One of the baseball stories I managed to catch while on my vacation was Bud
Selig’s
announcement that he would not pursue a new contract after his current
one
expires. This means that his tenure as commissioner–one that began with
him
taking the job on an interim basis a decade ago–would end in December
2006.
It’s no secret that I’ve disagreed with how Selig has run the game, in
particular his anti-marketing strategies in pursuit of a favorable
labor
agreement. The short-term gain of a Collective Bargaining Agreement
that
benefited management wasn’t worth the years of damage Selig and his
cohort
did with their relentless bashing of what was a healthy industry.
Declines in
attendance, TV ratings and revenue, as well as fiascoes like contraction
and
the Expos situation, can largely be traced to Selig’s efforts to
convince
people that baseball wasn’t viable, wasn’t competitive, and wasn’t
worth their
time.
With a new CBA in place, though, and Selig setting his own exit date,
it’s
time to look forward and see what can be done between now and the end
of 2006.
What positive steps can and should be taken to ensure that Selig leaves
the
game in better shape than it’s in right now? Every now and then this
year, I’m
going to pick an aspect of the game and lay out what I think should be
done to
improve it. While I’ll isolate one level of the game in each column,
the ideas
I’m presenting need to be viewed as a whole, as one big plan to get
baseball
where it needs to be.
I’ll start with the game’s ownership, because I think everything grows
from
that. Over the past decade, baseball has brought in a number of owners,
both
individual and corporate, that have had a net negative effect on the
game.
From grandstanding over taxpayer-funded ballparks and inflated claims
of
losses, to taking short-term approaches in a long-term industry, the
most
recent set of “lords of the realm” have been a disaster.
If you think tonight’s UTK is shorter than normal, blame it on me. I’ve spent half the day researching A.J. Burnett’s injury, answering email regarding Burnett’s surgery, and writing what is becoming a really long article on Tim Kremchek. The result: my carpal tunnel is acting up more than normal, and I’ll need to try to stop by my chiropractor (yeah, a chiropractor for carpal tunnel…I never would have believed it either) some time this week. For now, please bear with me in this less verbose edition.
The worst-case scenario came true. As Jim Andrews peered into A.J. Burnett’s elbow, he saw a completely torn–by some accounts, “shredded, destroyed”–ulnar collateral ligament. The ligament was replaced and the clock started. We’ll see Burnett again in about six months and he should be back to his old self in 2005, just in time for free agency. By then, he should have a new manager, but for the Marlins’ sake, I hope it’s much sooner than that.
You’ve been hanging ’round these parts long enough. You’ve heard the party line, once or twice or 20 times: Higher payrolls don’t result in higher ticket prices. Correlation is not causation. Salaries don’t shift demand curves. It’s Economics 101. Simple, textbook stuff.
The problem with this line of argument–the problem with a lot of economically-based arguments–is that it’s easy to let the theory get ahead of the data. Well, I should state that more precisely: It’s easy to let an oversimplified theory get ahead of the data. A lot of what you learn in Economics 102, and Economics 201, and graduate-level classes that I was too busy drinking Boone’s Farm to take advantage of, is that much of the theory you master in an intro-level class is based on a particular set of assumptions that can prove to be quite robust in certain cases, and utterly misleading in others.
A lot of people shun economics for this very reason–we’ve all had coffee shop conversations with the scruffy, Skynard-mangling philosophy major who is fond of spewing out faux-profundities about the irrationality of human nature. He’s missing the point, of course, but so too is the Ayn Rand-spouting prepster from down the residence hall who conflates assumptions with hard rules.
In either case, a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing. Economics, though it sometimes harbors pretensions to the contrary, is above all else a behavioral science, and an empirical science. If the theory doesn’t match the data–well, it’s not the data’s fault. This is especially important to keep in mind when evaluating something like ticket prices to baseball games, a commodity that is unusual in many ways. As we’ve stressed frequently, ticket prices ought to be almost wholly determined by demand-side behavior–the marginal cost of allowing another butt in the seats is negligible. But baseball tickets are unusual in other ways, too: They’re very much a luxury good, and their prices are determined by a finite number of decision-makers who may be subject to conflicts of interest. It’s certainly worth evaluating the available data to see whether we can put our money where our mouth is.
BP favorites Marcus Giles and Bobby Kielty finally get their due, but Johan Santana’s imprisonment threatens to start a new revolution. Plus notes on the Braves’ bullpen usage, Torii Hunter’s slump, the bizarre tale of Josh Hamilton, and Lou Piniella’s quest for an aura-emitting closer.