Category: Sports
Should NFL players become like economics professors?
With the lockout ending today, free agency would seem to be in place:
In the union lawyers’ world, every player would enter the league as an unrestricted free agent, an independent contractor free to sell his services to any team. Every player would again become an unrestricted free agent each time his contract expired. And each team would be free to spend as much or as little as it wanted on player payroll or on an individual player’s compensation.
The NFL Commissioner presents multiple reasons why this is a bad idea, most of which are obviously hypocritical (some players might get paid less!, and yet the players mostly favor the new system). The serious argument I can see is that of competitive balance, but a) do fans really enjoy competitive balance or do they prefer national stage mega-rivalries of titans?, and b) there are ways to restore competitive balance other than using monopsonistic collusion in the labor market. Here is a serious economic analysis by John Vrooman (pdf), and it suggests persuasively that sharing venue revenue can remedy the revenue imbalance problem and restore balance to the extent that is required.
Here is James Surowiecki on this topic, he is not pro-owner. I’ve yet to see any good reason to object to the new status quo, namely universal free agency in the NFL.
I have not, however, followed this issue closely. Working on the Modern Principles text with Alex has, among other things, taken away from my consumption of sports.
Which universities spend the most on athletics?
Number one is UT Austin, at $112.9 million a year, followed by Ohio State, U. Florida, Louisiana State, U. Tennessee, Wisconsin-Madison, Auburn, Alabama, U. OK, and then USC, which is still spending $80 million a year.
That is from Charles’s Clotfelter’s very good new book Big-Time Sports in American Universities. Clotfelter is relatively sympathetic to sports in universities and considers their fundraising and civic virtue advantages. Of course those numbers are gross and not net expenditures.
Barter markets in everything?
A die-hard cricket fan wants to sell his kidney for India-Pakistan semifinals match ticket.
Endgames for basketball, the 2-for-1
When should a team try for two shots near the end of a game or quarter? Here is part of Mr. Winston’s request:
Hypothetically, your team is tied with about a minute left. Your team should shoot the ball with no less than 45 seconds left on the clock, so that if you miss and fail to get the offensive rebound, you are almost guaranteed to get the ball back. Here is his reasoning: “2-for-1 is a basic fundamental premise – I get 2 shots, you get 1. If we are tied before that begins, I am going to win more often than you. Period. Even if the first shot is less-than-great, you have to take a decent look early.
Here are a few points against the 2-for-1:
1. Taking a bad shot too early can lead to long rebounds and leave a team unable to get back to defend.
2. Turnovers and offensive rebounds and fouls are common near the end of games. No one knows how many shots are left in the game, so don’t think that backwards induction will work.
3. Your chance of drawing fouls, or inducing sheer defensive lapses, goes down if you take the rapid shot.
4. Taking the bad shot early may disrupt shooting rhythms, dispirit the team if there is a miss, and lead to too much play focused on the shot clock rather than quality execution.
5. You still might get a final shot attempt even if the first two shot attempts, by you and the opposing team, run down the shot clock a fair amount.
Overall I am not one to insist on the 2-for-1. Basically you are immediately spending a valuable asset — a possession — without that much information about its value. The deeper economic lesson is that infinite horizon models are more plausible than you think, because no one knows how rapidly events will be taking place.
Here is one paper on endgame strategy in basketball, focusing on the intentional foul.
“What doesn’t kill you only makes you run faster”
Among the tools at Salazar’s disposal is the good ol’ cryosauna, which works like this:
A container of liquid nitrogen turns to gas and is pumped into the cylinder where the athlete stands, plunging the temperature below negative 200 degrees Fahrenheit for a short burst of time. The body believes that it is dying and rushes blood to protect its vital organs. Two minutes later, when the athlete emerges from the container, the concentrated and enriched blood rushes back through the body, providing an instant cleanse and relief.
Markets in everything
"Easy and Affordable Portable Baptism Pools –
that are designed to take a beating as well."
The link is here and for the pointer I thank John Chilton.
File under "There is no Great Stagnation."
Markets in everything the future of kung fu?
Today, however, temple officials seem more interested in building the Shaolin brand than in restoring its soul. Over the past decade Shi Yongxin, the 45-year-old abbot, has built an international business empire–including touring kung fu troupes, film and TV projects, an online store selling Shaolin-brand tea and soap–and franchised Shaolin temples abroad, including one planned in Australia that will be attached to a golf resort. Furthermore, many of the men manning the temple's numerous cash registers–men with shaved heads and wearing monks' robes–admit they're not monks but employees paid to look the part.
Over tea in his office at the temple, Yongxin calmly makes the case that all of these efforts further Buddhism.
As for some of the traditional styles, perhaps Baumol's cost disease is operating:
"There are no high kicks or acrobatics," he says. Such moves create vulnerable openings. "Shaolin kung fu is designed for combat, not to entertain audiences. It is hard to convince boys to spend many years learning something that won't make them wealthy or famous." He seems drained by the thought. "I worry that is how the traditional styles will be lost."
Here is much more, and for the pointer I thank The Browser.
Have track and field performances peaked?
I don't know much about track and field, but I found this article interesting, excerpt:
Today 64 percent of track and field world records have stood since 1993. One world record, the women’s 1,500 meters, hasn’t been broken since 1980. When Berthelot published his study last year in the online journal PLoS One, he made the simple but bold argument that athletic performance had peaked. On the whole, Berthelot said, the pinnacle of athletic achievement was achieved around 1988. We’ve been watching a virtual stasis ever since.
It seems unlikely to me that we have reached a true peak, rather a temporary plateau with slower-than-average growth, until the next breakthrough in training, technique, genetic manipulation, or whatever. Does that sound familiar?
What Belarus is really like
A hunter in Belarus was shot in the leg by a fox that he had wounded and was trying to kill.
The man was trying to finish the animal off with the butt of his rifle, but as the pair struggled the fox got its paw on the trigger of the gun and fired a shot.
Prosecutors from the Grodno region said the unnamed hunter ended up in hospital with a leg wound.
"The animal fiercely resisted and in the struggle accidentally pulled the trigger with its paw," the Telegraph quoted one prosecutor as saying.
The link is here, other versions of the story are here. It is said that the fox got away.
Legally protected catchphrases for star athletes (and coaches)
Pat Riley obtained a trademark for the term “three-peat” in 1989, when he coached the Los Angeles Lakers.
From football:
[Terrell] Owens wrote a children’s book, had a breakfast cereal named for him, made guest appearances on several television shows and commercials, and in 2009 starred in a VH1 reality show, “The T. O. Show.” In addition to registering “I Love Me Some Me,” he has also sought protection for “Getcha Popcorn Ready” and a logo featuring his initials, T. O.
The full story, interesting throughout, is here.
Rebounds per game, or rebounds per minute? (not a post about basketball)
When someone wins the Cy Young award with a 13-12 record, you reconsider the reliability of particular statistics and also the meaning of the award. In economics we are taught, correctly, that Ronald Coase is a world-class economist, despite his relatively small number of publications. Virtually each piece is a gem.
In the NBA, which is a better or more important stat? Rebounds per game, rebounds per minute, or how about "total rebound percentage"? Should not some measure of rebounding rate win out here?
Nonetheless, I still look first to total rebounds, whether in a game, in a year, or even in a career. How much time you are on the court is endogenous. If you are a superb rebounder but cannot play more than ten minutes a game — because of injury, uncooperativeness, or other missing skills — you will have a low number of total rebounds and that will reflect your broader deficits.
Greg Oden has a high rebound rate but he hardly plays, due to recurring injury. No one calls him the Ronald Coase of rebounding.
Similarly, Yao Ming has high success rates, but cannot stay on the court for very long, due to his bad feet. His team has plenty of talent but has not won much and it probably needs to be dismantled at this point.
In other words, it is often "brute total" statistics which are underrated (think about evaluating a potential spouse). And brute total statistics are most important when you must cooperate with others in complementary fashion and maintain their productivity as well as your own. They are least important when, like Wittgenstein, Coase, or Sraffa, you occasionally issue a missive of brilliance and then retreat for years. Coase did make his Chicago colleagues much more productive, but that effect would be weaker today in this age of specialization and co-authorship.
Both experimental economics and field experiments involve a lot of researcher cooperation and both are fields on the rise. Does this mean that total output statistics will/should become more important for assessing economists?
Circa 2010, should we be looking more for economists who are more like Nolan Ryan and less like Ronald Coase?
Addendum: Angus comments.
Observations on computer chess spectatorship
1. People enjoy watching a live internet human vs. human game more, when they can watch a computer judging the human moves and evaluating the position.
2. Few people enjoy watching live computer vs. computer games, even though the quality of play is much higher and the likelihood of a complex, wild position is much higher. Even if you care at all, there is little in-progress suspense; you might as well look back at the moves once they are over. How many other activities would we enjoy watching or experiencing less if they were done by computers?
3. The quality of play in a computer vs. computer game is so high it is often difficult for humans to tell where the losing computer went wrong, even if the spectator human has the help of a chess-playing computer.
4. I find only the very best computer (Rybka) of interest, although I do not feel the same way about the human players. Furthermore the fifth best computer is still much better than the best human players.
5. The notion of a computer chess tournament taking place "in time" is an odd one. You can play all the games back-to-back or simply use multiple copies of the programs and finish the entire tournament in a few hours; see #2.
6. Watching a computer play chess is a window onto a world where, once the opening is past (often, computers are simply told what to do by a pre-programmed "openings book"), there are many fewer presuppositions than what a human mind will bring to bear on the problem. It's a very good way of learning, in convincing form (the computer will beat you), how much your intuitions lead you astray. It's not just your "bad moves" which cause you to lose, it's also the moves which still seem pretty good to you.
7. There are nonetheless many computer moves which I simply cannot believe are any good. It does seem that every now and then computers get stuck in a "dogmatic trap," usually because of their limited time horizons for evaluation. Playing against a computer, you will do best in the early middle game and then progressively fall apart as its combinatorial powers destroy you.
8. You can watch chess computers play against each other at www.chessbomb.com. Click on "enter" and then TCEC5.
Mercados en todo
Investors from the United States believe they have found an exotic new prospect: Latin American baseball players, some as young as 13 and many from impoverished families.
Recognizing that major league teams are offering multimillion-dollar contracts to some teenage prospects, the investors are either financing upstart Dominican trainers, known as buscones, or building their own academies. In exchange, the investors are guaranteed significant returns – sometimes as much as 50 percent of their players’ bonuses – when they sign with major league teams. Agents in the United States typically receive 5 percent.
The full story is here and for the pointer I thank J.C. Bradbury, who has a new book out The Hot Stove: Understanding Baseball's Second Season.
Anything but the election
A 15-month-old girl survived a fall from a seventh-floor apartment in Paris almost unscathed after bouncing off a cafe awning and into the arms of a passerby, police said today.
The baby had been playing unsupervised with her four-year-old sister yesterday when she fell out of the window, a police spokesman said.
A young man saw the baby starting to fall and alerted his father, who raced into position, arms outstretched, to catch her after she hit the awning, the daily Le Parisien reported.
…The owner of the cafe, located at the foot of the block of flats in north-east Paris, said it was a stroke of luck he had decided to leave the awning open that afternoon.
"I usually close it to stop it catching fire as people tend to throw their cigarette butts on to it,"…
Here is more. It seems that no adult was at home in the apartment.
Here is Montaigne's short essay on fortune. The word "fortune" appears over 350 times in Montaigne's Essays.
Richard T. Gill
Richard T. Gill, in all statistical probability the only Harvard economist to sing 86 performances with the Metropolitan Opera, died on Monday…He was 82.
The article is here. Gill wrote many widely used texts and oddly he did not begin vocal training until he was almost forty. Up until that point, he had little acquaintance with classical music and he smoked two and a half packs of cigarettes a day. He first performed in a staging of Figaro at Harvard, directed by John Lithgow and conducted by John Adams (the John Adams). Later, he was in the world premiere of Philip Glass's Satyagraha. Gill continued to write and edit textbooks throughout his singing career.
In 1971 he gave up his tenure at Harvard. In 1984-85 he hosted a 28-part PBS show on economics. In the 1990s he wrote two books, one on population the other on the decline of the American family. Here is Gill's proposal for a Parental Bill of Rights. His short stories for Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker were widely anthologized and in 2003 he published his first novel.
Here is his home page. At the time of his death he was working on a three to four-volume autobiography. As a Harvard undergraduate he was a successful boxer and somehow he ended up as an Assistant Dean at Harvard by age 21 and later Master of Leverett House.