Category Archives: Sports

Sociologist ties rooting for the Kansas City Royals to Midwestern values

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The Kansas City Royals have a rich history including a 1985 World Series victory. However, the last two decades have been difficult: the team has had three winning seasons since 1990, no playoff visits during that time, and seven straight losing seasons. So why do fans keep rooting for the team? A sociologist suggests that rooting for the Royals is tied to Midwestern values:

Yet the Royals likely will sell out Kauffman Stadium on opening day, draw more than 2 million fans and continue to have a loyal following on the blogosphere.

“Loyalty in the face of hard times is a long-held Midwestern value, and dealing with hard times is a regular challenge for anyone whose livelihoods depend on agriculture and related businesses,” said Jay Coakley, a professor of sociology at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. “However, we must go deeper than this value to explain the loyalty of Royals fans over the past decade.”…

“The fans’ connection with a team becomes a part of their identity,” said Coakley, the author of the textbook “Sports in Society.”

“Fans everywhere reaffirm those identities for each other so that they feel special — and they often make a special point of doing this when teams are unsuccessful and they need extra reaffirmation to justify their support in the face of regular losses. Over time, this pattern of identity reaffirmation becomes regularized, and the fan identity serves as an important basis for their sense of self as well as their social lives and everyday conversations with fans and nonfans alike.

“Losses and losing seasons become topics of conversations much like the last hailstorm or dry season that ruined crops. Of course, some people eventually become weary of predictable bad times and leave their farms or fan identities behind.

“But many stick it out year after year because it is who they are, and giving up on yourself is a hard thing to do.”

Coakley is suggesting that an rooting interest in a sports team becomes internalized and the basis for a kind of community. Fans identify with the team and the city (see this recent post on the differences between the Oakland A’s and the San Francisco Giants). I wonder if we could look at the times that fans use the term “we” to refer both to themselves and the team to get an idea of how much these identities have merged.

But it is particularly interesting that Coakley ties fan’s devotion to the Royals to Midwestern values derived from farming and agriculture. Would a sociologist in Boston come up with a different cultural explanation for why Red Sox fans are so devoted? This seems like a fairly convenient explanation that might not hold up in other places.

The sociological pitch for the Oakland A’s: green-collar baseball

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We have blue-collar, white-collar, and pink-collar. In time for Opening Day of the 2011 baseball season, how about “green-collar baseball“:

There’s a sociological genius at work in the Oakland Athletics marketing department. The current slogan for the franchise, “green collar baseball,” speaks volumes about the culture of the bay area, and why I have become such a devoted fan of the Oakland A’s…

Across the Bay Bridge, you’ll find a better stadium (AT&T Park), a team with a higher payroll, fancier concessions, and fancier fans. You’ll find doctors, lawyers, and San Francisco techie types taking in an afternoon game, reveling in the see and be seen crowd. On the San Francisco side, baseball is very much en vogue. If you search hard enough, you might even find a fan in the crowd who can tell you what a change-up is or explain the infield fly rule.

Trot back over to the Oakland side, and you’ll see where that marketing slogan is coming from. The Oakland Coliseum is clearly a Soviet spin on the baseball stadium, a concrete gulag if there ever was one. The concession options are minimal, the team operates on a shoestring payroll, and the fans are decidedly less cosmopolitan.

All these shortcomings are what bring me to love the authentic experience of Oakland Athletics baseball, and loathe the corporate, plasticized feel of the Giants. There’s an old Taoist saying that it’s “better to be alive in the mud than dead in the palace.” Count me as one who’s happiest to feel alive in the mud of the Oakland A’s.

Having spent time watching both the San Francisco Giants at AT&T Park and the Oakland Athletics at Oakland-Alameda County Stadium, I have a few thoughts on this subject:

1. There is no comparison in stadiums: AT&T Park is nice and has great views while the A’s play in a concrete circle. One website goes so far as to say that the A’s stadium “represents everything that’s wrong with baseball stadiums.”

2. The two teams do seem to have differences in the number of fans: AT&T Park is regularly full while the A’s struggle to even fill the bottom portion of the stadium, even when the team was good in the early 2000s.

3. Both teams have potential: the Giants, of course, won the World Series last year while the A’s seem to have put together a dark horse candidate to win the AL West based around young pitching (just like the Giants). The baseball in each place should be relatively similar.

4. San Francisco and Oakland are very different kinds of cities. Both have a grittiness to them but Oakland is known for crime and gangs while San Francisco has more glittering pieces. Ultimately, I think this is really what is behind this idea of “green-collar baseball”: Giants’ fans are painted as plastic because this is how Oakland residents view their neighbor across the bay. Oakland, both the city and its baseball team, are the underdogs, the team with a limited number of fans, limited funds, and a limited stadium. What is sociological about the use of this marketing slogan is that it invokes issues of social class and status.

I wonder if these sorts of descriptions only pop only in cities that have multiple franchises in the same sport. Almost the same argument occurs in Chicago: the Cubs fans are only at Wrigley Field because it is the cool thing to do while the White Sox fans are the working class people who really care about baseball.

If President Obama kicked teams out of the NCAA tournament for low graduation rates

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The discussion over the graduation rates of men’s basketball players on NCAA tournament teams has grown in recent years. One columnist wondered what President Obama might say if he addressed the issue:

“While nine of every 10 white players graduate on the top-32-seeded men’s teams, only five of every 10 black players graduate. As an African American, I am personally outraged that 21 of the 68 men’s teams have black player graduation rates ranging from 44 percent down to zero.

“Thus, beginning today, I will do my bracket with this new stipulation: I will not write in your team if either your team or black player graduation rate is under 50 percent.

“This decision is not an easy one to make for a basketball purist. It leaves out nearly a third of the teams, including prestigious programs that account for 10 of the last 21 titles. It is with regret that I will leave blank spots for Syracuse, Indiana State, Missouri, Southern Cal, Michigan State, Tennessee, Florida, Nevada-Las Vegas, UC-Santa Barbara, Michigan, Morehead State, Kentucky, Georgia, Temple, Connecticut, Alabama-Birmingham, Texas, Washington, Arizona, Kansas State, and Akron…”

If Education Secretary Arne Duncan already made a similar suggestion, why not the President, who is an avid basketball fan and fills out men’s and women’s brackets on TV?

This is a complex issue that the NCAA doesn’t seem to want to talk about. Instead, they would rather run commercials (one example here) saying that “most [college athletes] go pro in something other than sports.” This may be true in many sports but there are racial gaps in a number of schools in both men’s basketball and football (read about troubles at Auburn here), the major revenue-generating sports.

Update on “baseball McMansions” in Arizona: White Sox also facing issues

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Yesterday, I wrote about a new spring training facility in Arizona that one writer dubbed a “baseball McMansion.” While this particular park may have issues, it is not the only one. The Chicago White Sox also recently moved to the same area. Because of the economic recession, the White Sox are having attendance issues and the mixed-use development that was supposed to surround their facility has not been built:

Small crowds on the west side of the Valley are an alarming trend as the White Sox and other neighboring teams try to rebound in the wake of a depressed area.

“The opening of the Rockies-Diamondbacks stadium (Talking Stick at Salt River Fields) is definitely pulling people away,” Sox chairman Jerry Reinsdorf said before 10,074 fans attended Wednesday’s game between the Sox and world champion Giants. “Now you have six teams in the east valley…”

But the Glendale area hasn’t developed into what the Sox thought when they decided to move from Tucson after the 2008 season.”One of the attractions to putting this ballpark here was the plan for what was going to be built around it,” Reinsdorf said. “By now, in our third year, we were supposed to be looking at restaurants and retail and a hotel and condominiums. And the guys who were going to do that went broke. So we’re sort of sitting out here by ourselves.

“All of the projections for the Phoenix area growth had Glendale in 10 years being the population center of the valley, a ton of people west of here. And that stopped. But at some point the economy will come back. This is too vibrant an area. And when it does come back, those projections will come true. So it’s just a delay.”

It may be some time before the White Sox and other teams see an uptick in attendance and building as Arizona has been hit hard by the economic recession, evidenced by foreclosures and a slowdown in development. Reinsdorf sounds quite optimistic about the future – perhaps he has to be if he has put a decent amount of money into this project.

it seems like now would be the time to look into why exactly the White Sox and other teams moved to this area. In their projections about Glendale, was their any allowance for a growth slowdown? Was the main draw the growing population in this area or were there certain financial incentives that made this move attractive? And what will happen to these spring training complexes if population growth in this area is limited for a significant amount of time?

Grant Hill, Jalen Rose, and race and class

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ESPN recently aired the documentary The Fab Five which earned the network its highest ratings for a documentary (though its unclear how this stacks up against their typical Sunday night programming). One part of the documentary that has drawn attention are the comments Jalen Rose made regarding Grant Hill, Duke, and race. Here is what Rose said in a short segment:

I hated Duke and I hated everything Duke stood for. Schools like Duke didn’t recruit players like me. I felt like they only recruited black players that were Uncle Toms … I was jealous of Grant Hill. He came from a great black family. Congratulations, your mom went to college and was roommates with Hillary Clinton. And your dad played in the NFL — a very well-spoken and successful man. I was upset and bitter my mom had to bust her hump for 20-plus years. I was bitter that I had a professional athlete that was my father that I didn’t know. I resented that more than I resented him. I looked at it as they are who the world accepts and we are who the world hates.

Hill responded to Rose’s comment on the New York Times website. Here are a few relevant points:

In his garbled but sweeping comment that Duke recruits only “black players that were ‘Uncle Toms,’ ” Jalen seems to change the usual meaning of those very vitriolic words into his own meaning, i.e., blacks from two-parent, middle-class families. He leaves us all guessing exactly what he believes today…

This is part of our great tradition as black Americans. We aspire for the best or better for our children and work hard to make that happen for them. Jalen’s mother is part of our great black tradition and made the same sacrifices for him…

To hint that those who grew up in a household with a mother and father are somehow less black than those who did not is beyond ridiculous. All of us are extremely proud of the current Duke team, especially Nolan Smith. He was raised by his mother, plays in memory of his late father and carries himself with the pride and confidence that they instilled in him…

I caution my fabulous five friends to avoid stereotyping me and others they do not know in much the same way so many people stereotyped them back then for their appearance and swagger. I wish for you the restoration of the bond that made you friends, brothers and icons.

While this appears to be a conversation about race, I wonder how much of this might be about social class. While Rose used terms that invoked race (particularly the reference to “Uncle Toms”), what also might have been describing differences in social class: Grant Hill grew up in more of an upper-class family where his dad was a known athlete and his mom had connections. Rose did not have the same opportunities that Hill’s family provided and felt bitter about Duke, a private school known for its wealth (according to the National Association of of College and University Business Officers, Duke is #15 in its 2010 endowment with over $4.8 billion).

In the long run, both men have done well for themselves: Hill is still playing in the NBA while Rose is an analyst for ESPN and also played 13 years in the NBA. But these discussions about opportunities and race and class are ongoing in sociology: is it race that is the primary issue or is it social class? A sociologist like William Julius Wilson has written about this, most recently here, invoking a lot of discussion over the last few decades. How this particular discussion ends up between  Rose and Hill remains to be seen but there will be plenty of ongoing talk about these larger issues.

Describing a “baseball McMansion”

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The term McMansion is generally a pejorative word, typically referring to the size or the poor architecture of a home or the cookie-cutter nature of a suburban neighborhood. Occasionally, it gets applied to others structures, even baseball stadiums.  In a review of Scottsdale Stadium, the spring training home of the San Francisco Giants, a writer suggests that another spring training facility, Salt Water Fields, home of the Arizona Diamondbacks and Colorado Rockies, is more like a McMansion than a home:

Salt River Fields, someone said later, “isn’t spring training.” It’s a baseball McMansion. Scottsdale Stadium just feels like home.

Here is a little more of the description of the two ballparks. Scottsdale Stadium is described as, “intimate and evocative of its sport,” “the Cactus League’s quaintest stadium,” “The place blends into the landscape as if Frank Lloyd Wright had come back from the grave to assist the architects who replaced the old wooden park 20 years ago,” and “There is no such thing as a mediocre seat.” In contrast, here is how Salt River Fields is described: “The world up there seemed so different, the trip should have required a passport,” “Salt River Fields sits next to a Target and movie multiplex. Concrete rules the landscape, offset by some sprouting trees and cactus gardens,” “The parking lot and the walkways at the new stadium consume more space than the entire Giants facility,” and “Shade, like everything else, is more abundant than at the Giants’ park.” Overall, Salt River Fields is more suburban, bigger, less intimate, and features more space (particularly in the parking lots) while Scottsdale Stadium is more like Fenway Park and Wrigley Field.

It would be interesting to find out how fans respond to these two settings. Both offer certain amenities. Not everyone likes cozier, more intimate facilities like Wrigley Field. While Cubs fans tend to like the place, many others (including other teams) complain about the lack of space and outdated facilities (like the bathrooms). Additionally, we could ask whether Scottsdale Stadium really is authentic or simply borrows architectural and design features from other successful ballparks and tries to put them all together.
Ultimately, will baseball fans go in greater numbers to Scottsdale Stadium because of its design and atmosphere and avoid Salt Water Fields with its McMansion nature?

There’s IP in Olympics

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There’s two interesting intellectual property tidbits that arise from Russia’s recent announcement of its three official mascots for the 2014 Winter Olympics.

First:  Don’t Privatize Santa

Ded Morez, the Russian equivalent of Santa Claus, had led in early polling [to decide the mascot] but was pulled from the ballot at the last second when Russian organizers feared that their country’s folk hero would become official property of the IOC [International Olympic Committee].

Analysis:  I don’t know the intricacies of Russian IP law, but, here in the U.S., a public domain figure like Santa wouldn’t become re-protected just because a corporate entity used it (at least in theory, though some would argue that such behavior constitutes a large portion of Disney’s business model).  On the other hand, it’s probably best to never turn IP over to the IOC that you ever want to use again.  Under U.S. law, the IOC doesn’t bother with protecting its Olympic-related IP via general copyright and trademark laws (like everyone else).  Rather, they are personally, directly, explicitly written into the federal statute.  See 36 U.S.C. § 220506.

Second:  Plagiarizing the Past?

[T]he creator of Russia’s last Olympic mascot [Summer 1980] says [one of the new mascots constitutes] plagiarism….”This polar bear, everything is taken from mine, the eyes, nose, mouth, smile,” he told a Moscow radio station. “I don’t like being robbed.”

Analysis:  I’m going to let Chris Chase from the original Yahoo! article take this one:

Yes, both bears have eyes, noses, mouths and smiles, as do all cartoon bears. There’s only so many ways to draw an anthropomorphic cartoon bear. You don’t see Winnie the Pooh with snarling fangs, you know?

One is white and has a scarf. The other is brown and wearing an Olympic ring belt buckle. Other than the fact that they’re both from the ursus genus, there aren’t many similarities. The Sochi mascot may be unoriginal, uninspired and bland, but it’s not a copy.

Sounds like a great, practical description the merger doctrine to me.

The NFL: where having a really smart QB may be a bad thing

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Part of the NFL scouting combine circus is the Wonderlic test. Alabama’s Greg McElroy, scored 48 out of 50, quite a high score. There is one commentator who suggests this may be a bad thing:

McElroy’s brainpower still has the potential be taken as a negative around the league, as explained by Pro Football Talk’s Mike Florio:

That said, scoring too high can be as much of a problem as scoring too low.  Football coaches want to command the locker room. Being smarter than the individual players makes that easier. Having a guy in the locker room who may be smarter than every member of the coaching staff can be viewed as a problem — or at a minimum as a threat to the egos of the men who hope to be able when necessary to outsmart the players, especially when trying in some way to manipulate them.

So while McElroy, who was unable to work out due to injury, may be really smart, he perhaps would have been wise to tank a few of the answers.

Wikipedia’s entry on this has a listing of average Wonderlic scores by NFL position according to a longtime NFL scribe. The average score for a quarterback is 24. It appears that McElroy’s score ranks amongst the highest known scores.

Football is known as having players who are warriors or gladiators. Even so, having a smart quarterback seems to me to be a good thing, rather than a negative because it might challenge the supremacy of the coach. With the complexity of offensive systems these days, particularly with the check-downs and need to read defensive coverages, a smart quarterback might help. This seems like a weird issue of masculinity: in a relatively violent sport, who gets to be smartest in the locker room?

There would be a way to possibly figure out whether this issue with the coach is real (granted that enough Wonderlic data is out there): how do Wonderlic scores compare with the number of coaches a quarterback has (and controlling for a bunch of other factors)? And more broadly, do higher Wonderlic scores translate into more victories?

Another interesting sociology course: Baseball in American Society

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A student writing in the newspaper of Florida Southern College discusses a unique class on campus:

It is not secret that Sociology professor Dr. Edwin Plowman is one of the most eccentric professors on this campus. His “Baseball in American Society” class has by far been one of the favorite classes. Dr. Plowman has some experiences that none of us will ever be able to call our own and he shares them in every class session. Oh, and my personal library grew with the books he assigned that I just did not ever want to sell back to the bookstore.

A few thoughts about this class:

1. Is the class mainly about baseball and how it fits in American society or about American society through the lens of baseball? Both could be very interesting – baseball has its own logic but the game has both influenced and has been influenced by larger social forces. As a baseball fan myself, this sounds like an interesting course to teach.

2. This is reminder of how students view courses. It sounds like the professor tells some good stories and also assigns  books that a student would want to hold onto after the class. This is what makes this class interesting for this student. (And what does it mean when a student says a professor is eccentric?)

Scorecasting looks at data: Cubs not unlucky, just bad

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The recently published book Scorecasting (read a quick summary here) has a chapter that tackles the question of whether the Chicago Cubs are cursed or not. Their conclusion after looking at the data: the team has simply been bad.

But how can anyone disprove the existence of a curse? According to the authors, teams that frequently field good teams but finish in second place, or make the playoffs but fail to win a title, justifiably can claim to be unlucky. So, too, can teams that have impressive batting, hitting and defensive statistics, but whose strong numbers don’t translate into victories.

On both scores, the Cubs proved to be “less unlucky” than the average team. That is, not unlucky, just bad.

“Relative to other teams, we could easily explain the Cubs lack of success from the data — both their on the field statistics and where they finished in the standings,” Moscowitz said.

Since their last Series appearance in 1945, the Cubs have finished second fewer times than they have finished first. They also have finished last or next to last close to 40 percent of the time. According to the book, the odds of this happening by chance are 527 to 1.

The authors of “Scorecasting” believe that what has been stopping the Cubs the last three decades is the extreme loyalty of their fans, which has served to reduce the incentive for Cubs management to win.

According to their analysis, which is primarily based on attendance records and the team’s won-loss percentage from 1982-2009, Cubs fans are the least sensitive to the team’s winning percentage, while White Sox fans are among the most sensitive.

There are two interesting arguments going on here, both of which commonly come up in conversation in Chicago:

1. The data suggests that the Cubs have just been a bad team. It is not as if they have reached the playoffs or World Series multiple times and lost. It is not that they have impressive statistics and this hasn’t translated into wins. They just haven’t been very good. It would be interesting to read the rest of this chapter to see if the authors talk about the MLB teams that have been truly unlucky. I don’t know if a chapter like this will put the talk of a Cubs curse to rest but it is good to hear that there is data that could quiet the curse talk. (But perhaps the curse is what Cubs fans want to believe – it means that the team or the fans aren’t at fault.)

2. Cubs fans like to think that they are loyal while White Sox fans argue that Cubs fans will go to Wrigley Field no matter what. So is the answer for more Cubs fans to stay away from the ballpark until the team and the Ricketts show that they are serious about winning?