In what's surely a global pastime, played out as loudly in the bars of Brooklyn as the pubs of North London, sports fans bewail the lack of loyalty in professional sports, as evidenced by ever-changing rosters and inflated egos that bounce from city to city chasing the highest bidder. In the age of free agency, players are commodities, bought, sold and traded like any investment. The payoff — and fans expect one, the hell with loyalty — is a better shot at the title and the riches that come with it. But a new study of top professional soccer teams in Europe is challenging the wisdom ... Read More
Shedding Light on Ice Hockey Blackouts
September 1, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment
In the first period of Game 3 of the National Hockey League's Western Conference Finals, the Chicago Blackhawks' leading scorer, Martin Havlat, was knocked unconscious by a vicious body-check that sent him sprawling to the ice; his eyes were closed as teammates and medical personnel closed in around him. Two days later, he skated back out onto the ice for Game 4. Some folks would say, "that's just hockey," and let's face it, most of those folks live in Canada, where the sport is akin to a religion, despite being the main cause of sports-related traumatic brain injury. But a recent study ... Read More
Suspense and Sports Television
April 16, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment
The prolific sports scholar Allen Guttmann suggests that the careful recording of stats is one of several defining characteristics of modern sports. The widespread interest in player stats suggests that certain types of sports fans are interested in comparing the on-field achievements of athletes just as much as they are in the individual achievements themselves. But when it comes to watching games, we are only interested in who wins and loses, according to recent research by a trio of economists. In their summary of a longer paper, William Chan, Pascal Courty and Hao Li argue that ... Read More
Baseball’s Best Teams Are … 2009 Edition
April 1, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment
Baseball fans on the East Coast have an exciting season to look forward to, with division championship races going down to the wire. That's the prediction of mathematician and Mets fan Bruce Bukiet, who has just released his forecast for the 2009 Major League Baseball season. If Bukiet’s model proves accurate, the Western Division races should be far less interesting, with the two Southern California teams — the Angels and Dodgers — easily winning in their respective leagues. The National League Central Division also looks uncompetitive, with the Chicago Cubs finishing far ahead of ... Read More
The NFL Should Be More Like NASCAR
November 28, 2008 • By • Leave a Comment
When I was growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1980s, you could go to an Oakland A's game for next to nothing. And though the Oakland Coliseum at that time was not Ebbets Field, I can, to a limit, understand the nostalgia with which people remember the Brooklyn Dodgers. It was a time and place where the admission was cheap and the players were more or less accessible. It doesn't take much to see that sport spectatorship and sports stars have changed dramatically in the past two decades: Phil Mickelson wants to play more in Europe next year because the dollar is "stagnant"; The ... Read More
Group Members’ Insecurity Can Foster Being a Jerk
October 26, 2008 • By • Leave a Comment
It's a familiar sight at sporting events, and it recently reared its head on the campaign trail. A healthy pride in a group we belong to or identify with — be it a football team, an ethnic identity or a political party — morphs into an aggressive nastiness. Rooting for the home team turns into taunting the opposing players; a commitment to one candidate inspires cries that his opponent is a terrorist. How and why does this shift occur? According to new research by a group of psychologists at the University of California, Davis, the answer seems to lie at the intersection of intensity ... Read More
Baseball Whiffs When Setting Salaries
October 16, 2008 • By • Leave a Comment
As one team after another gets eliminated in the baseball playoffs, no doubt many fans are grousing that certain strikeout- or error-prone players are getting paid too much. New research suggests one likely reason for this disconnect between an athlete's paycheck and performance. In a paper just published in the Journal of Sports Economics, economist Andrew Healy of Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles uses Major League Baseball as “an ideal laboratory for testing theories about compensation” — specifically, the theory that salary offers are warped by “memory-based biases” ... Read More
Surprising Season Throws Baseball Guru a Curve
October 3, 2008 • By • Leave a Comment
Throughout this past summer, one of the 10 most-viewed items on Miller-McCune.com has been a short story posted on April 1 titled "Baseball's Best Teams Are...." It contained mathematician Bruce Bukiet's predictions for the 2008 Major League Baseball season. In 2000, the math professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology created and copyrighted a mathematical model to compute the probability of any one team defeating any other team. He notes on his Web site that his system "beat the odds" for five of the past seven years. So how did his system perform for 2008? Well, it was closer ... Read More
Men Dominate Olympics TV Coverage
July 31, 2008 • By • Leave a Comment
A new analysis of NBC's prime-time Olympics coverage shows male athletes receive more air time than women, but the discrepancy is much greater for the winter games than the summer ones. Andrew C. Billings of Clemson University clocked all 348 prime-time hours of Olympics coverage from 1996 through 2006 — three Summer Olympics and three Winter Olympics. He found that “men athletes and their respective sports were shown a slight majority of the time in each of the three Summer Olympics telecasts, with an overall split of 51.9 percent for men’s events and 48.1 percent for women’s ... Read More
Research in Summary
July 14, 2008 • By • Leave a Comment
No one gives out medals for Olympics-related research. But that hasn’t stopped scholars from using the games as a springboard to study everything from terrorism to traffic patterns. Type the term “Olympic Games” into Google’s Scholar directory, and 57,300 entries come up. To commemorate this month’s Beijing Games, we present a few of the more interesting Olympics-related research papers of recent times. Home-Field Advantage Do athletes competing in Olympic events in their home countries have an advantage over their competitors from abroad? Several studies suggest the answer is ... Read More
