Soccer in Seattle
A bit behind on this, but the new MLS team in Seattle (The Sounders) have sold more season tickets (per game) than the Mariners. Here the writeup in the Puget ...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 ...Does Baseball’s Salary Arbitration Process Reduce Player Performance and Weaken Player-Club Relationships?
Guest Post by John Budd Previous research on Major League Baseball’s final-offer salary arbitration process has found that players who lost in arbitration have subsequent lower on-field performance than those ...Home Plate Collisions -- Baseball or Rugby?
Warning: Readers who think about sports rules and practices solely as "that's the way it has been so that's the way it should be" probably won't like this post. The ...Stub Hub and MLB Ticketing
This week's issue of the Sports Business Journal has an interesting article about ticket sales for MLB and the relationship of the league to Stub Hub. Written by Bill King ...Playoff Roulette
Jeffrey Beckmann at BleacherReport presents a slideshow of the "50 Best Teams" not to win a World Series. Of the teams on this side of 1950, the 1996 Braves and ...Baseball Arbitration Bats 1,000 For the Year
For the first time ever this year, no baseball player went to arbitration. From ESPN. Reliever Darren O'Day completed a $5.8 million, two-year contract with the Baltimore Orioleson Monday, becoming the 133rd and ...Latin (Baseball) Economics
A TSE reader, Jeff Baird, steered my attention toward an Economist article on Draft Dodgers No More: Can The Dominican Republic Avoid Puerto Rico's Fate? MLB included Puerto Ricans in ...PEDs and Quality of Competition
In a recent TSE post, Brian writes: The league’s testing procedure (“analytic evidence”) uncovered only 13 users from 2009 to the present. Yet, now there is strong evidence that many ...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 ...A Report From the Cutting Edge
This just in: remember that image of baseball front office types as slow-witted dinosaurs who had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the twentieth century by Michael Lewis? Forget ...RIP Thomas Roberts
Thomas Roberts, the arbitrator who found MLB teams had colluded in the free agent market in the mid 1980's (and who was fired twice by MLB), has passed. From the ...