Category Archives: Sports

Dynamic pricing at sporting events

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Kevin Arnovitz at Truehoop reports that the New Orleans Hornets are embracing variable pricing for tickets for the upcoming NBA season. But more interesting is the link to a story about tickets sold by the San Francisco Giants, the first team to completely embrace dynamic pricing.

Last season (2009), the Giants played around the concept of dynamic pricing. Based on demand for tickets for each game, the prices in this section of about 2,000 tickets would fluctuate. When I was in San Francisco last August and was looking for Giants tickets, I saw this section online and was intrigued by it. (For the record, I bought tickets in other seats on StubHub which were cheaper than the variably-priced seats.)

Based on the success of this small sample, the Giants went ahead and introduced dynamic pricing for all the tickets in AT&T Park (a beautiful stadium) during the 2010 season. They are the first team to do this and now several other teams are tinkering with the concept on a small scale.

Evaluating Scottie Pippen as “window into your [pro basketball] soul”

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I recently had a discussion with a colleague about Scottie Pippen, who is entering the Basketball Hall of Fame. My colleague, a long-time Detroit Pistons fan, could not help himself from laughing when I suggested that Pippen was one of the best 25 NBA players of all-time. Miffed, I used my own years of watching Pippen play for the Bulls, Bill Simmons’ ranking in The Book of Basketball (these rankings were the best part of the book – Simmons has Pippen at #24), and stats from basketball-reference.com to make my argument.

Apparently this interaction was not as isolated as I thought. Kevin Arnovitz at Truehoop writes that Pippen was a polarizing player and “how you feel about Scottie Pippen is window into to your soul as a fan of the pro game.”

How large is too large for football?

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The NFL has some large players, particularly on the offensive line where it seems like all the linemen are at least 6’3″ and 300 pounds.The game has evolved from one with fairly normal people to one where players have to be behemoths or physical specimens at each position.

Mississippi walk-on lineman Terrell Brown is even bigger: 6’11” and 390 pounds. This is huge, massive. A couple thoughts:

1. Can one even be a good football player at this size? I imagine if he locked up with a defensive player, Brown could win on size alone. But how difficult is it to move all that weight? I could imagine some smaller defense players could make it difficult as they run around him.

2. Can one remain healthy while playing at this size? Linemen take a beating and it seems like tall athletes, like Yao Ming, have special issues.

3. What will his future life be like if football doesn’t work out? Offensive linemen bulk up quite a bit to play football but this is not the weight one would want to stay at for a lifetime.

Brown has a long way to go before these questions are answered – he is just a walk-on who apparently played at a community college and is not listed on recruiting sites. I’d be curious to see how his football future plays out.

How statistics may change golf

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Statistics are part of many sports and are often used by managers, coaches, and players to make decisions.

Golf is not yet up to par with others sports (see the Moneyball craze in baseball or the efforts of some NBA teams to analyze games) but that moment might be just around the corner, according to Slate:

We’re in a golden age for golf research because the PGA Tour has opened ShotLink’s books to researchers. Two professors at the Wharton school, for example, looked at 1.6 million tour putts and concluded that professional golfers are risk-averse. They examined putts for par and putts for birdie from the same distances and discovered that pros make the birdie putts less often. They suggest that pros leave these birdie putts short out of fear of making bogey, and then calculate that this bogey terror—and the resultant failure to approach birdie putts in the same way as par putts—costs the average tour player about one stroke per tournament.

It’s insights like this that offer the provoking notion that a Moneyball-type revolution awaits golf.

It would seem like an advantage to players to have this kind of data and analysis in hand as long as they don’t completely overrule their instincts for the game. Just because one has statistics available doesn’t necessarily mean they will be used judiciously.

h/t Instapundit

Argument over Title IX ruling

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Two articles at ESPN.com debate the merits of Title IX after a recent court decision regarding the act at Quinnipiac University. While the court case was about the school inflating the number of female athletes in order to show parity in male and female sports programs, Gregg Easterbrook (a journalist/pundit) and Nancy Hogshead-Makar (law professor and “senior director of advocacy for the Women’s Sports Foundation”) debate the necessity of Title IX.

1. Easterbrook argues that the rule allows the government to intervene in situations where it should not. While Title IX was initially necessary to help women’s sports get the recognition they deserved, it is unnecessary today. In the case at hand, the court was left deciding whether playing volleyball was a “civil right” and whether the school could add a competitive cheer team. Easterbrook says, “The issue is whether Title IX has run amok.”

2. Hogshead-Makar argues that Title IX is still necessary as women’s college sports attract smaller “scholarships, budgets, coaching salaries, facilities and competitive opportunities” compared to male sports, male sports are larger at the high school level, schools in addition to Quinnipiac are miscounting female athletes in order to appear compliant, and Title IX has widespread public support (80% according to one poll).

Divergent perspectives on a legal act that affects many college students.

Baseball training now including cultural assimilation

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White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen recently made comments suggesting Latin American baseball players are not treated as well as Asian players. While reading an article about this on ESPN.com, I was interested to find that major league teams have stepped up efforts to help players assimilate to American culture:

[M]any teams are doing what Guillen has suggested. Although they aren’t hiring specific interpreters, many organizations have intensified their English and cultural assimilation classes at the minor league level. This is a recent development, which is why Guillen hasn’t seen its impact at the major league level.

Teams recognize that a player’s path to success depends on how quickly he can assimilate into the American culture. It’s not nearly enough to be able to throw 95 mph or to hit a ball 450 feet. Pity the teams that lag behind in realizing this. It’s to a team’s benefit to have its players focused on baseball and not on whether they can order dinner, pay their rent or call for a taxi. Teams should do this not for altruistic reasons but for simple economic reasons. It’s a sound fiscal decision to put your employees in the best position to succeed.

Take the case of star Cleveland Indians rookie catcher Carlos Santana. Although he had been bashing Triple-A pitching for most of this year, one of the reasons Cleveland waited until the middle of the season to call him up to the majors was because the team wanted him to focus on language training.

The writer portrays this as a sound business decision but surely there are more dimensions to the story than this. What is the responsibility of a sports team (or any business) to its employees? Helping players adjust to a new culture or helping players complete an education (an issue in baseball, football, and basketball) or navigate a new world of fame and money is an important consideration. Not only might it be a sound economic decision and boost on-field performance but it also suggests teams might also be interested in the human potential (and not just athletic potential) of their players.

The anger in Cleveland over LeBron

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While the story of a fan dressed in a LeBron James Miami Heat jersey being escorted out of the Cleveland Indians game last night makes the rounds, Joe Posnanski of Sports Illustrated writes about the anger present in the city of Cleveland. According to Posnanski, what makes this anger different from anger after  sports letdowns of the past (of which Cleveland has seen its share) is that the anger seems to be growing.

Those who don’t watch or follow sports sometimes say that it doesn’t matter who wins or loses or how the local team finishes. Posnanski is suggesting the opposite: this anger about an NBA transaction is present all over a large city.

My questions: how much does this sports move really diminish the quality of life in Cleveland? Are workers less productive or are fewer business deals made? Do less visitors come to Cleveland now that it is not the city of LeBron? Can the image of Cleveland across the United States sink (even with Forbes already earlier this year naming it the most miserable city in the United States)? Would residents move away from Cleveland because LeBron also moved away?

Beware of stadium food

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Yahoo reports on ESPN’s findings about stadium food. There were some noteworthy health violations and this little tidbit about Chicago stadiums in a discussion about how inspection practices differ by state:

Chicago stadiums had the lowest percentage of vendors with critical violations; that could be because city inspectors make their visits when the stadiums are empty and no employee is handling or serving food. (Gotta lova that Chicago political machine.)

In the last ten or twenty years, stadium food has improved in quality – from nachos with fake cheese to sushi, premium sandwiches, and more. However, perhaps a lot of it wasn’t very clean…

LeBron and the 2008 Olympic team

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As we continue to sort through what happened in the first three weeks of NBA free agency, Adrian Wojnarowski at Yahoo provides more details. Here is part of the story of LeBron and playing for Team USA in the 2008 Summer Olympics:

From Team USA coach Mike Krzyzewski to managing director Jerry Colangelo to NBA elders, the issue of James’ immaturity and downright disrespectfulness had become a consuming topic on the march to the Olympics. The course of history could’ve changed dramatically, because there was a real risk that James wouldn’t be brought to Beijing based on fears his monumental talents weren’t worth the daily grind of dealing with him…

No one could stand James as a 19-year-old in the 2004 Athens Olympics, nor the 2006 World Championships. Officials feared James could become the instigator of everything they wanted to rid themselves for the ’08 Olympics.

The whole story casts LeBron and his friends in a less-than-positive light. Olympic officials called his group “The Enablers.”

Fascinating backstory and look into the life of a player who has been a national celebrity since high school.

The beauty (and pain) of baseball in a single play

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One of my uncles once said he likes baseball because it is so unpredictable. On any day the worst team can beat the best, the best hitters fail about 70% of the time, and the best teams rarely win more than 60% of their games.

This was exemplified today in one play in the Cubs-Phillies game. In the top of the 9th inning, the Phillies trailed 1-0 with a runner on second with two outs. On a ball hit to left field, the rookie right-fielder threw home as the runner tried to tie the game. The throw bounced to the catcher, who had just enough time to catch it and tag the runner. Except the catcher dropped the ball, the run scored, and the Phillies tacked on three more runs to win it. (Watch the replay here from MLB.com.)

This is one big reason to watch sports: it can be hard to predict how a single play might alter the course of the game.

And on a related note, not completing a play like this seems like one that happens to teams that are not very good. A better team would make the out to end the game. In baseball, it is very interesting how good teams always seem to get the breaks – most of which they probably make for themselves.