sued (again)
As a football player at UCLA, Ramogi Huma found there was always more month than money when it came to the reality of daily living.That's the opener from Robin Acton and Richard Gazarik's article. It's an important story that will slowly unfold over the next couple of years, so file it for future reference. Rod Fort and Steve Ross are quoted, among others.
His scholarship paid for tuition, books, food and housing, but didn't cover toothpaste, travel expenses or phone bills. When "people came peddling credit cards in front of the athletic department," Huma applied and accepted a sports water bottle as a free gift.
He charged what he needed to survive.
"I thought I could get a job in the summers to pay it off, but when I was playing, I wasn't allowed to work because the NCAA didn't allow it," said Huma, who owed $6,000 at 19 percent interest upon his 1998 graduation.
That experience -- and the National Collegiate Athletic Association's suspension of a teammate who accepted groceries when his scholarship money ran out -- led Huma in 2001 to found the Collegiate Athletes Coalition to improve conditions for student athletes.
Now, as the NCAA prepares for its annual "March Madness'' basketball championships, it is locked in a legal battle with the CAC that could change the future of college sports.
The headline reads "NCAA: USW (United Steel Workers) trying to make athletes "paid employees." Well, that's certainly preferred to "unpaid employees."
Thursday, March 08, 2007
Are Stadiums and Players Complements in Production?
Teams seeking public subsidies commonly claim that building a new stadium will improve the team's revenue flow, allowing it to acquire more talent and improve the quality of the team. No doubt building a new stadium improves team cash flow, but the important question is "what is this cash being spent on?"
If fans are spending the extra cash on amenities at new stadiums, then there is no reason for teams to invest more in team quality. In other words, players have no claims to these revenues. The critical question is whether capital augments labor: do new stadiums improve the marginal product of players and, thus, improve their contribution to team revenue? If so, then teams have an incentive to increase spending on players.
Quinn, Bursik, Borick, and Raethz (2003) find that a new stadium may be complementary to on-field production, but only for baseball. But a recent Wall Street Journal article (reproduced here) provides an example how capital augments labor in sports in general:
In a separate study published this past summer, a Ph.D. candidate in Canada took saliva samples from 14 players on a minor-league hockey team before and after games. The key finding: Levels of testosterone, which have been found to facilitate assertive and aggressive behavior, were 25% to 30% higher before home games, suggesting the home arena triggered players' elemental instinct to protect their territory. "It has the potential to go a long way in developing techniques to create the ideal physiological profile prior to playing," says Justin Carre, the doctoral candidate at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, who co-authored the study.
...Mr. Poulson made his name in the 1990s, overseeing construction of the Portland Trail Blazers' arena for owner and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. Mr. Allen, an avid fan of both music and sports, wanted the new venue to draw top bands for concerts but not if that meant using materials that would deaden crowd noise during basketball games. Ellerbe Becket came up with a novel although expensive solution: rotating ceiling panels with a soft, absorptive side for concerts and a hard side that reflects crowd noise back to the court during games.
...At other schools, it's more than just musical chairs that's going on. When Oklahoma State University expanded its Gallagher-Iba Arena -- already one of the loudest venues around -- it went overboard to make sure that those deafening noise levels didn't drop. After taking sound readings and measuring reverberation times throughout the building, architect Gary Sparks came up with a strategy: Instead of building the extra 7,300 seats outward, he stacked them on top of the existing seats on a steep slope. He also added a flat ceiling stripped of almost all absorptive materials. The goal was to give every sound wave a direct path to a hard surface that would send it ping-ponging around for as long as four seconds.
The author of the article also notes that visiting teams and referees are adversely affected by home team crowd noise. He also notes that in the interest of fairness, some leagues are looking at ways to control noise.
The push for fan power is ratcheting up a cat-and-mouse game between teams looking for an edge and league officials charged with keeping things fair. A number of college-basketball conferences, including the ACC and the Big East, are cracking down on the practice of seating pep bands directly behind visitors' benches to make it harder for coaches to talk to their teams during timeouts. Last year, Major League Baseball instituted new rules governing stadiums with retractable roofs, which can be closed to keep out the elements -- but also to keep in the noise. Teams now have to tell the league by May their criteria for deciding when to open or close their roofs during the season, and in the postseason the final decision is up to MLB.
Seemingly this is another way that leagues standardize the effect of capital across teams. Leagues do this with standardization of playing field dimensions and equipment. While they may try to legislate against some ways to distract players, let's hope they don't go too far. We wouldn't want to be deprived of wonderful scenes like this.
Labels: capital, labor, marginal revenue product, stadiums
