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Category Archives: Baseball
Are pricy footballers worth the cost?
The FT today has a story about research by a Cass Business School professor who questions the high cost of footballers’ transfer fees makes financial sense to Premiership clubs.
Gilad Livne argues that new accounting rules mean that football managers will have to disclose all transfer fess on their clubs’ balance sheets. His research into 58 clubs shows that high transfer fee players “might not enhance profitability or cash flow”.
Of course, football fans would argue that their club’s share price isn&rsqou;t, shall we say, the most pressing dependent variable. Victories in a season, perhaps, would be a better indication of whether that big signing was value for money.
The excellent JunkCharts blog, which tracks dodgy visualisations of statistics in the news, notices just this kind of story, albeit about about the baseball clubs’s payrolls, in the New York Times. This one has the advantage of using the only dependent variable that anyone reading the sports page will care about.
But Junk Charts points out that the Times gets the statistics wrong: &ldquo there appears to be a general association between payroll and winningness”.
It would be interesting to see the same thing done for the Premiership. If Livne Livne is right, the requisite dataset of transfer fees may soon become available.
What cricket can learn from baseball
My coach with the Brighton Buccaneers, Craig Savage, gets a mention in the Indy’s Ashes coverage today:
Fielding has been a key part of Australia’s success, dating back to Bobby Simpson&rsqou;s reign as coach. This summer, however, there has been criticism of the management for not practising catching enough. England, meanwhile, have worked hard on their fielding, but have not used a specialist coach since Trevor Penney worked with the squad for the one-day internationals.
Australia are touring with only two coaches, Buchanan and Jamie Siddons. Mike Young, a baseball coach who has worked with the team in the past, believes they are paying the price for not bringing a specialist fielding coach.
Craig Savage, another baseball coach, has been working with Sussex for the last three years and believes cricket can learn much from his sport. “Fielding is a huge part of cricket but teams don’t spend enough time on it,” he said.
“Technique is hugely important. If you get your hands to the ball there’s no reason why you shouldn’t catch it, but you need to learn to read how the ball comes off the bat, how to catch the ball on the run, how to run into position before making a catch. Above all, you need to have soft hands. If you hands are hard and tensed up, there’s every chance you’ll spill the ball.”
Absolutely. From a baseball player’s perspective, fielding in cricket appears sloppy and even lazy. This has nothing whatsoever to do with the lack of gloves; it’s all about technique and, perhaps more importantly, what might be described as the economic logic of the game.
Fielding is far more valuable in baseball than in cricket. Why? because the relative value of the two objectives in each sport are reversed. In baseball, unlike cricket, runs are rare and valuable while and outs are common and should be routine.
An error in the field might cost the fielding team just one run in both games, but while this is usually no more than a minor irritant in a cricket, it’s a catastrophe that could cost a team the game in baseball.
Consequentially, baseball players spend more time practicing fielding and have developed more graceful techniques. It’s wonderful that cricket is adopting some of them.
Incidentally, the reversed economics of outs and runs also affects the different informal etiquette of the two games: A baseball player who celebrates an out like a cricketer taking a wicket is guilty of very poor form and liable to have a pitch placed squarly in his ear the next time he comes to bat.
What a shocker
The Netherlands have defended their European baseball championship, beating Italy 15-0 in the final in Prague. The Dutch are the dominant in Europe, having now won won 19 of the 29 championships since 1954. Italy is Europe’s second power, having won eight.
Spain and Germany finished third and fourth, and have therefore qualified for the 2007 World Cup.
Great Britain finished seventh. The team must be on a bit of a downer since their hopes host nation qualification for the 2012 Olympics were scuppered by the IOC chosing not to include baseball in the programme for the London games.
Another interesting outcome was the ninth-place finish of Greece. It was their first major tournament since the country cobbled together its Olympic baseball teams from north Americans hastily given Greek passports. In the 2003 European Championships, Greece was represented for the first time ever, and the team of professional ringers went all the way to the final before being stopped by — who else — the Dutch.
This concludes my periodic unhealthy obsession with a European minority sport — at least until the 2005 World Cup begins in Amsterdam in September.
No baseball in London 2012
so much for my vested interest in the 2012 London Olympics.
What a blow for British baseball:
This morning, the IOC Session reviewed the Olympic Programme. A vote was carried out sport by sport according to the order that the sports appear in rule 46 of the Olympic Charter, with members voting to decide which sport should be included in the Olympic Programme for 2012. IOC members chose to include 26 sports on the programme for London 2012, with Baseball and Softball not being selected for 2012.
Update: The reaction from the sports’ managing agency in Britain, BaseballSoftballUK.
Update 2: The Australian reports that the decision to axe sports associated with America may have been a protest by Arab countries against the Iraq war. I’m not sure I buy that.
A more likely explaination is that the IOC was reacting against the uncooperative owners of the clubs in Major League Baseball, who have refused to let top professionals compete in the Olympics and have until recently failed to take action against the rampant doping that has plagued the sport in America for years.
The Evening Standard’s report speaks volumes about baseball and softball’s status in Britain. The lede is more concerned with the decision not to replace the two dropped sports with rugby union.
London 2012: Is anybody actually in favour?
Pass your ID card: Is another UK blogosphere consensus is in the making? Diamond Geezer) and Shot By Both Sides appear to be lonely voices in favour of hosting the Olympics in London.
The Sharpener’s Paris correspondent, Katie Bartleby, notices that while the official French bid folks are already serving up the sour grapes, ordinary Parisians understand that they have won today:
I knew the announcement had been made because several of the apartments in my courtyard had applause burst out of the open windows. That’s French people, clapping that London got the games. This is not a country known for being magnanimous losers (or even magnanimous winners.) They’re pleased London won because they want to inflict the games on London. That’s not magnanimity, that’s Schadenfreude.
Nosemonkey’s post from last November about the economic arguments against the London Olympics are worth revisiting:
… The cost estimate is just £2.375bn — only a third of the Athens games. Will we stick to this budget? Well, if the Millennium Dome disaster is anything to go by, no – that hideous white elephant is currently costing the country nearly £30 million a year just for it to stay closed and empty, blighting the landscape and the view from Greenwich Park.
Of this under-estimate of £2.375 billion, £875 million is to be borne by London through a £20 pa increase in council tax. So I’m going to have to fork out an extra £160 over the next eight years when my Council Tax is already extortionate to pay for something I don’t want in a part of London I’ve never been? Great. And those who actually WANT the Olympics — are they going to get free tickets in return for having their hard-earned money taken from them to pay for a bunch of well-paid athletes to have a jolly? Bollocks are they.
I’m not sure about those “well-paid” athletes, since the underachieving millionaires of the American basketball team are hardly representative, but the rest of that seems fair. Further afield, non-Londoners ought to be enen more incensed at the thought of tax increases to stump up for a fortnight of bread and circuses. Quoth Chicken Yoghurt:
Unless the marathon runs past my front door here in Brighton, the Olympics coming to the UK will impact on my life not at all — apart from, of course, all the money that will swill away to pay for this smug back-slap. I’m sure if you live on a sink estate in Glasgow you must be jumping for joy right now. As you will be if you run any of the functionally redundant yet highly lucrative marketing consultancies or advertising agencies that swarm around London like mussels around a sewage outlet.
Not to mention the small local businesses in the Lea Valley are not all that happy about being forced to relocate.
I instinctively agree with all this. But as someone involved with the grassroots organisation of a minority sport, I have a vested interest. I love the idea that some of my younger teammates will get the opportunity to compete at the highest amateur level — if the IOC don’t decide to drop baseball from the 2012 programme tomorrow. I’m also excited about the possibility of long-overdue investment in world-class training facilities for the sport in a city where decent baseball diamonds are hard to come by nonexistant.
Nice as they are for the handful of top athletes in each sport, though, world-class venues is not what most grassroots sports need in Britain. As Camilla Cavendish put it in the Times today, many of the anti-Olympics financial arguements still apply now that the bid has been successful:
… if we really want to get a new generation involved in sport, if we want to create a base to nurture the athletes of the future, we need to spend money on inner city sports facilities, not elite performance venues. Some local sports projects have already been cut because Government has raided the sports budget to fund the Olympic bid. The budget for south-central London has fallen from £27 million over a three-year period to £16 million over four years. That’s money that would have gone to local basketball courts, tennis courts, playing fields. Sport England’s community budget is £2 million a year for the next five years for the whole of London: what is that going to buy?
Given that, cuo bono? Journalist Andrew Jennings, who has written three books critical of the IOC thinks he knows:
“One of the frequently uniting factors of all these bids, for all these cities is a small group of people who wish to get richer than they already are or have jobs for even longer,” Jennings said yesterday by telephone from England.
“Whichever city wins tomorrow — there’s seven years’ work for that lot. The unifying factor is self interest by property speculators.”
That’s will certainly be seven years of news stories and blog entries to keep an eye on “that lot”.
The business of football and baseball compared
Regular readers will know that one of my more eccentric obsessions is the minority pursuit that is European baseball. (In the coming month, you can be sure that there will be some posts here about the European Baseball Championship 2005, which is going to be held in the Czech Republic in July.)
Via Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution, I see that the Brookings Institution has just published National Pastime, an economic analysis of why Americans play baseball while the rest of the world plays football (ie, “soccer”).
With Tampa Bay Buccaneers owner Malcolm Glazer taking over Manchester United, the authors found a timely peg for a new comparative look at sports business between the United States and Europe.
Here’s the publishers’ description:
In National Pastime, Stefan Szymanski and Andrew Zimbalist examine how organizational structures have made Major League Baseball a profitable business (notwithstanding common claims made by the owners) while soccer leagues around the world struggle to break even. They weave a rich variety of stories, anecdotes, and photos into their account of how these games became businesses, and how these businesses have adapted to the demands of fans. The authors show how early administrators of baseball and soccer leagues were influenced by the parallel developments of each sport and, in particular, how the concept of the league was invented by American baseball and transplanted first to English soccer, and then to the rest of the world.
I’m not sure what the exact thesis of the book is, of course, but here’s how I see the situation — and judging by their Washington Post article, the authors have a pretty similar view.
Ironically, perhaps, the big American sports leagues have far less of a “free market” orientation than European football does.
The American sports leagues have understood that unlike in other industries, it’s not good for individual franchises to drive their competitors out of the market. Sports works best when there is rough parity of competition. Consequentially, they have instituted a number of collective measures that are actually punitive of success. The draft system from professionalising amateurs (in which the poorest-performing club from the previous season selects first, and so on), the luxury tax on player salaries, and television revenue sharing are all designed to ensure that rich clubs do not come to dominate the rest.
European football, by contrast, has resisted approaches like this, relying instead on the problematic promotion-and-relegation system.
Rather than stable competition within the top professional leagues, therefore, European football has seen the increasing dominance of the richest clubs, which has led to continuous talk (and actual implementation) of breakaway elite leagues.
World Cup announced
Nice:
Major League Baseball and the Major League Baseball Players Association jointly announced Wednesday that the “World Baseball Classic,” a 16-nation tournament featuring the world’s best players competing for their home countries, will be played in March 2006.
The European contingent, no doubt, will be from Italy and the Netherlands, which dominate this minority sport in these parts. But perhaps this is something for the Great Britain national baseball team to aim for — in the very, very long term.
Weekend blog catchup
Jeff Jarvis of Buzzmachine says “there’s something very wrong with your life when you start looking on Saturday as blog catch-up day.”
Sunday isn’t much better, I guess. But following a manic couple of days, here are some quick links to things I have somehow managed to find the time to find interesting over the last two days:
- Presenting a list of WMDs that terrorists might want to obtain, the head of the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), Germany’s international intelligency agency, says he doesn’t think al-Qaeda has managed to obtain nuclear weapons, but that he his concerned about radiological weapons.
- The Periscope notes a provocative New Statesman article that says organisations in both Saudi Arabia and the United States are exporting fundamentalism.
- Tony Blair should be more careful about where he sticks his fingers — especially when photographers are present.
- Matthew Yglesias has discovered that he would be a Labour supporter in the British election, largely because of Iraq. British readers will find the comments section on this post interesting as an example of how the American centre-left is discussing the British election.
- Speaking of American perceptions of the election, be sure to check out the Christian Science Monitor’s take on MG Rover and the election.
- Looking at the looming referendum in France, the Monitor also has a pro-adoption editorial on the European Constitution:
… one overarching appeal should be made: The EU and its precursors have successfully overcome the aggressive nationalism that caused so much suffering in the past century. Overall, the EU has proven such a success that other countries are clamoring to join. The constitution — no, let’s say the “simplifying treaty” — is the next logical step in this historic experiment.
- Timothy Garton Ash and Timothy Snyder have a lengthy piece about Ukraine’s Orange Revolution in the New York Review of Books.
- Dan Gillmor has an important post linking to various thoughts on the changing economics of journalism.
- Via Gillmor, I also came across a topical article by Chris Daly, a journalism professor at Boston University, entitled “Are Bloggers Journalists? Let’s ask Thomas Jefferson”.
- Major sporting events are bad for the environment, reports the New Scientist. Researchers have found that the 2004 FA Cup final at Cardiff’s Millennium Stadium had an ecological footprint of 3,051 hectares.
- And oh yes: John Foster is the first baseball player to have played in both Britain’s top domestic baseball competition and Major Leagues. While he was a college player in 1997, he spent a summer with my club, the Brighton Buccaneers, before going back to the States and becoming a professional. Following a serious injury last year, he’s just been promoted back to the Major Leagues by the Atlanta Braves.
China getting ready to play ball
It’s been a while since I’ve endulged my esoteric interest in international baseball on this blog, so here goes: the members of the Chinese national team are preparing for the 2008 Olympics. As the hosts, China will automatically qualify. Although I’m generally sceptical of the London 2012 bid, securing automatic qualification for the Great Britain National Baseball Team would be a certain bonus. [ADDED 13.1.2006]
Playin’ honkbal
I got back from Amsterdam late last night. I had been watching a couple of games of the European Baseball Championships.
On Tuesday afternoon, I watched Great Britain — a team that includes six of my Brighton teammates — beat Germany, 5-3. That evening, we all went over to Haarlem to watch the Netherlands clobber Sweden before a crowd of about 4,500.
The International Herald Tribune published a lengthy story about the tournament. John Vinocur‘s piece is the best journalism about European baseball I have seen. His name-dropping of two top European clubs — Germany’s Paderborn and France’s Savigny-sur-Orge — proves that he’s done his homework.
After the Holland-Sweden game, we bumped into Netherlands manager Davey Johnson outside the stadium, and took some pictures of him with my teammates. I’m still don’t have a digital camera, so it will be a while before they get posted here. The IHT story had a sidebar about Johnson. An AP reporter also filed a story about Johnson, which the New York Times, among others, picked up.
Baseball Euros II
On day 1 of the baseball Euros yesterday, Great Britain lost to Russia, 4-1. Today they play Italy. Some more European baseball stories:
- Former Channel 5 baseball presenterJosh Chetwynd has a story about the Great Britain team, of which he is a member, in The Times.
- The Baltimore Sun reports on the role of Balitmore Orioles owner Peter Angelos in setting up the Greek national team. The Greek squad, which Great Britain faces on Monday, includes Orioles minor-leaguers Nick Markakis and Chris Lemonis and former major league catcher Erik Pappas and will be managed by Orioles scout Rob Derksen, who also headed the Australian national team at the 1996 Atlanta olympics. In a good indicator that bringing in ringers is no longer a sure-fire way to succeed in European baseball, Greece lost their first game, 1-0 to Spain.
- Germany’s pre-tournament victory in a friendly against South Africa (and the fact that four members of the local Paderborn Untouchables will be representing Germany) are mentioned in the Bielefeld Tagblatt
- In the Netherlands themselves, De Telegraaf covered the national Honkbal team’s 7-0 thrashing of Belgium.
Baseball in Europe
The game in Japan may be cancelled, but Major League Baseball is still eager to build a bigger overseas profile, even here in baseball-parched Europe. On Monday, the Associated Press reported that a plan is afoot to play some games of the 2004 season in Europe.The gist:
The commissioner’s office has started discussing a plan to move regular-season games to Europe in July 2004.Italy, France, the Netherlands and England are among the candidates, according to Paul Archey, a senior vice president of Major League Baseball International.
[...] Planning for Europe is in the early stages. Commissioner Bud Selig has not yet given the go-ahead, although he’s excited about the possibilities of taking the game all over the world.
[...]“Italy is probably the front-runner because they have one of the strongest fan bases and they have facilities,”’ Archey said.
Better yet, the New York Mets have expressed interest in the venture. Obviously, I’m biased in favour of England, but there’s always Ryanair if they go somewhere else.
Meanwhile, details of the more significant European baseball plan have quietly been sitting on the web site of the French Baseball, Softball and Cricket Federation for months. I wonder how long it will take for someone to finally pick it up.