Sunday, January 31, 2010
Seeding in Grand Slams
New attendance records were set (653,860, up 8%) , and As a moral if not economic boost for us locals, Tennis Australia (governing body for Tennis in this nation), in conjunction with the Victorian State Government, announced a plan for a $363 million AUD redevelopment and extension of Melbourne Park, the home of the Australian Open since 1988.
However, some newspaper and radio coverage in Melbourne has suggested the Open was a bit lacklustre this year.
Rising attendances (a new record of 653,820, up 8% on 2009) and record day-night crowds on the Wed and Sat of the first week would suggest otherwise, but I agree that 'the feel, the vibe, the atmosphere' was lacking until we reached the finals. Perhaps this was caused by the bad weather at the start of the Open - rain instead of the usual stifling heat was an unusual start to the tournament? Maybe the slightly later start than in years gone by (a week later than iat the start of the 2000s) means more Melburnians are back into work mode after the Christmas break? Maybe the local broadcaster, the Seven Network, did an awful job? (They have been almost universally whacked for a shocking telecast this year.) Perhaps attendance growth can be explained by the great missing variable of sports economics research - (the compounding effect of) marketing/advertising expenditure?
So, (a) if we could measure 'enthusiasm', (b) has the seeding of 32 players (up from of the 16 seeds prior to 2001) influenced this variable, (c) how? And (d) if attendance is rising, does it really matter, or will there be a lagged detrimental impact upon attendance?
Julio del Corral addressed some related issues in the Dec 2009 J Sports Eco, suggesting a significant reduction of competitive balance in men's Grand Slam tennis (but not for the women) since the 32 seeds were introduced. Check it out.
Labels: Competitive Balance, tennis
Sunday, December 13, 2009
The Short Supply of Tall People is Getting Longer
The statement about competitive balance reflects an argument offered in The Wages of Wins. Specifically, we argue – following the lead of the late evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould – that competition in sports is driven by the size of the underlying population of talent. As the talent pool expands, sports leagues become more competitive.Economists sometimes use the Noll-Scully measure of competitive balance, the actual standard deviation of win percent divided by the "idealized" standard deviation of win percent. This measure tells us how spread out wins and losses are within a league. The closer this measure gets to one, the more balanced the competition in the league.
Because it is adjusted for the length of the season in terms of games, we can make comparisons between leagues. Comparing this measure between the NBA, the NFL, MLB, and the NHL, the NFL has the most balance, followed closely by MLB and theNHL. Why the competitive imbalance in the NBA? Dave Berri again:
At the other end of the extreme lies the NBA and the ABA. Each of these leagues is less competitive than any other league considered. At first this seems odd, since basketball is possibly the second most popular sport in the world. The problem with basketball, though, is not the population of people who are interested in playing. To play basketball you can’t just be interested. To play basketball at the highest level you generally have to be tall.And there just are not that many people that tall and that athletic, relatively speaking.
But as has happened in other sports, the talent pool is growing. The hot region now is Latin America:
"You just didn't see many kids from Latin America then," Chaney said. "There were a few around — I think (N.C. State's Jim) Valvano had one — but there just weren't many Latino kids around. Now, you see them popping up all over."I remember watching the Oklahoma Sooners basketball team back in the late 1990's when they had Eduardo Najera and Victor Avila, both Mexican natives, on their roster. Najera was the second Mexican drafted into the NBA and has had a good career in the NBA.
The article notes the US Olympic Dream Team as the start of the interest in basketball in Latin America. It will be interesting to see, as these some of these players filter into the NBA, if competition becomes more balanced as we've seen in other sports.
Addendum: here's a little more Noll-Scully goodness, applied to the NHL, from Stacey Brook, one of Dave Berri's co-authors (along with Martin Schmidt) on the Wages of Wins.
Update: missing Stacey Brook link is now there. Thanks tp reader Phil!
Labels: Competitive Balance, NBA, noll scully
