Gladwell on Lanning

UM doctoral alum Jon Lanning, now teaching at Bryn Mawr, gets attention from Malcolm Gladwell in a column about why it is helpful to think about professional sports franchises as art objects rather than businesses.

A good bit:

... it is one of the surreal qualities of professional sports that they are as welcoming and lucrative for those owners who chose to behave like 14-year-olds as they are of those owners who chose to behave like grown-ups.

Jon's paper is about the racial integration of professional baseball and, among other things, estimates the costs (in foregone profits) that owners implicitly paid to keep their teams white. An apparently ungated version of Jon's paper is here. Gladwell uses it to motivate the general idea of owners getting psychic returns from their teams.

Roller Derby

Ann Arbor does not strike me as the most natural environment for Roller Derby, but the Ann Arbor Derby Dimes beg to disagree.

There is even time-lapse photography of their new ad on the north side of Ali Baba's. I wonder how much they paid for that. Somehow Ali Baba and roller derby do not seem like the best fit either.

Bambi and baseball

Apparently ground up deer antlers are all the rage in major league baseball.

Anti-doping policy is an odd bird (or, in this case, an odd mammal). It is not clear to me that the leagues should be in the business of protecting players from their own ambitions.

Hat tip: Charlie Brown

On bowling

From the New Yorker. Hat tip: Stephan Lauermann.

Macy's feels the Heat

This is a marketing department's nightmare.

Hat tip: Dann Millimet

Walking the walk after talking the talk

Kansas City sports blogger endures the punishment he recommended for a player.

I look forward, in a similar spirit, to Paul Krugman voluntarily paying all the extra taxes he recommends.

As an aside, this video would make a fine text for analysis by a gender studies class.

Hat tip: Charlie Brown

Athletic contests

Click here for a chance to win 250 free concussion tests [sic] for your team.

Or, if you do not actually need 250 concussion tests for your team, you can learn about the release dates of new sneakers.

Hat tip: Charlie Brown

Sports measurement

In my inbox this morning was this NYT piece on the effects of Barry Bonds' steroid use on the size and functioning of various body parts, as recounted by his ex-girlfriend.

I hope the resulting email trail is not the subject of a FOIA request by anyone other than the Bad Pun Appreciation Society.

No hat tip in case the snoops are watching but it wasn't Lars Skipper.

Important sports news you may have missed

Cal Tech's basketball team (?!?!) ends its 310 (three hundred ten!) game conference losing streak with a win over powerhouse liberal arts college Occidental.

Yowza.

Hat tip: Mike Ward on Facebook

NFL socialism

Poor old Bill Maher, left in the dust by Jon Stewart.

This Maher piece on the NFL helps illustrates why. First Maher thinks that socialism equals redistribution. Well, no. Socialism means government ownership of the means of production. I think he means social democracy, something one might have expected an editor at the HuffPo to catch. Second, he confuses the NFL's business strategy of partially leveling the playing field among its teams via revenue sharing and salary caps with government redistribution. Sorry Bill, but unlike the government's redistribution, the NFL's redistribution is not motivated by altruism or by a desire to buy votes with other people's money; it is all about profits.

Maher's particular species of confusion reminded me of a remark that Lester Telser once made at a seminar at Chicago about a store owner who shut down everything but the cash register because that was the only part of his store that made any money.

For a better informed discussion of the actual socialism in pro football, look here.

Yankees hat = crime?

Or could it just be that the denominator has been mislaid?

The article manages to actually hint at the denominator in one paragraph, but it seems to me that it is the whole story.

Non-Yankees hat tip to Charlie Brown

The hobbies of others - military dress-up edition

This surprises me as they are pretty tight at the Big House.

The lingering question, of course, is why?

Hat tip: Dann Millimet

The hobbies of others.

Am I happy or sad to know that there is something called the Junior Roller Derby Association?

Most of my affection, such as it is, for roller derby comes from fond memories of the classic individualist movie dystopia Rollerball. My affection for Bach's organ music is partly drawn from that movie as well.

I am free associating a bit; my excuse is that it is Sunday evening before a pretty busy week.

Hat tip: FB friend whose offspring apparently play junior roller derby.

JQAS: read at your own risk?

Apparently the Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports has some issues, though it is the authors who really misbehaved here.

Hat tip: Jess Goldberg

Danes getting the jump on an exciting new sport

Somehow I have completely missed this on my visits to Denmark.

Hat tip: Jessica Goldberg

ESPN and the World Cup

An interesting piece from the WSJ about ESPN's extensive (and expensive) coverage of the World Cup.

Getting people who actually know about soccer / football to cover the matches is a good idea; I think I would have been inclined to have some more familiar faces and voices as well to make the enterprise seem a bit less foreign to US viewers.

I liked this bit:

If NBC managed to get a prime-time audience for curling at the winter Olympics, the cable network can surely generate buzz for the world's most popular sport.

My sense from the selected sample around me is that US interest in soccer is growing steadily over time. Now if only I could get my slingbox to work ...

And then the Germans win ...

England is sent home by Germany and the US is sent home by Ghana.

It is nice in a way to see an African team last into the round of eight but now my two favorite teams are both out of the action and I am left to cheer for the Dutch.

The title of the post, of course, is from the famous quote:

"Football is a simple game: 22 men chase a ball for 90 minutes, and at the end, the Germans win." -- Gary Lineker

Contracting out, North Korean style

The Vancouver Sun on North Korea contracting out to China to provide fans for its FIFA World Cup matches.

Can you hear that giant sucking sound along the Yalu River?

Hat tip: Dann Millimet

Vuvuzela

I was wondering about the background noise in the US vs. England World Cup match yesterday and so I did what you would naturally do, which is to ask some of our clever gradual students, in this case in particular a student from South Africa.

The noise, which sounds like a large number of kazoos droning on and on and on is in fact a large number of vuvuzelas droning on and on and on.

I commend the wikipedia article on vuvuzelas to those who want to know more. It includes some discussion of a possible ban on vuvuzelas at the World Cup, something that obviously did not materialize.

Barrel Man, RIP

America is great because of eccentrics like this.