Category Archives: Sports

Sitting in a McMansion at the Kentucky Derby?

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An overview of the seating arrangements at the Kentucky Derby suggests some spectators will be treated to a McMansion-like setting:

For those who may wonder what sorts of seating arrangements (and pecking orders) have been established in the 138 years of this aggressively social event, here’s a breakdown: Industry types settle into third-floor boxes at the finish line. Hot-shot corporate leaders plant their flags in fifth-floor suites. The celebrity headliners for Friday night’s charity fundraisers can usually be seen on the fourth-floor Skye Terrace or the Turf Club.

Prime stalking ground this year is “The Mansion,” a new luxury hideaway with a dedicated elevator and private wine cellar designed to feel like a McMansion.

Major sponsors such as Yum! Brands (Taco Bell, KFC) and Brown-Forman (the spirits company behind Jack Daniel’s and Woodford Reserve), have fifth-floor “Finish Line” suites. Prominent Louisville figures buy seats at large tables within the dining areas on “Millionaire’s Row,” which some dismiss as “Thousandaire’s row.”

Horse-industry insiders lock in seats, tables or boxes with personal seat licenses, the best of which can cost up to $75,000 for multiple years or $46,000 for one year. The heart of the industry is in the third-floor numbered boxes: sections 316 to 318 are closest to the finish line. Owners with runners in the Derby are given an assigned box here.

Sounds like there is plenty of money thrown around. But, I wonder what exactly makes “The Mansion” similar to a McMansion: just the elevator and wine cellar? Is there something about the flashiness of the space? Its poor design or architecture? Its appeal to the nouveau riche? Here is an inside look at the newly opened space:

And while the name inspires thoughts of Gone With the Wind’s Tara, or maybe PBS’ Downton Abbey, The Mansion decor better resembles a high-rise suite in a Las Vegas hotel for high rollers, with oversized couches and striking chandeliers…

“This is an experience that’s unlike anything else in sports,” track spokesman Darren Rogers said. Where someone at the Super Bowl or World Series is constantly watching a game, horse racing has periods of 30 minutes or more between races for Mansion customers to be pampered in “the finest amenities that these exclusive customers are used to.”

Churchill’s paddock can be seen from a balcony that also has a prime view of the almost 120-year-old Twin Spires. Mansion patrons who want to watch the races can walk out onto another three-tier balcony that, from the lower rows, affords some of the best views of the track.

“When we started with the design process, we started with a theme. And really the theme of this venue is ‘past meets present,’ ” Churchill track General Manager Ryan Jordan said. “So you’ve got a great historical venue here, and we wanted to bring it up to the modern times with this (Mansion) venue specifically.”

I’m seeing why it is labeled “The Mansion” but still not seeing the McMansion piece which implies some negative aspects…

Fathers still play catch with their sons? What about football, video games?

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I recently saw a review of the new Jackie Robinson bio-pic 42 that suggested American fathers still bond with their sons by playing baseball. My first thought: do fathers still do this on a large scale? Here is why I think this may be an outdated sentiment.

Baseball is no longer the most popular sport in the United States. Even with the large number of kids who play baseball or Little League, baseball’s peak has long passed with the NFL taking over the sports lead. The NFL released its 2013 schedule last week and ESPN was breathless for a while looking at the most tantalizing games that have yet to be played. Baseball is no longer the “all-American sport” and surely this must trickle down to the activities of kids and fathers. While it does have the same nostalgic pitch, what about playing catch with a football in the backyard? (This may be impacted today and in the future because of fears of concussions.) Moving in a different direction, as has the racial composition of baseball players, what about kicking around a soccer ball in the backyard?

Here is another possibility for how fathers and sons might now be interacting in the United States: by playing video games together. The generation who grew up with video games has reached adulthood and these video games habits don’t simply disappear. What if fathers and sons don’t play sports together as much as play Madden? What if they enjoy a good session of Call of Duty? This may not be happening on a large scale yet but I imagine this would grow in the future.

All that said, I want to see some data about how exactly fathers are bonding with their kids in 2013. Appeals to playing catch in the backyard might just be nostalgia for a bygone era.

Argument: the movie “42” ignores Jackie Robinson’s role in the larger Civil Rights Movement

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Peter Drier argues that the new movie 42 fails to properly put Jackie Robinson in a larger context: as part of a larger social movement.

The film portrays baseball’s integration as the tale of two trailblazers—Robinson, the combative athlete and Rickey, the shrewd strategist—battling baseball’s, and society’s, bigotry. But the truth is that it was a political victory brought about by a social protest movement. As an activist himself, Robinson would likely have been disappointed by a film that ignored the centrality of the broader civil rights struggle…

42 is the fourth Hollywood film about Robinson. All of them suffer from what might be called movement myopia. We may prefer our heroes to be rugged individualists, but the reality doesn’t conform to the myth embedded in Hollywood’s version of the Robinson story…

Starting in the 1930s, reporters for African-American papers (especially Wendell Smith of the Pittsburgh Courier, Fay Young of the Chicago Defender, Joe Bostic of the People’s Voice in New York, and Sam Lacy of the Baltimore Afro-American), and Lester Rodney, sports editor of the Communist paper, the Daily Worker, took the lead in pushing baseball’s establishment to hire black players. They published open letters to owners, polled white managers and players (some of whom were threatened by the prospect of losing their jobs to blacks, but most of whom said that they had no objections to playing with African Americans), brought black players to unscheduled tryouts at spring training centers, and kept the issue before the public. Several white journalists for mainstream papers joined the chorus for baseball integration.

Progressive unions and civil rights groups picketed outside Yankee Stadium the Polo Grounds, and Ebbets Field in New York City, and Comiskey Park and Wrigley Field in Chicago. They gathered more than a million signatures on petitions, demanding that baseball tear down the color barrier erected by team owners and Commissioner Kennesaw Mountain Landis. In July 1940, the Trade Union Athletic Association held an “End Jim Crow in Baseball” demonstration at the New York World’s Fair. The next year, liberal unions sent a delegation to meet with Landis to demand that major league baseball recruit black players. In December 1943, Paul Robeson, the prominent black actor, singer, and activist, addressed baseball’s owners at their annual winter meeting in New York, urging them to integrate their teams. Under orders from Landis, they ignored Robeson and didn’t ask him a single question…

Robinson recognized that the dismantling of baseball’s color line was a triumph of both a man and a movement. During and after his playing days, he joined the civil rights crusade, speaking out—in speeches, interviews, and his column—against racial injustice. In 1949, testifying before Congress, he said: “I’m not fooled because I’ve had a chance open to very few Negro Americans.”

Fascinating. Robinson can be applauded for his individual efforts and we can also recognize that he was part of a larger movement – it doesn’t have to be one or the other. But, our narratives, now prominently told in biopic movies, love to emphasize the individual. This is part of a larger American issue regarding an inability to recognize and discuss larger social structures, forces, and movements.

Many Americans might assume the Civil Rights Movement begins in the mid-1950s with Brown vs. Board of Education or the actions of Rosa Parks (this is where the Wikipedia article on the subject starts) but things were stirring in Robinson’s day. While baseball was America’s sport (pro football didn’t start its meteoric rise until a decade or so later) and Robinson’s play was influential, there were other efforts going on. In 1948 the military was integrated via an order from President Truman. After World War II, blacks tried to move into better housing, often found in white neighborhoods, but faced serious (sometimes violent) opposition in a number of locations.

I’ve been conflicted about whether I should see this movie as a big baseball fans. Sports movies are a little too mawkish for me and don’t ever really reflect how the game is played. This argument is not helping the movie’s cause…

Using algorithms for better realignment in the NHL?

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The NHL recently announced realignment plans. However, a group of West Point mathematicians developed an algorithm they argue provides a better realignment:

Well, a team of mathematicians at West Point set out to find an algorithm that could solve some of these problems. In their article posted on the arXiv titled Realignment in the NHL, MLB, the NFL, and the NBA, they explore how to easily construct different team divisions. For example, with the relatively recent move of Atlanta’s hockey team to Winnipeg, the current team alignment is pretty weird (below left), and the NHL has proposed a new 4-division configuration (below right):

Here’s how it works. First, they use a rough approximation for distance traveled by each team (which is correlated with actual travel distances), and then examine all the different ways to divide the cities in a league into geographic halves. You then can subdivide those portions until you get the division sizes you want. However, only certain types of divisions will work, such as not wanting to make teams travel too laterally, due to time zone differences…

Anyway, using this method, here are two ways of dividing the NHL into six different divisions that are found to be optimal:

My first thought when looking at the algorithm realignment plans is that it is based less on time zones and more on regions like the Southwest, Northwest, Central, Southeast, North, and Northeast.

But here is where I think the demands of the NHL don’t quite line up with the goals of the algorithm to minimize travel. The grouping of sports teams is often dependent on historic patterns, rivalries, and when teams entered the league. For example, the NHL realignment plans generated a lot of discussion in Chicago because it meant that the long rivalry between the Chicago Blackhawks and the Detroit Red Wings would end. In other words, there is cultural baggage to realignment that can’t only be solved with statistics. Data loses out to narratives.

Another way an algorithm could redraw the boundaries: spread out the winning teams across the league. What teams are really good tends to be cyclical but occasionally leagues end up with multiple good teams in a single division or an imbalance of power between conferences. Why not spread out teams by records which then gives teams a better chance to meet in the finals or other teams in those stacked divisions or conferences a chance to make the playoffs?b

Will Nate Silver ruin his brand with NCAA predictions?

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Statistical guru Nate Silver, known for his 2012 election predictions, has been branching out into other areas recently on the New York Times site. Check out his 2013 NCAA predictions. Or look at his 2013 Oscar predictions.

While Silver has a background in sports statistics, I wonder if these forays into new areas with the imprimatur of the New York Times will eventually backfire. In many ways, these new areas have less data than presidential elections and thus, Silver has to step further out on a limb. For example, look at these predictions for the 2013 NCAA bracket:

The top pick for 2013, Louisville, only has a 22.7% chance of winning. If Silver goes with this pick of Louisville, and he does, then he by his own figures will be wrong 77.3% of the time. These are not good odds.

I’m not sure Silver can really win much by predicting the NCAA champion or the Oscars because the odds of making a wrong prediction are higher. What happens if he is wrong a number of times in a row? Will people still listen to him in the same way? What happens when the 2016 presidential election comes along? Of course, Silver could continue to develop better models and make more accurate picks but even this takes attention away from his political predictions.

You can collect lots of Moneyball-type data but it still has to be used well

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Another report from the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference provides this useful reminder about statistics and big data:

Politics didn’t come up at the conference, except for a single question to Nate Silver, the FiveThirtyEight election oracle who got his start doing statistical analysis on baseball players. Silver suggested there wasn’t much comparison between the two worlds.

But even if there’s no direct correlation, there was an underlying message I heard consistently throughout the conference that applies to both: Data is an incredibly valuable resource for organizations, but you must be able to communicate its value to stakeholders making decisions — whether that’s in the pursuit of athletes or voters.

And the Obama 2012 campaign successfully put this together. Here is one example:

Data played a major role. There’s perhaps no better example than the constant testing of email subject lines. The performance of the Obama email with the subject line “I will be outspent” earned the campaign an estimated $2.6 million. Had the campaign gone with the lowest-performing subject line, it would have raised $2.2 million less, according to “Inside the Cave,” a detailed report from Republican strategist Patrick Ruffini and the team at Engage.

This is an important reminder about statistics: they still have to be used well and effectively shared with leaders and the public. We are now in a world where more data is available than ever before but this doesn’t necessarily mean life is getting better.

I recently was in a conversation about the value of statistics. I suggested that if colleges and others were able to effectively train the students of today in statistics and how to use them in the real world, we might be better off as a society in a few decades as these students go on to become leaders who can make statistics a regular part of their decision-making. We’ll see if this happens…

Does Michael Jordan own McMansions?

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One headline for a story about Michael Jordan’s most recent home purchase suggests it is a McMansion: “Michael Jordan buys lakefront McMansion on a North Carolina golf course.” More on the house:

Bobcats owner Michael Jordan has purchased a 12,310-square-foot lakefront home in Cornelius, N.C., for $2.8 million.

The home is about 22 miles north of uptown Charlotte where the Bobcats play their home games and where Jordan owns a spacious condo…

The home is located on Lake Norman and the seventh hole of The Peninsula Golf Club. The listing states it features six bedrooms and eight bathrooms and a “stunning panoramic lake views from almost every room.”…

Last year he purchased a 28,000-square foot home in Jupiter, Fla., for $12.8 million after selling his mansion in Chicago.

I’m leery of dubbing a $2.8 million, 12,000 square a McMansion and not just a straight up mansion. On one hand, the home is less than half the size of the Jupiter, Florida home and it is built on a golf course, a common site for a McMansion. On the other hand, this house is five times larger than the average new home in the United States and is quite expensive.

Also, I wonder how this idea of owning a McMansion fits with Jordan’s image. Jordan’s brand is worth hundreds of millions of dollars and his image doesn’t quite fit the mass produced, garish home that the term McMansion implies. This is far-fetched but what would happen if this home purchase started hurting his brand?

Using analytics and statistics in sports and society: a ways to go

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Truehoop has been doing a fine job covering the 2013 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. One post from last Saturday highlighted five quotes “On how far people have delved into the potential of analytics“:

“We are nowhere yet.”
— Morey

“There is a human element in sports that is not quantifiable. These players bleed for you, give you everything they have, and there’s a bond there.”
— Bill Polian, ESPN NFL analyst

“When visualizing data, it’s not about how much can I put in but how much can I take out.”
— Joe Ward, The New York Times sports graphics editor

“If you are not becoming a digital CMO (Chief Marketing Officer), you are becoming extinct.”
— Tim McDermott, Philadelphia Eagles CMO

“Even if God came down and said this model is correct … there is still randomness, and you can be wrong.”
— Phil Birnbaum, By The Numbers editor

In other words, there is a lot of potential in these statistics and models but we have a long way to go in deploying them correctly. I think this is a good reminder when thinking about big data as well: simply having the numbers and recognizing they might mean something is a long way from making sense of the numbers and improving lives because of our new knowledge.

No one-size-fits-all approach for building a downtown baseball stadium

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A new study examines the divergent outcomes after the construction of new baseball stadiums in downtown Denver and Phoenix:

That Coors and Chase Fields had diverging fates is no accident but rather the result of poor planning, write Arizona State researchers Stephen Buckman and Elizabeth A. Mack in a recent issue of the Journal of Urbanism. Phoenix’s attempt to copy Denver’s success shows that sports stadiums are not a one-size-fits-all solution to downtown redevelopment efforts. On the contrary, Buckman and Mack argue, these projects must strongly consider the natural form of the city to avoid failure:

A key consideration that is often overlooked in the planning phase of these projects is the historical urban growth patterns and resulting urban form of the cities in which stadium development projects are proposed.

Buckman and Mack conducted a point-by-point review of both stadiums in their effort to determine what factors contributed most to their success, or lack thereof. They quickly found that population differences weren’t the source of the difference. Phoenix and Denver had similar demographic profiles at the time the fields were being proposed, with no marked variations in age of the potential fan base or ability to pay for tickets.

Where they began to see a clear difference was in urban form. Metropolitan Phoenix is a widespread area without a distinctive downtown core. Its satellite cities of Glendale, Tempe, and Scottsdale all have significant attractions and downtowns of their own that create what the researchers call a “centrifugal effect” on potential visitors to downtown Phoenix. By some estimates, Phoenix has the least developed downtown core in the country.

Denver, on the other hand, has a historic core that dates back to the city’s founding in 1858. In addition, the city itself is far less expansive: encompassing only about 150 squares miles, to more than 9,000 for metropolitan Phoenix. The result of this urban form, for Denver residents, is a considerably more convenient proximity to the stadium.

More broadly, it sounds like having key structures in and near the baseball stadium is very important, perhaps even more so than the particulars of the stadium itself. In other words, building a stadium with little already existing around it might have little impact on the surrounding area. Downtowns work because they are clusters of activity; there are not just office buildings but also nearby residences, restaurants, and cultural institutions that help insure a broad range of visitors to the downtown. Baseball games then become another activity that people want to go to because the games are part of the scene of the whole area.

I visited Coors Field for the first time this past August during the 2012 American Sociological Association meetings. Since I was staying near the Convention Center, we had to walk about 15 minutes to the stadium. The walk was pleasant in itself; Denver has a nice scene between these two destination points. Unlike some other major cities where the downtown is dominated by large buildings, this area has primarily low-rise buildings. People are outside walking around or eating. The stadium itself seemed to be at the edge of the downtown area closer to I-25 but it was clear plenty of other fans were also walking through the surrounding LoDo neighborhood and enjoying the night.

Another question I would ask as a baseball fan: could attendance be boosted in a more dispersed region if the team was winning? Or do parks like Wrigley Field win at attendance with little effect of record because fans want to have the experience?

By the way, here is a picture from my seat. While Coors Field might be more successful than Chase Field, the team was not good last year and there were plenty of empty seats as well as cheap seats online.

CoorsFieldAug2012

Argument: statistics can help us understand and enjoy baseball

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An editor and writer for Baseball Prospectus argues that we need science and statistics to understand baseball:

Fight it if you like, but baseball has become too complicated to solve without science. Every rotation of every pitch is measured now. Every inch that a baseball travels is measured now. Teams that used to get mocked for using spreadsheets now rely on databases packed with precise location and movement of every player on every play — and those teams are the norm, not the film-inspiring exceptions. This is exciting and it’s terrifying…

I’m not a mathematician and I’m not a scientist. I’m a guy who tries to understand baseball with common sense. In this era, that means embracing advanced metrics that I don’t really understand. That should make me a little uncomfortable, and it does. WAR is a crisscrossed mess of routes leading toward something that, basically, I have to take on faith…

Yet baseball’s front offices, the people in charge of $100 million payrolls and all your hope for the 2013 season, side overwhelmingly with data. For team executives, the basic framework of WAR — measuring players’ total performance against a consistent baseline — is commonplace, used by nearly every front office, according to insiders. The writers who helped guide the creation of WAR over the decades — including Bill James, Sean Smith and Keith Woolner — work for teams now. As James told me, the war over WAR has ceased where it matters. “There’s a practical necessity for measurements like that in a front office that make it irrelevant whether you like them or you don’t.”

Whether you do is up to you and ultimately matters only to you. In the larger perspective, the debate is over, and data won. So fight it if you’d like. But at a certain point, the question in any debate against science is: What are you really fighting and why?

As someone who likes data, I would statistics is just another tool that can help us understand baseball better. It doesn’t have to be an either/or argument, baseball with advanced statistics versus baseball without advanced statistics. Baseball with advanced statistics is a more complete and gets at some of the underlying mechanics of the game rather than the visual cues or the culturally accepted statistics.

While this story is specifically about baseball, I think it also mirrors larger conversations in American society about the use of statistics. Why interrupt people’s common sense understandings of the world with abstract data? Aren’t these new statistics difficult to understand and can’t they also be manipulated? Some of this is true: looking at data can involve seeing things in news ways and there are disagreements about how to define concepts as well as how to collect to interpret data. But, in the end, these statistics can help us better understand the world.