NHL Expansion: How about Milwaukee?

Not that I think the NHL needs to expand, but if they were to do so, why are they talking about Las Vegas and Kansas City? Why not Milwaukee, where people actually play and follow hockey?

Steroids and Doping

As Major League Baseball considers Jason Giambi's latest semi-confession, and the cycling world witnesses a full confession by a former Tour de France champion at the same time they are transfixed by the Landis trial, it occurs to me that there is perhaps only one solution to the current state of affairs: the athletes need to police themselves. The owners/sponsors/organizers won't do it, because they worry about the economic harm they will suffer if they appear to admit any past wrongdoing. The sports unions won't do it because they are run by extremists who believe that any constraint on athletes, even on drug-taking, is bad. So it's up to the athletes. They need to agree among themselves, outside of their unions, not to take performance-enhancing drugs, and to report on anyone who is doing so. It's for their health and for the integrity of their sport. Is there anyone bold enough to take the first step?

Giambi's Comments

The recent Jason Giambi remarks about steriod use and the need for MLB to offer an apology has me re-thinking some things I said a while back. I used to think the controversy would blow over in a couple years, and McGwire, Bonds et al. would get in the Hall of Fame. Now I'm not so sure. Without sincere apologies and explanations from these guys, they might not be forgiven.

Is the NFL a Cartel?

The Economist's Free Exchange blog has a post in which they refer to the NFL as a "cartel":

Is football’s popularity a result of the cartel that runs the football league or is American football an innately more interesting game?

and

Economic theory predicts that the profitability of a cartel comes from the firms withholding some of its product to increase its value and/or charging the highest price possible without being undercut by its competition. ... Should the government intervene, break up the cartel, and make football games more frequent?

This analysis is just wrong. The NFL is no more a cartel than is, say, Dell or Toyota. The NFL is a single entity that competes in the sports entertainment industry along with a number of other actors.

J.D. Drew to the Red Sox

The Red Sox are paying $70 million over 5 years to J.D. Drew? That seems like a bit much for a guy who has never played more than 146 games in a year and probably won't do much for team chemistry. I suppose they liked his on-base-percentage, though.

BCS Prediction

I'm going on record to say that I think it's going to be Florida in the title game, beating Michigan by a nose. Tonight we'll see if I'm right.

NBA Management/Player Relations

NBA management/player relations strike me as bizarre:

The players' association filed two unfair labor practice charges Friday against the NBA over issues with the new ball and the league's crackdown on player complaints.

The charges were filed with the National Labor Relations Board.

...

A number of players publicly have complained about changing the ball from leather to a microfiber composite. Although players are adjusting to the new ball, they're having a much harder time with the crackdown on reactions after the whistle, often referred to as a "zero-tolerance policy."

First of all, it seems to me the league should have talked to the players about the new ball, to get their input. The people who actually use the ball would have the most knowledge about it, so talk to them before you make a change.

But on the other side, why are the players filing charges with the NLRB? Can't they just talk through these issues without a government intermediary? Really, the issues are not that complicated.

Finally, why are the players whining about the technical fouls issue? They're getting paid millions, and they should be able to deal with foul calls they don't like.

Pujols Needs to Tone it Down

Albert Pujols is one of my favorites. He's the best hitter in the game today, and could be one of the all-time greats. But this is not how players should be talking:

Albert Pujols thinks he was snubbed.

The St. Louis Cardinals' slugger is upset he lost out to Philadelphia's Ryan Howard for the National League MVP award, saying Wednesday the honor should go to someone on a playoff team.

"I see it this way: Someone who doesn't take his team to the playoffs doesn't deserve to win the MVP," Pujols said in Spanish at a news conference organized by the Dominican Republic's sports ministry.

...

Pujols, the 2005 NL MVP, said he has bigger dreams -- a spot in the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y. The BBWAA also votes for the Hall of Fame.

"It is still early but it is a dream I have," Pujols said. "My hope is that in good time I will have sufficient numbers to get to Cooperstown."

First, there's no need to whine about losing to Ryan Howard. Pujols makes a valid point (although I disagree with him on it), but while it's fine to say that kind of thing to your friends in private, he should keep it out of the media. Phillies fans are going to let him hear it when he plays in Philly next year.

Second, don't talk about how your goal is to be in the Hall of Fame. We know it is, but you don't say that to everybody. It's a bit unseemly. Just say you're going to play your best and see what happens.

UPDATE: Pujols seems to have apologized:

"I feel so bad because I love Ryan Howard," Pujols told USA TODAY. "I never said he didn't deserve the MVP. He is deserving of that award. He earned it. That's why he got it. I'm not trying to defend myself; I just want to tell him that I'm sorry for all of this because he earned the MVP. The last thing I want to do is spoil this for him."

I'm not quite sure how this reconciles with his earlier statements, but it's good to hear.

Baseball Hall of Fame

McGwire, Gwynn and Ripken are on this year's Hall of Fame ballot. I think Ripken should be a nearly unanimous choice, Gwynn should get in with a bit of room to spare, but McGwire needs to wait a year as punishment.

Olympics Say No to Cricket

The IOC has said it will not be including cricket in the Olympics. Do any cricket fans care? I can't say I was particularly broken up about baseball being dropped.

The BCS Mess: A Retro Solution

Today's a big day for the BCS. Will USC beat Notre Dame, and thus slip past Michigan? Does Florida have a shot at moving up with a couple big wins? Whatever happens, no doubt many people will be unhappy with the result, and we'll be reading about their unhappiness through the end of January.

The most common proposal offered to deal with the problems will be a playoff of some type. Everyone will agree that this is the only way and will heap criticism on the NCAA for blocking this obvious solution.

I agree that the BCS sucks, but I have a very different take. I'm going to go on record here with an alternative proposal: Let's go back to the old Bowl system. Here are my arguments for it:

• Under the old system, January 1 was one of the best sports days of the year. There were five excellent college football games, and sometimes 3 or 4 of them would have implications for who would be national champion. Now, by contrast, there is only game that matters, and January 1 is fairly dull. And if the BCS championship game is a blowout, there are no good games at all.
• The Bowls have character. It is something different from any other sport.
• Do we have to take sports so seriously that we need to have a definitive champion?
• The arguments over which team should be crowned national champion were actually quite fun.

It's rare that I argue things were better when I was growing up, but here's one instance where I think "progress" has not been kind to us, and more "progress" would be even worse.

Antitrust and Sports Leagues

I recently read a review of a book about Curt Flood's fight against baseball's old "reserve clause." http://www.dcbar.org/for_lawyers/washington_lawyer/november_2006/books.cfm (scroll down a bit for it). The Flood case dealt with a somewhat narrow issue, but it brings to mind an issue that has always bothered me: The consideration and treatment of team sports leagues under the antitrust laws.

It seems to me that many people have a misconception, under which they view individual teams as companies competing in the market. Thus, they seem to equate Red Sox-Yankees competition with Dell-HP competition. But to me this is not an appropriate comparison. The Red Sox-Yankees are to a great extent on the same team, that is, the Major League Baseball team. They both benefit when the league itself is doing well. Dell and HP, by contrast, are cutthroat competitors. The real competition for the Red Sox, Yankees and MLB is really the NFL, NBA, etc.

In essence, what you have with team sports leagues is an entity that is based on internal competition. The entity's success depends on the appeal of the internal competition model it creates.

As a result, it seems to me that the entity should be able to set up the internal competition structure however it wants to. It could have one owner who employs all the individual teams and players. Or it could have multiple owners, but with strict controls on movement of players between teams. Or it could have the teams act as individual competing entities, with no resrictions of any sort. But regardless of which model the league operates under, I'm not sure there should be any antitrust concerns (unless the league is trying to prevent other competing leagues from starting up (e.g. through predatory pricing).)

UPDATE: After writing this quickly off the top of my head, I thought it might be worth researching it a bit. I see there is a recent paper somewhat on point: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=927771 I'm going to try to give it a read soon. Here's the abstract:

Professional sports leagues enjoy a unique justification in defending their seemingly anticompetitive practices under the antitrust laws: They allegedly need to maintain competitive balance. According to the argument, sports leagues need to do anticompetitive things to enhance their competitive standing vis-a-vis other sports leagues or other forms of entertainment. The argument is on the leading side of a circuit split, with only the D.C. Circuit rejecting it. Additionally, sports leagues have been adept at getting this argument into public discourse and legislative consideration. This Article argues that antitrust should reject the competitive balance argument on its face. The competitive balance argument makes the assumptions that there can only be one championship competition per sports league, that leagues can and will engineer balance in that unique competition, and that fan interest is directly related to that singular competition.

This Article draws on comparative data and recent economic research to conclude that each of these assumptions is wrong and that judicial endorsement of the competitive balance argument may simply be an aesthetic preference without empirical support. Instead, a solution lies in reconceiving the league competition envisioned by the competitive balance argument. In particular, a sports league can be subject to several different “competing competitions” among its constituent teams; it could thus maintain fan interest even in the absence of competitive balance. This view draws support from the experience of the decade-old English Premier League and also helps to illuminate Major League Baseball's litigation attempting to expand its intellectual property rights to limit fantasy baseball league operators.

UPDATE II: OK, I read (well, skimmed) the article and I'm glad I did. I kind of wish I had read it before doing the post, but what can you do? The authors' -- Temple Law professor Salil Mehra and Pepper Hamilton associate Joel Zuercher -- state that the main justification for not applying antitrust laws to sports league is the "competitive balance" argument. They explain:

the competitive balance argument can excuse restraints by reasoning that they are necessary to create the on-the-field competition that draws fans. Under this theory, competitive balance helps sports league compete with other forms of entertainment, including other sports leagues and “American Idol”- style reality television that may themselves provide “competing competitions.”

They then attack this argument on a number of grounds. For reasons to lengthy to go into (I'd have to write my own law review article to explain), I was not convinced. But what was most interesting to me was their mention of the "single entity" argument for not applying some antitrust rules to sports leagues. Under this arguement, they note,

horizontal agreements among competing teams in a sports league should receive completely unique treatment under the antitrust laws based on the proposition that leagues should be treated as a “single entity,” rather than being treated as a horizontal agreement among competitors. Such treatment would shift the analysis from Sherman Act Section One’s relatively strict prohibitions on horizontal restraints of trade to the more ambiguous strictures in Section Two’s restrictions of monopolization. Newer sports leagues, such as Major League Soccer, have attempted to structure themselves as single corporate entities with the constituent teams as subunits, in order to garner the relatively favorable antitrust treatment in the manner that the single-entity argument proposes.

This sounds a lot like what I was arguing. I'm happy to hear there is someone else who agrees! But alas, they also say: "However, the single entity argument has been largely rejected by courts."

Ryan Howard over Albert Pujols for MVP

Howard over Pujols for MVP was a tough call, but I'll go along with the decision. I watched a lot of the Phillies games in the stretch run, and opposing teams were terrified of Howard. I don't know how many intentional walks he got, but it was a lot.

It seems to me there is an unstated bias against previous award winners (MVP and Cy Young). To repeat, you can't just do what you did last year -- you have to do better. (Unless there is no one close to you). I think Greg Maddux lost a Cy Young because of that, and it probably hurt Pujols here.

McNabb Done; So are the Eagles

McNabb's year has ended early again. I hate to see this happen to him. He's a great guy and a great quarterback. Not perfect, but great.

And that should do it for the Eagles this year. 5-5 with Jeff Garcia taking over. Not looking promising.

It has been quite a run of bad luck now for the Eagles. It would be nice to get some more help next year -- either a solid running back or a good defensive pick up.

Tiger Blows One!

Tiger Woods squandered a three-stroke lead with six holes left, then lost to Padraig Harington on the second hole of a playoff Sunday at the Dunlop Phoenix.

I'm disappointed to see that happen. I like to think of Tiger as invincible. But, of course, he is not. He is merely super-human (as evidenced by a 14-2 playoff record in official tournaments, among other accomplishments).