Sunday, May 11, 2008
Gene Doping - The New Frontier of Doping
This morning's Kansas City Star has an interesting piece on the new frontier of doping: gene doping. The whole article is worth a read, but here are the opening paragraphs.
Scientists have seen the future of sport. It involves mice that can lift three times the average, humans who can run 90-minute marathons, and ligament tears that can be fixed by injection.
It is genetic engineering, therapy and doping, and it is the arrival of the bionic athlete. At the extreme, this is either the advancement or end of the human race. At the minimum, it is the unavoidable change to the way our sports — baseball, football, the Olympics, you name it — are played.
One thing that the article mentions is that the genetic doping is a way for the human body to exceed its natural athletic capacity.
If confined to natural training, elite athletes are said to be now using 99 percent of their natural physical capacity, compared to just 75 percent in 1896, the year of the first modern Olympics. Given those parameters, academics say there would be no new world records after the year 2060.
But that’s in a world with no genetic engineering. Scientists think a series of gene-doping breakthroughs could boost endurance by up to 10 percent and, according to one study, allow a runner to complete a marathon in 90 minutes — more than a half-hour faster than the current world record.
In an absolute sense, doping should generate more interest from fans as athletes get bigger, stronger, and faster. But I wonder if there is diminishing marginal utility on the point of view of fans. "Wow, Brady Jones has hit his 500th home run that traveled more than 600 feet. Big deal!" Does the display of athletic talent get so extreme that fans are no longer all that excited (all else equal)?
Another interesting issue is what happens to the supply of athletic talent in team sports. Assuming a safe type of genetic doping is found that increases the human capacity to run, jump, etc., this should increase the supply of talent, leading to lower salaries "per unit of talent." And what of competitive balance? If the number of teams stays more or less constant, competition should become almost perfectly balanced, non?
Labels: doping
Wednesday, May 07, 2008
The NFL in Toronto
When readings Skip's post on the CFL this afternoon, I noticed this article listed as being one of the most popular over at the Toronto Globe and Mail. It describes the pricing of tickets to Buffalo Bills games being played in Toronto in the next few years:
Tickets for the Buffalo Bills' eight-game series in Toronto will average $183 per seat — more than triple the cost for the team's home games at Ralph Wilson Stadium this season.
The ticket prices, ranging from $55 to $295, were released Wednesday by the Toronto-based group hosting the series, which will have the Bills play five annual regular-season and three preseason games at the 54,000-seat Rogers Centre through 2012.
The prices are in Canadian money, which is currently near par with the U.S. dollar, and do not include a large bulk of VIP sideline and hospitality suite seats, which will raise the average even higher.
Despite the hefty price, organizers anticipate the games selling out after 180,000 ticket requests were registered on a Web site last month. About 30,000 tickets per game will be distributed in two weeks by lottery to Internet registrants as well as a limited number of Bills and CFL Toronto Argonauts season-ticket holders.
Compare those prices to the prices of Toronto Argonauts games. Single game tickets are not for sale yet for the 2008 season, but choice seats in their 3-game package go for $189 total and season tickets range from $300-$700 for a 9 game home season plus a few other other goodies.
Which brings me to one of Skip's thoughts about why government subsidies have been hard to come by for CFL teams:
It is possible that the CFL makes so little money and has such a small impact that the relocation threat is not operative. There is in fact relatively little demand for football stadiums, public or privately financed.
It's anecdotal, I realize, but there seems to be high demand for NFL football in Toronto. That may simply be due to the novelty of NFL football being played in Toronto. Or perhaps it's due to the value of the NFL brand name, a value the CFL may not have in it's country.
Labels: cfl, demand for football, NFL Buffalo Bills
Why has Canada not subsidized the CFL?
Five CFL teams – the Montreal Alouettes, Winnipeg Blue Bombers, Hamilton Tiger-Cats, Saskatchewan Roughriders and the ownership of a conditional Ottawa franchise – are aggressively pushing plans to build new stadiums or drastically alter and refurbish old ones.It's the overdue question that intrigues me. The article notes that no stadium has been built for football since the 1960s, although some teams play in venues built for another purpose. Some are dilapidated.
Factor in the anticipated makeover of Vancouver's B.C. Place Stadium, which could add a retractable roof to the facility, and a potential redesign of Toronto's BMO Field to accommodate the Argonauts, and the CFL could be looking at well over a half-billion dollars invested in stadium infrastructure during the next five years.
Many would suggest it's long overdue.
Why the lack of public investment? The CFL, like other prominent North American leagues, is a closed set of teams that controls entry. The incentive to obtain a stadium subsidy that derives from the league structure and the relocation threat thus exists. The view of Canadian government as fairly liberal with the checkbook would imply public-private "cooperation" on stadium ventures.
The article suggests at one point that "local and provincial governments are wary about investing in pro sports facilities of any kind," but that doesn't wash with me. Brad knows all about the current subsidy issue over a hockey arena in Alberta, for instance ;)
I can see two possibilities.
It is possible that the CFL makes so little money and has such a small impact that the relocation threat is not operative. There is in fact relatively little demand for football stadiums, public or privately financed.
Second, the political distribution of power differs in Canada from the U.S. This renders the execution of a relocation threat pointless, since (by assumption) there is not a significant source of local public revenue. [bleg: Anyone know the facts?]
I lean towards the first. But the second is testable: hockey arenas should have a greater fraction of public funding south of the U.S. border, despite the fact that hockey is Canada's national sport.
Labels: cfl, nhl, stadium subsidies
Tuesday, May 06, 2008
NCAA Football Politics
Dan Wetzel of Yahoo! writes in his consideration of the failure semi-final/final proposal by the SEC Commissioner in Too Good to Go
The interests of the Pac-10 and Big Ten are transparent enough. Wetzel exposes the "lengthening the season concerns" and other such nonsense for just that in his piece. The behavior of the Big East and Big 12 is the real question. Are they just risk averse -- not knowing very well how they will fare in such a system and therefore reluctant? Concerns about the impact on the regular season seem to be at the core:In the end, according to interviews with people in the room, the decision to proceed or not probably came down to the Big East and Big 12.
The Big Ten and Pac-10, thanks to an economically advantageous relationship with the Rose Bowl until at least 2014, were going to oppose just about anything put on the table. The smaller conferences and Notre Dame were likely to support whatever the majority did as long as their access and revenue weren’t cut. The ACC was in favor of the SEC’s proposal.
That left two swing votes, the Big East and Big 12, who had they pushed for further discussion could have weakened the Big Ten and Pac-10’s silly obstruction talk – “they’ll have to pry a playoff system out of my cold dead hands,” the Ohio State president barked last year.
Best I can tell, after years of discussions with the people in power by me and my colleague Josh Peter, is that while there isn’t a single reason, the oft-cited “protection of the regular season” is a critical one.Increasing the value of some games without diminishing the value of others, is, indeed, tricky business. The current BCS system makes a lot of regular season games count. The downside is that it makes only one post-season game count. In addition, it can make winning a conference championship meaningless, even for a highly regarded conference because of too many losses for the champion. The old polling system to determine a national champion placed weights on a combination of regular season and bowl game results. A "plus-one" system as proposed might diminish the regular season's value more than a "6-plus-2" playoff involving six conferences winners (ACC, Big 12, Big East, Big Ten, Pac 10, SEC) and two at-large teams. Such a system would value regular season games by putting a premium on winning one's conference, while also putting attention on the post season.
Labels: NCAA; college sports; football
Monday, May 05, 2008
Competitive Balance in European Soccer
While the annual races for the championship are usually close, at times coming down to the the last minutes of the last game of the season, interseason competitive balance is notoriously absent in European Leagues using promotion and relegation systems.
Longtime American soccer columnist Paul Gardner sums up his thoughts about promotion and relegation thusly:
The purists keep telling me that soccer will never make it here until we adoptUs economists often have a soft spot for promotion and relegation, but Gardner makes some interesting observations about the costs in competitive balance.
promotion and relegation. I think they're dead wrong. I think it's much more
likely that the rest of the world, this damned, abominably commercial world,
will be forced to recognize the merits of the American franchise system.
Friday, May 02, 2008
Self-congratulations Part Deux
Thursday, May 01, 2008
Emerging scandals?
As an aside, I think that doping and horses provides a good example of the social costs of doping in general. The Nash equilibrium is to dope, and it has been going on for decades. But doped, muscle-bound thoroughbreds are more likely to suffer a catastrophic injury than horses that run clean. (Granted, I think the links here are much stronger than with humans.) Drape has a good post on this issue as well, "The Last Winstrol Derby?", which discusses the possibility that American racing will ban & test for steroids in the near future. Winstrol has been used on horses long before it was injected - allegedly - into Roger Clemens' butt.
And now to the land of scandals, European soccer. This time we go off the beaten path, to Romania, and the run-in for the league championship. The story has everything: ethnic tension between the two protagonists, allegations of payments to referees, payments to opposing teams, and mafia-like sniping between the clubs.
Labels: horse racing, scandals, soccer
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Self-congratulations
CLEVELAND--The Greater Cleveland Sports Commission has been named "2007 Sports Commission of the Year" by the National Association of Sports Commissions.What possible purpose can a National Association of Sports Commissions serve?
The award was chosen by a national panel of Sports Commission executives and was presented at the 2008 NASC Sports Event Symposium held in Omaha.
Sports Econ Musings
Free-Agency & MLBPA: Buck Martinez (TBS Analyst for NYY-Cleveland Game)went to some lengths describing the pressure put on C.C. Sabbathia, potentially the marquee free agent pitcher for next off-season, by the MLBPA to follow through and become a free agent rather than resign -- which is what Sabbathia says he prefers. Martinez' imputed rationale for the MLBPA is that getting the top guy on the market sets higher prices for everyone. That's a testable proposition for the sports economists out there with the free agent data sets -- does a higher quality player in the pool raise average offers?
My Ongoing NBA Playoff Beef: (See "Where Hardly Any Game Matters") Sixers beat the Pistons in Detroit, win in Philly, but must win two more to advance and one more to put the Pistons at the very brink of elimination. In spite of the Sixers play, there's been about as much drama as a Seton Hall-Providence matchup. A Celtic-Lakers matchup may be entertaining, but getting there will seem a lot like the WWF.
Labels: labor markets, MLB, NASCAR, NBA
Monday, April 28, 2008
The Dynamo stadium game
Allan Sanderson: Consider the Options
Whether to support the Games themselves or merely the city's official bid, the latter carrying a price tag of $50 million to $100 million, one hears that "only private money" is underwriting those activities; no tax dollars will be spent. "Private" implicitly refers to donations from corporations and wealthy citizens. However, in jargon that students learn on the first day of Economics 101, virtually all expenditures or allocations have an opportunity cost, whether it be for a firm or family.
If Boeing, Sears, Motorola or McDonald's gives $1 million to help finance our Olympic bid, that is $1 million that does not get returned to stockholders as dividends or plowed back into the company for new projects and production. In addition, that is $1 million that does not, then, support an exhibition at the Field Museum, a new gallery at the Art Institute, or an after-school youth program.
When I sit down each December to write out checks to local, national and international charities and other non-profit organizations, I am implicitly choosing how to allocate, say, $2,000 among various groups and activities. The slice that goes to WTTW Ch. 11 doesn't go to the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless or the American Cancer Society—or to the University of Chicago. It's still just $1 million or $2,000 no matter how a corporation, a wealthy benefactor or I cut it.
There is no free lunch in this world and no free Olympic Games either.
Via Stephen Karlson.
Labels: Allan Sanderson, Olympics, opportunity cost
Sunday, April 27, 2008
Money on the line
Blame all this on Max Starks.There is an element of anecdote to this, but 8 tackles out of the first 25 picks is really a stunning figure. I'd be interested to see some time series data on picks by position in the first round. Surely this is a) an outlier and b) unlikely to persist. Has Michael Lewis ignited a fad? I imagine that Richard Thaler would argue that he has.
Starks started on the offensive line in the Super Bowl for the Pittsburgh Steelers three Januarys ago. But he couldn't hold onto his starting position, losing the right tackle spot to Willie Colon last training camp.
Starks wound up starting only four games for the Steelers in 2007. He became a disposable player, right?
Starks became a free agent this off-season, but the Steelers slapped a transition tag on him to prevent him from leaving. They were willing to guarantee him $6.8 million in 2008 to have him ride their bench again.
That displayed the value of offensive linemen in today's NFL – and the 2008 draft drove that point home.
Michigan's Jake Long became the first offensive tackle selected No. 1 overall in a draft since 1997 when the Miami Dolphins gave him that honor Saturday.
Seven more offensive tackles were selected in the next 25 picks – and Atlanta, Carolina and Kansas City traded up to get theirs. That's eight offensive tackles in the first round.
