Showing posts with label Sport. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sport. Show all posts

Reality Football

September 5, 2014
Posted by Jay Livingston

Over at Scatterplot , Jeremy Freese posts this excerpt from Season of Saturdays, by Michael Weinreb, a sports writer.

Maybe you don’t understand at all: Maybe you attended a liberal arts college in New England, or maybe you grew up in a city where the athletes were professionals (New York, say, or Boston, or Chicago, or London). . . . Maybe the thought of a university’s morale being tied to its football team strikes you as a fundamental failing of American society. Maybe you hear stories about corrupt recruiting and grade-fixing, and maybe you cannot understand how a sport with a long history of exploitation and brutality and scandal can still be considered a vital (and often defining) aspect of student life. Maybe you see it as a potentially crippling frivolity, or as a populist indulgence, and maybe the threat of football encroaching on the nation’s educational system makes you wonder how someone could possibly write an entire book extolling its cultural virtues.

And the thing is, I would like to tell you that you’re wrong, but I also know that you’re not entirely wrong.


Jeremy, a long-time Big Ten fan (Iowa and now Northwestern), admits to his own increasing ambivalence about the game.  Me, I’m more like those “maybe” people Weinreb imagines. In the town where I grew up, many adults felt towards the high school football team the way college team fans feel about their team. They went to all the games (sometimes even the away games), they knew the team’s history and would compare individual players to those of five or ten or more years earlier. And this wasn’t Odessa, TX.; it was a white collar, WASP suburb of Pittsburgh. I wondered what was wrong with these grown men. Many of them didn’t even have kids in the school.  The phrase “get a life” hadn’t been invented yet, but if it had, that’s what I would have said.

I had the same feeling some years later when I went to a Princeton game – the alums in their tweed sport coats and striped ties shouting “Go Tiger” while we – grad students and young faculty – regarded the whole scene with stoned irony.

Over the years, I grew less critical about the fans, mostly because of sociology, which taught me to look at institutions, not just individuals. Some of the men in my town really liked school football. Others (my father, for example) liked to play bridge. So what? But those accusations of brutality, exploitation, and corruption that Weinreb mentions – those are more than just “not entirely wrong.” They are accurate and important.  But the fault lies with institutions like the NCAA, not with the fans and athletes.

Sports, Markets, and Ficitons

August 9, 2014
Posted by Jay Livingston

Owners of money-making operations can make more money if they pay their workers less. But they paying less is possible only if others are not offering to pay more. This often requires that the business form a cartel – an agreement among owners not to compete. That way, they can all pay their workers less than market value. 

As Adam Smith pointed out long ago, businesses don’t really want competition.  What’s interesting political conservatives who are not in business, despite their talk about freedom and capitalism and the free market,  often want to shelter hugely profitable business from competition.

Thus it was that yesterday Claudia Wilken,  a liberal judge appointed by Bill Clinton, told the NCAA it would have to start paying their workers.  The NCAA and its affiliated businesses (sometimes known as “universities”) didn’t just pay their workers less.  They didn’t pay them at all. Even better.

Of course, the NCAA claims that the football and basketball players are not workers creating a product that the NCAA sells for huge amounts of money. No, these are “scholar athletes.”  And for years, the courts have gone along with this fiction. With yesterday’s court ruling as a start, that may soon change.

The ruling, which would take effect in 2016, does not mandate that players be paid. But it could allow universities to engage in bidding wars for the best athletes, though the N.C.A.A. would probably try to prevent that by capping payments, which Judge Wilken said was permissible. [NYT]

We’ve been here before. In sport, the courts have long been slow in recognizing what was obvious to everyone else. In 1922, the Supreme Court exempted major league baseball from the Sherman Anti-trust Law, ruling that baseball was an “amusement,” not a business. Another fiction. Even in 1969, when the Court admitted that baseball was a business, the conservatives on the Court still continued to allow teams to enforce the “reserve clause,” which prevented players from seeking a better deal with another club.  If Mickey Mantle didn’t like the contract the Yankees offered, his only option was to retire.  Dissenting were three of the Court’s great liberals – William Brennan, Thurgood Marshall, and William O. Douglas.

The reserve clause finally disappeared, not because of a court ruling but because the players had formed a union.  In negotiations with the owners, the union was strong enough to force them to give up the reserve clause. College athletes have never been able to form a union.  Recently, athletes at Northwestern voted to form a union. In April, the NLRB ruled that the athletes were employees and could unionize.  Of course, those who were getting rich off the atheletes’ unpaid labor – the university and the NCAA – objected.  Just last month, they filed briefs arguing against the NLRB decision.





Still, it may be hard for college athletes to form unions given the short tenure of each member. And I expect that the NCAA and its universities will, like admittedly for-profit corporations, do everything they can to prevent or bust the unions.  So for now, the courts are the only hope for bringing any real pay, let alone competitive wages, to college atheletes.  So for now the courts are the workers’ only hope. Yesterday’s ruling offered that hope.

So when it comes to money-making athletics, who’s for competition?  Liberal judges and unions.


Soccer and Status Politics

June 27, 2014
Posted by Jay Livingston

Ann Coulter nails it in her column on soccer.  Not the part about the rising interest in soccer signalling America’s  moral decay. That’s just her usual attempt to be provocative.  What Coulter gets right is that soccer is part of the cultural divide.  The question she raises is much bigger than whether soccer is an inferior sport to baseball or football. It’s “Whose country is this anyway?”

Though she doesn’t say so explicitly, Coulter frames soccer is a matter of status politics – the struggle for recognition, respect, and prestige among different groups. She sees the soccer demographic as is a coalition of White liberals and immigrants of the past generation or two. The anti-soccer side comprises what Sarah Palin called “the real America” – non-urban, White, Protestant, nativist, Republican.  That’s Coulter’s side, and she’s worried that in the long run, her side will lose.

We’ve seen this match-up before. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Prohibition provided a vehicle for “real Americans” to assert the virtue and predominance of their way of life over that of the immigrant, non-Protestant groups. The opposition to Obamacare (and just about any Obama policy) had pretty much the same roster.  (See an earlier post here.) In both cases, these groups felt a threat to their position of privilege.  The anti-Obama crowd is explicit about this sense of loss and threat. America is “our” country, “they” have taken it away, and we are going to take it back.  (See my “Repo Men” post from three years ago.)

Coulter is absolutely open about her nativism and Xenophobia – none of this “America is a nation of immigrants” nonsense. Or as she says, “I promise you: No American whose great-grandfather was born here is watching soccer.”  And one of the bullet points in her argument that soccer is a sign of moral decay is
  • It's foreign.
Followed by
  • Soccer is like the metric system, which liberals also adore because it's European.
(The metric system is simpler and more logical. But it’s used in all those foreign countries, and it’s used universally in science – two reasons for conservatives like Coulter to give it the red card.)

Maybe liberals do like soccer because it’s European, or more accurately international.  But it’s equally true that conservatives fear things because they are foreign.  They demand that the rest of the world become American.  In 2006, John Tierney, a conservative/libertarian writing for the Times, said (here), “Instead of us copying the rest of the world, the rest of the world could learn from us. Maybe they love soccer because they haven’t been given better alternatives.” *

To see what else the soccer soccer coalition liked, I went to Google correlates and entered “world cup.” Unfortunately, data for the current World Cup are not in, so most of the queries are from 2010.  The map looks like what you would expect – the states where people Googled “World Cup” were the Northeast corridor and California. What’s more puzzling is that many of the highest correlates were for movies – Oscar nominees like “Avatar” and “The Hurt Locker,” but also movies liberals like – “Vicki Cristina Barcelona,” “Inception,” and “Eat, Pray, Love.” All these had correlation coefficients with “World Cup” of 0.87 or higher. Here are the results for “World Cup” and “Oscars 2010.”



The other highly correlated cluster of terms had a different theme:
  • hanukkah 2010 (0.8989)
  • passover 2010 (0.8972)
  • yom kippur 2010 (0.8950)
  • chanukah 2010 (0.8874)
Here are the graphics:



This does not necessarily mean that people who Googled “passover 2010" also Googled “World Cup.” It means only that in states where people Googled “passover 2010" people also Googled “world cup.” In New York and California, for example, it might have been Jews looking for information about Passover and while Hispanics Googled “World Cup.”

Soccer, Jews, and moral decay.  This combination reminded me of something Coulter said in a 2007 interview with Donny Deutsch, who happens to be Jewish (the full transcript is here):


COULTER: Well, OK, take the Republican National Convention. People were happy. They're Christian. They're tolerant. They defend America, they —
DEUTSCH: Christian — so we should be Christian? It would be better if we were all Christian?
COULTER: Yes.
DEUTSCH: We should all be Christian?
COULTER: Yes. Would you like to come to church with me, Donny? . . . . .
COULTER: No, we think — we just want Jews to be perfected, as they say.
DEUTSCH: Wow, you didn't really say that, did you?
. . . . . .


DEUTSCH: Ann said she wanted to explain her last comment. So I'm going to give her a chance. So you don't think that was offensive?
COULTER: No. I'm sorry. It is not intended to be. I don't think you should take it that way, but that is what Christians consider themselves: perfected Jews.

Coulter didn’t mention soccer at the time, but perhaps that is yet another sign of the how Jews are imperfect compared to Christians – they live in places where soccer is popular, places where small-town and suburban WASP conservatives are not so dominant. For Coulter, that’s not just imperfect, that’s moral decay.


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*In 2012, Marco Rubio, addressing the Republican convention, used nearly identical language – the same know-nothing arrogance – in speaking about Democratic proposals like Obamacare: “These are ideas that threaten to make America more like the rest of the world instead of making the rest of the world more like America.”

We Still Don’t Call It Football, But . . .

June 26, 2014
Posted by Jay Livingston

How American is soccer now as a spectator sport? My totally unscientific indicator is the front page of New York tabloids.  And today, they both had the US-Germany World Cup match.


The inset in the Daily News picture is a letter written by coach Jurgen Klinsmann for workers to give to their employers:  World Cup as excused absence. 

(Someone ought to remind Coach Klinsmann that this is the US, not Europe. Employers here don’t even have to give workers a day off for childbirth.)


Eight years ago, the World Cup was not front page news, perhaps because team USA went 0-2 in the first round. In 2010, soccer made it to the front page of the Post, when the US was knocked out of the tournament by Ghana.


It’s still one of my favorite captions.  But if the US loses today, I doubt that we’ll see this kind of ironic humor.



The Belmont – No Place Like Place?

June 7, 2014
Posted before post time by Jay Livingston

At Freakonomics Steven Levitt argues for making “a place bet on California Chrome” mostly because the odds to win will be so low.

When California Chrome won the Preakness, a $2 bet to win returned $3. A $2 bet to place also returned $3! . . . You can’t know with certainty what the place payout will be ahead of time because it depends on what other horse finishes in the top two, but if you watch the allocation of money in the place pool you can get a pretty good idea. Sometimes crazy things happen. When Big Brown won the Preakness, he paid $2.40 to win, $2.60 to place, and $2.40 to show!

Levitt is right when he says that the place payout depends on which other horse finishes in the top two. But he’s wrong when he says that you can get a pretty good idea by watching the place pool. The Tote board at the track does show how much money is bet on each horse to win, to place, and to show.  The place payout is determined by taking all the losing bets and dividing them up among people who bet on the winner and those who bet on the place horse.

The reason Big Brown paid more to place than to win was that horse who finished second, Macho Again, at 40-1 was the second longest shot in the race.  That meant more money in the place pool to be divided (all the money bet on the other ten horses) and fewer people that it would be divided among  So if you are betting a heavy favorite to place, you not only have to watch the place pool bets, but you also have to pray that the horses with big money bet on them finish no better than third.

Levitt’s best bet is Commanding Curve to win. The odds will be attractive. A dollar on California Chrome, if he wins, will get you fifty cents; if you bet him to place, you might win only a dime. The morning line on Commanding Curve is 15-1, but I expect it will by lower by post time. Commanding Curve closed six lengths on California Chrome in the final furlong of the Derby, an indication that he might have the stamina for the added quarter-mile of the Belmont.  Commanding Curve also skipped the Preakness, giving him an extra two weeks of rest.

My own long shot is Wicked Strong, another possible closer. The morning line is 6-1, but I predict it will be higher. He had some bad racing luck in the Derby and still got fourth.

Finally, I cannot do a post on horse racing without reiterating my pet peeve about the incorrect use of “track record” that has become so widespread (see my earlier post here).  In racing, where the term originates, it does not refer to a horse’s past performances. It refers to the record time at that track for a given distance. People don’t have track records, tracks do. The Belmont stakes is a mile and a half.  The fastest time for that distance at Belmont – the track record – is 2:24.  That’s way fast, and here’s what it looked like.


In a sport where the difference between win and place is usually a fraction of a second, Secretariat is four or five seconds ahead of the rest.

UPDATE: Both Levitt and I were wrong. The winner was Tonalist at 8-1, a horse who had raced only four times and only once against top horses, though he won that one (a grade-2 stakes). The place horse was an even longer shot, Commissioner at 20-1.

Prophetic Umpires

March 30, 2014
Posted by Jay Livingston

“It ain’t nothin’ till I call it,” said umpire Bill Klem. And if he called it a strike, a strike it was.  As Klem knew, the umpire has something resembling papal infallibility.  That was then. Klem worked behind the plate from 1905 to 1942 and holds the record for throwing players and managers out of the game (the infallibility thing is sometimes a bit much for players to take).  Now, thanks to modern technology, we can know just which calls the umpires miss.

Here’s Matt Holliday taking a called third strike.


Holliday’s body language speaks clearly, and his reaction is understandable. The pitch was wide, even wider than the first two pitches, both of which the umpire miscalled as strikes.* 


The PITCHf/x technology that makes this graphic possible, whatever its value or threat to umpires, has been a boon for sabremetricians  and social scientists.  The big data provided can tell us not just the number of bad calls but the factors that make a bad call more or less likely.  In the New York Times today (here), Brayden King and Jerry Kim report on their study of roughly 780,000 pitches in the 2008-09 season. Umpires erred on about 1 in every 7 pitches – 47,000 pitches over the plate that were called balls, and nearly 69,000 like those three to Matt Holliday.

Here are some of the other findings that King and Kim  report in today’s article.
  •  Umpires gave a slight edge to the home team pitchers, calling 13.3% of their pitches outside the zone as strikes.  Visitors got 12.6%.
  • The count mattered
  •     At 0-0, the error rate was 14.7%.
  •     At 3-0, 18.6% of pitches outside the zone were called as strikes
  •     At 0-2, only 7.3% of pitches outside the zone were called as strikes
  • All-star pitchers were more likely than others to get favorable calls . . .
  • . . . Especially if the pitcher had a reputation as a location pitcher.
  • The importance of the situation (tie game, bottom of the ninth) made no difference in bad calls.
It seems that expectation accounts for a lot of these findings. It’s not that what you see is what you get. It’s that what you expect is what you see. We expect good All-star pitchers to throw more accurately, especially control freaks like Greg Maddux.**  We also expect that a pitcher who is way ahead in the count will throw a waste pitch and that on the 3-0, he’ll put it over the plate.  My guess is that umpires share these expectations. The difference is that the umps can turn their expectations into self-fulfilling prophecies.

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* I took the graphics from fangraphs

**The pitcher in the clips is Tyler Clippard, a pretty good closer for the Nationals. He was selected as an All-star once, not nearly enough to meet the King-Kim criterion level of five.

Super Bowl Post – Crowds, Birds, Horses

February 2, 2014
Posted by Jay Livingston

I have posted frequently – maybe too frequently – about the “wisdom of crowds” in sports betting (in this post, for example, which has links to earlier posts going back to the early days of this blog).  For those of us who doubt that wisdom, today’s Superbowl looks like a notable opportunity.

The initial line two weeks ago from most bookmakers was pick ’em or even the Seahawks favored by a point.  The crowd, in its alleged wisdom, jumped all over the Broncos.  The bookmakers, desperate for Seahawks action to balance their ledgers moved the line, and by early in the week the Broncos were 2½-point favorites.  Betting is still going 75% for the Broncos.*

Of course, a single game (n = 1) is not a good test of this betting strategy.  Still, as Damon Runyon said, the race is not always to the swift, but that’s the way to bet ’em.

It’s two hours till game time, and although this may be the year of the horse, I’m going with Seattle.

UPDATE, Monday, Feb. 3: Well, that was easy. Rarely is the crowd so decisively unwise. Their Broncos handed the Seahawks a two-point lead on the first play of the game, and after that it was all downhill. The Seahawks won 43 - 8. 

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 *Bookmakers are leery of raising the line to 3 to attract Seahawks money because if the Broncos do win by 3 (the most common margin in football outcomes), those new bets will be result in a push rather than a win for the books. The books will pay Broncos bettors, who only gave 2½ points, but they will not collect from Seahawks bettors who took the 3 points.  So instead, the books are lowering the vigorish (in effect, the surcharge on losing bets) from 10% to 0% for Seattle bettors but raising it to 15% or 20% for Broncos bettors.

I Keek a Touchdown

January 4, 2014
Posted by Jay Livingston

Two observations on the NFL playoffs this weekend.

1.  Longer, Better.  Field goals are important. The line on the Saints-Eagles game today and on the 49ers-Packers game tomorrow is three points – a field goal. That was the margin in 15% of all NFL games this season. (I think that the usual percentage is closer to 10%, but it’s still the most frequent margin.)

The Saints just cut Garret Hartley, the place kicker they’ve had all season. He hit only 73% of his attempts, the second worst percentage in the NFL. Twenty years ago, that percentage would have put him ahead of one-third of all kickers.  In 1965, with 73% he would have been at the top. The best field goal percentage that year was 67%.

Gin and Tacos  has a nice discussion on how and why kicking has increased in distance and accuracy. And don’t miss the link to his companion piece on the first wave of European kickers in the NFL. (I had always thought that “I keek a touchdown! I keek a touchdown!” was an apocryphal comedy bit that started with Alex Karras and wound up on Johnny Carson.  But apparently Garo Yepremian actually said it.)

2. The Wisdom of Crowds.  Occasional posts here dating back to 2006 have looked at the match-up between The Wisdom of Crowds and The Smart Money.  Today offers another example.  The Chiefs started as a 2½-point underdog to the Colts. The crowd has been all over the Chiefs, and as we approach game time, the books have made KC the favorite by two or even three points.  The smart money was betting the Colts earlier in the week despite having to lay a point or two.

UPDATE, January 5: The Colts pulled off an incredible comeback to win 45-44. The crowd (i.e., Chiefs backers), who mostly bet on Sunday or late in the week and gave up points, lost. But the smart guys, who bet earlier in the week and gave up 1½-2½ points also lost. Looks like this was a very good game for the bookies.

The Wisdom of Crowds Finally Wins One

December 23, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston

In several posts over the years, this blog has questioned the “wisdom of crowds,” at least when it comes to sports betting.  (This 2009 post has links to even earlier wisdom-of-crowds posts.) The Wisdom of Crowds says that when it comes to guessing – the weight of an ox, the location of lost ships, the right answer on “Millionaire,” the outcome of football games – you’re better off crowdsourcing than getting the advice of a single expert. None of us is as smart as all of us.*

In sports betting, if you want to know where the crowd is going, follow the money. And you can usually tell where the money is going by watching the point spread.  The spread is like a price – the greater the demand for a side, the more points you have to give up.  When the line moves – if a 4-point favorite becomes a 5-point favorite – chances are that bettors are demanding that side. 

Yesterday, the crowd cleaned up. In three games, so much money came in on the underdogs, that the bookies, in attempt to get action on the other side, made them the favorites.  On Saturday, the Dolphins were 3-point favorites over the Bills. Money kept coming in on the Bills. The books lowered the points Bills bettors were getting. By game time, if you wanted to bet the Bills, you’d have to give one or one-and-a-half points.

A change in the line of even of a half-point in the few hours before game time is often noteworthy; a change of a full point is significant.** A change of four points is extremely rare and indicates important action on the Bills.  As it turned out, the Bills won handily, 19-0. 

That was one of five games with large swings in the point spread. 

(Click on the chart for a larger view.)

The crowd was indeed wise this time around, winning four of the five.  The books took a bath. Yesterday was unusual in the number and magnitude of the changes.  Of course, over the course of the season, you could have made money by watching for crowdsourced line shifts and fading the public wisdom.

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* This line, popular in management circles, is usually attributed to a Japanese proverb.  That sourcing fits with notions about East-West differences. For Americans, with our strong value on individualism and our belief in lone entrepreneurial heroes, “none of us is as smart as all of us” is a dazzling revelation; for the Japanese it’s just common sense.

** Bookmakers are reluctant to move the line at all for fear of being “middled.”  Suppose a  bookie takes a lot of action on Team A getting 3½  points over Team B, so he lowers the line to 2½ to attract money on the favorite. Now bettors respond and bet Team B minus the 2½. If the final score is Team B 17, Team B 14, the point difference falls in the middle of the two lines, and the bookie loses both bets.  (This is an extreme case. More often the change is only a half-point, say from 7 to 7½, and the risk is not a middle but an “edge” – one bet is a push, the other a loss.

The Elementary Forms of the US Open Finals

September 10, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston
Cross posted at Sociological Images


Some sociologists went to the US Open final yesterday and posted about it on Facebook.  Here’s what they saw. Notice the size of the court.


(Photo by Jenn Lena)
                                   
I saw the match too. When I got home from work, I turned on CBS.  Here’s what I saw.





On my 40" flat-screen Samsung, I could see the match as though I were in the box seats, nothing between me and the court. I could see the grimace on a player’s face, the sweat stains on his shirt. I sat on an upholstered chair. And it cost me nothing. 

How much was a plastic seat in the top rows of Arthur Ashe Stadium? I don’t know. My grounds pass on Day 3 was $66.  So, $200?  More?   Seats for the finals were $95. I have sat up there near the top. The players are colorful miniatures moving around on the green rectangles. The distant perspective allows – forces – you to see the whole court, so you are aware of placement strategies and patterns of movement you might otherwise not have noticed. But tennis isn’t football; strategy, especially in singles, is fairly obvious and not complicated.*

From way up there, the players are so far away.  It's as though you were looking at your TV through the wrong end of a telescope. You see the game differently, and you hear it differently. A player hits a solid backcourt shot, and for a noticeable half-second or so, you hear silence. Only when the ball is clearing the net do you hear the impact of the stroke. 

Why go out to Flushing Meadow? It’s ridiculous to think about this in the narrow economic framework of money and tennis narrowly defined.  My $0 view of the match was far better than that of my FB friends in their expensive seats high above the court.  Close that micro-economics book and open Durkheim.  Think about the match as ritual. It’s not just about Nadal and Djokovic whacking a fuzzy yellow ball back and forth for a couple of hours. A ritual includes everyone. If you’re there, you are part of that group. You are one with the with the people in the stadium and with the charismatic figures in center court

That’s why, if something is a ritual, being there is so important. Showing up is more than just 80%. It’s everything. If you’re there, you are part of our group. You go to Thanksgiving dinner at Aunt Diane’s house not because the food is good. You might get better food and more enjoyment at home with take-out Chinese and a TV.  You go because your presence defines you as a member of the group. Not going is tantamount to saying that you are just not part of this family.

The Final is not just any match. It is the ritual that anoints our king, hence the trophies and pageantry and ritualistic incantations (speeches) after the match.  I would guess that most of the people there yesterday would choose even a so-so final over a close, well-played match on an outside court in Round 3.  Because this match is so important, it generates more mana. And that energy is created by the crowd.  Of course, the crowd’s perception is that it is the players who are creating that special feeling, and it helps if the match on the court is close and well-played. But the same match – every shot exactly the same – played in an early round in a nearly empty stadium would not create that same feeling for the handful of spectators who showed up.

What makes the ticket worth all the money then is not the quality of the play. It is the symbolic meaning of the ritual and the strong feeling you get from being part of that ritual. You were there, with Nadal and Djokovic. That ritual exists in sacred time, linked to other great finals matches.  So maybe you save your ticket stub or your program as your link to that sacred past.

I saw the same match, and I had a better view. But I’m not going to save my cable TV bill.

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* One of my favorite tennis quotes – I don’t remember who, only that he was not a native speaker of English. In a post-match interview, a reporter asked him a question about strategy, with the assumption that he must have had some complicated game-plan. The player didn’t understand.  “I heet the ball to heem; he heet the ball to me.”  That’s a fairly good description of what happens in most singles matches.

The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

July 9, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston

In 2010, the Pittsburgh Pirates won 57 games and lost 105. That .352 was the worst in major league baseball.  As we speak, they are at .602.  But for last night’s 1-0 loss to Oakland, they would be tied with St. Louis for the best record in baseball. 

What caused the turnaround?  Socialism and planning. 

The socialism part is revenue-sharing. Teams that make a lot of money must put some their profits into a pool for the less wealthy teams.  From each according to his ability to pay and all that.  The idea is that small-market teams can use the money for larger salaries to attract better players.

The NFL’s version of revenue-sharing shares a great deal of the wealth, which is why a “dynasty” in football rarely lasts more than a couple of years.  It’s also the reason that a huge media market, Los Angeles, has not had an NFL team for nearly two decades. 

In baseball, revenue sharing is less extensive, hence the long-term domination of big-market, wealthy teams like the Yankees.  Still, some of the TV money gets distributed to the poorer teams. But according to leaked documents in 2010, it looked as if the owners of some small-market teams (notably two Florida teams, the Rays and the Marlins) were paying the money to themselves, not to their players.

The Pirates too came under suspicion since they kept to their tight-fisted payroll.  But in fact, the Pirates were using the money for development – scouting young players, signing them, and giving them a couple of years in the minor leagues. 


The result is a first-rate pitching staff (their closer, Jason Grilli, may be the next Mariano Rivera), and some pretty good hitting.  All this on a payroll that’s less than one-third of what the Yankees are paying for their currently fourth-place General Hospital team. 

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Big hat tip to Alan Barra at The Atlantic.  My Pittsburgh connections, who blame owner Robert Nutting for the Pirates’ dismal record these past few years, claim that Barra’s article is “the Nutting PR machine at work” and that we should wait to see what changes the Pirates (and the Cards and Reds) make to their roster in the second half of the season.

Clyde and the Academic Job Interview

March 31, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston

NPR’s “On the Media” departed from its usual content – stories that make you think that the full title of the show is “Outrageous Things that Make You Want to Spit On the Media” – and ran an interview Brooke Gladstone did with Walt Frazier.*  It’s mostly about two things Clyde loves – basketball and words – with a passing reference to a third, clothes.  (“I’m a shy guy that likes to walk around in mink coats and a Rolls Royce.”)


In my own mind, the mention of Frazier usually triggers this anecdote about a job interview – not mine but that of another professor in the social sciences. Let’s call him Brett.  One day he was reminiscing about his job interview at Montclair back in 1972. 
At the end of my visit to campus, I had my interview with the Dean, and he asked me why I wanted to come to Montclair.  “Well, Dean,” I said, “I want to stay in the New York area till Frazier retires.”
It was a good story, and maybe he really did say that to the Dean.**  I have no doubt as to the truth of his statement. Frazier was worth staying around for.  In any case, it was prophetic. Five years later, in 1977, the Knicks traded Frazier to Cleveland.***  And in 1977 Montclair dumped Brett, who found a non-academic job. In Ohio.


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* The edited radio version of the interview is here.  A video of the full one-hour interview is here.

** In one episode of the sitcom “Family Ties,” Alex (Michael J. Fox) goes to Princeton for an interview with the Dean. The Dean, whose last name happens to be Meminger, so the episode has several references to Dean Meminger.” The real Dean Meminger was a basketball player, a Knicks teammate of Frazier in the 1970s. The creator of “Family Ties,” Gary David Goldberg, raised in Brooklyn, loved basketball, and the name of the dean was no doubt a dog whistle to other Knicks fans.

*** Clyde on being in Cleveland: “I was all dressed up and no place to go.”

Defending Against The Unstoppable

February 25, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston   

(A non-sociological post.  But I love this anecdote.)

I have a colleague who used to play pro basketball.  This was decades ago and in the European league.  But he played in an informal US tournament once – something like the Rucker tournament – and wound up playing against Julius Erving. 

I asked the obvious if tactless question.  “How many points did he score?”

“As many as he wanted to,” he said.  “As it happens it was about 40, but it could have been 60.  It could have been 80.”

Elsewhere, Michael Jordan turned 50 recently, and Emma Carmichael at Deadspin interviewed Craig Ehlo on the topic of guarding Jordan.  At the time of this anecdote, Ehlo was with the Sonics.
We were running up the court side-by-side and he told me: “Listen man, I’m hitting everything, so I’m gonna tell you what I’m gonna do this time and see if you can stop it. You know you cant stop it. You know you can’t stop this. You can’t guard me.

“I’m gonna catch it on the left elbow, and then I’m gonna drive to the left to the baseline, and then I’m gonna pull up and shoot my fadeaway.”

And sure enough ...

I was like, OK, well, if he’s gonna tell me what he’s going to do, then I’m gonna take advantage of this. And I was right there with him when he did—but sure enough he banked it off the backboard. We were heading back down court, and he gave me that kind of shrugged-shoulder look that you’d always see and he’s like: “I told you. I told you.” And I just said, “Don’t do that again.” 
(The full interview is here)

I like Ehlo’s response – don’t do that again.  Better to get beat than to get beat and be humiliated too. 

For the record, Ehlo was not some second-rate benchwarmer.  He played fourteen seasons in the NBA.  The Ehlo incident that stands out in my mind is really a Charles Barkley moment in Philadelphia when Barkley was with the Sixers.  Ehlo had the ball under the hoop and leaped up for a jam, both hands high above his head.  That left his whole body unprotected.  Barkley drove a hard shoulder into his ribcage, and Ehlo fell to the floor in obvious pain. When the screen in the arena showed the replay, even the Philadelphia fans grew quiet.

America’s Team Is Not in the Superbowl

February 3, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston
Cross-posted at Sociological Images

Six years ago, I blogged (here) that the Pittsburgh Steelers had become “America’s Team,” a title once claimed, perhaps legitimately, by the Dallas Cowboys. 

Now Ben Blatt at The Harvard College Sports Analysis Collective concludes that it’s still the Cowboys. (His post is here.)  
Still, based on their huge fan base and ability to remain the most popular team coast-to-coast, I think the Dallas Cowboys have earned the right to use the nickname  ‘America’s Team’.
To get data, Blatt posed as an advertiser and euchred Facebook into giving him some data from 155 million Facebook users, about half of the US population.  Blatt counted the “likes” for each NFL team.

 It’s Superbowls X, XIII, and XXX all over again – Steelers vs. Cowboys.  And the Cowboys have a slight edge.  But does that make them “America’s Team”? It should be easy to get more likes when you play to a metro area like Dallas that has twice as many people as Pittsburgh.  If the question is about “America’s Team,” we’re not interested in local support.  Just the opposite – we want to see how many fans a team has away from the home field. 

Blatt measures nationwide support by seeing which team gets the most likes in each Congressional district.  Unsurprisingly, each local team dominates its area.

The Cowboys are number one in the hearts of a wider area.  In Arkansas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, New Mexico, Idaho, and Utah they crush the non-existent competition.  Curiously, Blatt does not report the number of likes those states contributed. He says only that in those regions there were more likes for the Cowboys than for any other team.  By this measure, the Steelers don’t even win all Pennsylvania, but that’s because, unlike the Cowboys, the Steelers  face other NFL cities close to home.  Their home state and every bordering state except West Virginia has one or even two competing NFL teams – Eagles, Browns, Bengals, Ravens, Bills.   

The map makes the it appear that the 3.6 million Steeler fans are crowded into a small area while the 3.7 million Cowboy fans are widely spread.  But those wide open Western spaces may not contain all that many people.  And it’s fans, not real estate, that root for a team. 

If you want to know who America’s team is, you should find out how many fans it has outside its local area.  Unfortunately, Blatt doesn’t provide that information. So for a rough estimate, I took the number of Facebook likes and subtracted the metro area population.  Most teams came out on the negative side. The Patriots, for example, had 2.5 million likes. but they are in a media market of over 4 million people.  The Cowboys too wound up in the red  3.7 million likes in a metro area of 5.4 million people.


Likes outnumbered population for only five teams.  The clear winner was the Steelers.*

I made one final comparison –Steeler bars and Cowboys bars in Los Angeles  It’s the second largest media market in the country but hasn’t had a home NFL team to support in nearly two decades (how do economists explain this?).   The Cowboys should have an advantage in LA since more Angelenos have roots in Texas than in Pennsylvania.  According to FanLoop, there are 16 Cowboys bars within a 25-mile radius of 90210 (the first Los Angeles zip code that came to mind).  In that same circle, there are 31 Steelers bars.** 



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* The Packers also have a legitimate claim to the title.  To get the numbers to come out in favor of the Steelers, I assigned the Pack the Milwaukee metro area as its local support even though Milwaukee is 100 miles from Green Bay.  (Milwaukee  is closer to Chicago, but as the map makes clear, Packer and Bear loyalties split at the state line.)  Subtract the Green Bay population instead of Milwaukee from the Packer likes, and the Packers win the America’s Team trophy by two touchdowns.

** I my own zip code +25 miles, the score is Steelers 45, Cowboys 18.  (See this earlier post about Steeler bars.)

UPDATE:  It turns out that a few days ago, an intern at Facebook, Sean Taylor, published data on this same topic (here). Taylor’s map. by county rather than Congressional district, is a bit clearer than the one above.


But this repeats the shortcoming of the other map.  It shows which team was most popular, but it does not show the level of support for other teams.  Looking at the map, you would never suspect that the Packers get a lot of love (or rather a lot of likes) nationwide, not just in Wisconsin.  But it’s never enough to overcome the home team advantage. (Note also that the Steelers kick ass even in far away places like Alaska and Hawaii.) 

Do Pro Athletes Want Gambling?

October 14, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

The obits for Alex Karras  all noted that the NFL suspended him and Lions teammate Paul Hornung for gambling.  Then there’s Pete Rose, whose gambling has kept him out of the Hall of Fame.  And Tim Donaghy, the NBA ref who later said his gambling affected the way he called games. 

What’s up with White sports dudes and gambling? 

Chad Millman at ESPN touts the latest issue of their  magazine (he’s the editor) with the promise of some data.

In that issue we run one of our Confidential polls, in which we question dozens of athletes about taboo topics. In the current version we asked 67 jocks from the four major sports: . . . do you think sports betting should be legalized?

Let’s stipulate that a non-random sample of 67 jocks-we-could-get-to-answer-our-phone-call divided into four categories is less methodologically rigorous than we would prefer.  Still the differences among the sports are striking.  The NHL players were overwhelmingly in favor of legalized sports betting, the NBA players against it.

Here’s a graph that makes the ESPN data look more impressive than it actually is.


The Whiter the sport, the more its professional practitioners want legalized gambling.

Millman is not an academic, so he didn’t end his article with a call for further research (and funding).  But maybe he should have.

The London Games

July 17, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

The Olympics begin in London in less than a fortnight.  Just across the channel, Eurostar, the Paris-London rail link, has an ad campaign encouraging Parisians to make the trip to see how the British do the classical Greek games.  These posters have been springing up around Paris.




(Click on the image for a larger view.)


I’m sure there’s cultural lesson here, aside from the obvious one about levels of prudery – something about cultural differences going back to the Hundred Years War.  There’s no written copy on the posters, but the unwritten copy is all about cultural superiority.  “We French are the keepers of the classical culture of ancient Greece.  Measured against those standards and forms, you Brits look foolish with their silly games and corpulent bodies.”  Or to paraphrase the French soldier in the film says, “I fart in your general direction, but I’m going to take the Eurostar to do so."

Or maybe it’s just about darts and snooker on the one side and babyfoot (i.e, foosball)  on the other.

HT: Rue Rude

Injuries and Incentives - Saints and Sinners

April 6, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Did the bounty system work?

Even people with no interest in sports have heard about the strategy of Saints defensive coordinator Gregg Williams.  He offered his players a bounty for injuring opposing players – $1000 if a player was carried off the field, $1500 if the player didn’t return to the game that day.

On the audio released yesterday (listen here), you can hear Williams giving pep-talk instructions to to the defense just before the playoff game against the 49ers.  He specifies the injuries he would particularly welcome – a blow to the chin for quarterback Alex Smith, a concussion for receiver Kyle Williams, and as for receiver Michael Crabtree, “He becomes human when we fuckin’ take out that outside ACL.”

Much of the reaction to this story is shock and horror – some of it real, no doubt, by people unaware of football’s backstage, and some of it affected.  Among the players, there is anger and genuine surprise.  (“One word WOW,” tweeted 49rs safety Reginald Smith.)  Others were more sanguine, saying in effect, that football is a violent game where people get injured.  Jets linebacker Bart Scott said that getting rid of the bounties wouldn’t change that. 

But so far I have seen no data on whether the bounties worked.  Did the Saints injure more players than did other NFL teams?  Surely those numbers are available. 

The only evidence I’ve heard is that the Saints had the highest number of roughing-the-passer penalties in the NFL.  That’s probably because they blitz more.  Blitzing is a high-risk strategy, and there’s some question as to whether it’s effective.  In theory, blitzes should increase the defense’s chances of injuring the quarterback.  But the Saints were below the NFL median in sacks. 

None of that speaks directly to the question of injuries.  The bounty system is a recent and distasteful example of “incentivizing” (a recent and distasteful coinage among economists).  Has no sports economist or Freakonmist even counted up the injuries let alone run econometric statistics to see if these incentives worked?

Piety, Politics, and the Press – New York Edition

March 25, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

The Venn diagram of American culture shows a large overlap of political conservatism and Christian belief.  Folks who take their Christianity seriously (and their Bible literally) can be counted on to vote with Fox News.  Those who mock Christian piety even mildly are over on the left side of the room watching The Daily Show.

Not in New York. 

I was listening to the Christian radio station (officially “family radio”) on my drive home*  the day Peyton Manning signed with the Broncos.  The announcers main concern of course was what would happen to Tim Tebow.  They did not speculate much as to where Tebow would wind up, but they did assure me and my fellow listeners repeatedly that the Manning deal was evidence that “God has a plan.”  

A few days later, Tebow was on his way to New York and the Jets.  If you thought the New York Post would treat God’s plan with the appropriate respect, think again.

The New York Post, brought to you by the same Rupert Murdoch gang that owns Fox, is reliably right-wing on just about any political matter you can think of. But when the Manning/Broncos deal went down, the Post front page report on Tebow-Jets rumors was not quite in tune with the church choir.



The Post continued this irreverent tone when the Jets did sign Tebow.  The front page had a photoshopped picture of a towering Tim, Tebowing over Times Square.



Today, the Post tone on Tebow seems to be  bordering on sacrilege.  The QB is shown topless in a crucifix-like pose – arms outstretched, head turned to the side, legs crossed at the ankles – over the headline “The Passion of the Tebow.” 

(Previous Post posts in this SocioBlog are here and here.)
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* If you must know, this is what happens when you’re not interested in the guy Terri Gross is interviewing and you hit the Scan button.

Inflation - Garden Variety

February 22, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Sports is a business. 

The Dow is getting close to 13,000.  The Knicks are getting close to .500.  This month at least, it’s the Knicks who have been doing better, but then the Dow doesn’t have Jeremy Lin.  The Knicks do. 

The Knicks are owned by MSG, and the change in the Knicks’s fortunes has been taking place not just on the floor of the Garden but on the floor of the Stock Exchange as well.  Here is the chart of MSG vs. the Dow so far this year.



(Click on the image for a larger view.)


Lin’s breakout game was against the Nets on Feb. 4, a Saturday.  The next trading day, Feb. 6, MSG shows mostly a continuation of a pre-Lin upswing.  But Lin does seem to have had an effect.  The stock kept rising over the next several days, climbing higher than it had been in a couple of years.  February 13 was the first trading day after Lin’s 38-point game against Kobe and the Lakers.  Both the volume of trading and the price were up. 

The people at The Harvard Sports Analysis Collective (they have an understandable interest in all things Lin) have tracked the Lin effect on the stock price and compared it with similar periods surrounding the arrival of other big Knicks – Carmelo and Stoudemire.  Air ball.  Apparently, the traders at the NYSE ignored those trades at the Garden. 

The Collective provides one other financial indicator:  $503.82.  That was the average cost of a ticket to Sunday’s game against Dallas (the Knicks won by five).  That Nets game back on the Feb. 4th would have cost you, on average, only $140.57.  The price of a Knicks ticket has more than tripled in less than a month.  Talk about inflation (and no, I’m not going to say it, not here, not in the post’s title, not anywhere.  Enough already.)

Avoiding Indeterminacy (Predicting the Past)

February 15, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

One of the most difficult ideas to grasp or accept is indeterminacy, randomness.  We devote a considerable effort to making up stories to show that nothing is random, that everything is, or was, predictable. 

“We should have seen Lin coming” was the headline in Carl Bialik’s Wall Street Journal blog post (here) on Monday. 


Jeremy Lin – is there anybody who has not heard about “Linsanity”? – a guard for the Knicks, is the NBA’s new great white hope, though he’s Asian (his parents are from Taiwan).  Single-handedly he is bringing the NBA a new demo.  Even when the Knicks are on the road, the fans – in Washington, in Toronto, wherever – cheer for Lin.


Like one of those huge best-sellers by an unknown author that 39 publishers turned down before one took a chance, Lin’s talents might never have seen the light of NBA.  He played well at Harvard but in the NBA draft received not a nibble.   Eventually, he was picked up by the Knicks, but they too had no idea that Lin was star material.  Coach D’Antoni didn’t give him much court time until a game earlier two weeks ago when Lin went in to give Bibby a breather.  He scored 25 points, and since then, he has been headline news.

How did everyone miss him?  Carl Bialik is the WSJl’s “Numbers Guy,” and he puts together some numbers to show that Lin’s abilities were clear from the start.  Numbers like this:

Per 40 minutes this season, he’s taken 7.8 shots at the rim and made five of them. That’s the second-most made field goals from the rim for guards who’ve played at least 10 games and at least 10 minutes per game, and a percentage in line with the impressive Nos. 1 and 3 on the list . . .
If you thought a rim shot was something that followed a lame joke in a burlesque house, you might not find this convincing.  But Bialik has more such numbers, and he makes the case. 

Still, it reminded me of days at the horse track.  The Racing Form provides a wealth of information, mostly quantitative, on each horse in the race – the horse’s past performances.*   Horseplayers process all this data and make a bet.  Then, after the race, as they tear up their losing tickets, they go back to the past performances, and no matter which horse won, they can always find the bits of data that made it clear why that horse was bound to win. 

Prediction is very hard, especially about the future, as Yogi Berra or someone said.  Prediction about the past and present is much easier, as Bialik’s blogpost illustrates.  Or as Duncan Watts puts it in the title of his excellent book, Everything is Obvious . . . Once You Know the Answer.** 

There’s another reason the Knicks didn’t know how good Lin was.  Here’s Knick announcer Clemson Smith-Muñiz (la voz en Español de los Knicks):

I’ve asked the coaching staff the question this way: didn't you see this in practice? And the answer has been, invariably, “What practice?” Due to this condensed season, which included barely 4 weeks of pre-season, all teams are limiting their practices, especially the full-court scrimmages, on off days.
Their point, again, is that the Lin phenomenon was not indeterminate.  Given a chance to see Lin in practice, any good coach would have seen his abilities.

Of course, Lin might turn out to be a flash in the pan.  Maybe by his second time around the league, the other teams will have learned how to play him.  It hasn’t happened yet (last night, his three-pointer with less than a second on the clock won the game), but if it does, sports writers, maybe even Carl Bialik, will write columns and blog posts saying that his short-lived success was utterly predictable.


Linsanity is fine, Lindeterminacy is intolerable.

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* When non-horseplayers appropriated the term “track record,” they distorted its meaning, just as Bialik does in his blogpost (I did not bother to quote it).  What they are referring to is what horseplayers know as “past performances.” 

Not only does the popular meaning of “track record” have nothing to do with its meaning at the race track, but in most cases, the speaker or writer could drop the “track” without changing the meaning, except perhaps to make it clearer. 


** Another blogpost on Watts ideas and horse races is here.