Coyote Blog

In the past, local governments and the legislature have blithely hit up taxpayers to pay for new sports stadiums for local teams.  You may think you have it bad in your city with 4 major sports teams, but we have 4 major sports teams PLUS about seven or eight baseball spring training stadiums.

It seems like the legislature and local government finally got tired of putting all taxpayers on the hook for these stadiums, and had the radical idea that maybe actual, you know, fans who want to use the stadiums should pay for them.  This turned out to be too expensive for ticket prices at the proposed new Cubs spring training facility -- fans aren't used to paying for the full price of their sporting event in their ticket price -- they are used to getting subsidized by non-sports fans.  As a compromise, the legislature proposed a tax on tickets for all spring training games at all stadiums to pay for this one new field.  This seems stupid to me, but it elicited this hilarious response from the baseball commissioner:

Selig told reporters at HoHoKam Park that it was a "dangerous precedent" to tax all ticket buyers primarily to benefit one team and that Major League Baseball has taken over negotiations for a new Cubs spring home.

Right, but it is A-OK if all taxpayers, including those who will never see a baseball game, are taxed to pay for the new stadium.

For the first time in five years, I am apparently mathematically eliminated after the first weekend, with my best possible finish in 7th.    Congratulations to our current leaders, who navigated through an incredible series of upsets far better than I did:

Perhaps even more incredibly, Todd Ramsey is shown to have a 71+% chance of winning it all, which are pretty unprecedented odds in our pool this early in the tournament.

To join, go to http://www.pickhoops.com/CoyoteBlog and sign up, then enter your bracket.   More here.

Hosting the Olympics practically bankrupted Montreal.  Via Megan McArdle, Victor Matheson argues that the current Greek financial problems may have stemmed from hosting the Olympics.

Greece's federal government had historically been a profligate spender, but in order to join the euro currency zone, the government was forced to adopt austerity measures that reduced deficits from just over 9% of GDP in 1994 to just 3.1% of GDP in 1999, the year before Greece joined the euro.

But the Olympics broke the bank. Government deficits rose every year after 1999, peaking at 7.5% of GDP in 2004, the year of the Olympics, thanks in large part to the 9 billion euro price tag for the Games. For a relatively small country like Greece, the cost of hosting the Games equaled roughly 5% of the annual GDP of the country.

Of course, the Olympics didn't usher in an economic boom. Indeed, in 2005 Greece suffered an Olympic-sized hangover with GDP growth falling to its lowest level in a decade.

Hosting Olymics is just a super-sized version of the fallacy that causes governments to fund billion dollar sports stadiums.

How, in a benevolent universe, can it be that Phoenix does not have a team in this league?  More here via Carlos Miller.

Via Flowing Data, a cool chart in the NY Times with every batter faced by Rivera in the playoffs.

Rivera has 88 appearances in the post-season with only one blown save.  When he walks to the mound in the World Series, it is usually (in the immortal words of Bill Paxton) "game over man, game over."  But his one blown save is remembered in Phoenix, since it coincided with what is easily the greatest moment in Arizona pro sports history.

Readers will know that I am not a fan of publicly-funded stadiums.  Had the mayors of the 40 largest cities in the US signed a no-public-funding pledge 30 years ago, and stuck to it, we would still have the same number of sports teams in roughly the same places, but without all the taxpayer subsidies.  It is rivalry among cities the creates a sort of prisoners dilemma problem and we end up with rampant public subsidies.

What I hadn't realized was the role of outright bribery and kickbacks in this process.  Apparently, it is routine that city and county officials take compensation, in terms of free personal access to luxury boxes, in return for approving these public stadiums

In late August, when the Mobile City Council and Mayor Sam Jones first toured the $2.5-million addition to Ladd-Peebles Stadium, including 11 new skyboxes, District 6 Councilwoman Connie Hudson said she was surprised to hear the city council would have a suite separate from the mayor's, which is located just between the 40- and 50-yard lines.

"It was announced to me on the day we toured," Hudson said. "We've always shared, like we do with the Baybears."

The 11 new skyboxes bring the total at city-owned Ladd-Peebles Stadium up to 14, as three were built in 1997 in part of the press box addition. In addition to the two skyboxes available to the city, the Mobile County Commission also has a suite, which brings the total of skyboxes for local government use to three, or 21 percent of the skyboxes in the 61-year-old stadium.

Speaking generally, and taking into consideration the differences between facilities in other cities, Bud Ratliff of the Mobile Bay Sports Authority says most stadiums have only two skyboxes reserved for city and county use, but doesn't see a problem with the current arrangement at Ladd-Peebles.

I consider winning the Olympics for one's town to be roughly equivalent to army choosing to quarter itself in my house.  So I am pleased that this particular financial locust will go someplace else to pig out.  I am happy to watch it occur in some exotic locale to which I do not pay taxes.

I am reluctant to pile on Obama, though he certainly would have claimed credit had Chicago won.  I will say that the US managed to win an Olympic bid during even the Carter administration, though because the Montreal Olympics were such a financial disaster, LA really didn't have any competition when it was bidding in 1978.  One other city expressed interest that year - Tehran.  What a disaster that would have been.

Please don't tell me the LA Olympics "made money."  The city of LA and state of California subsidized the games in all kinds of ways that never hit the income statement of the organizing committee, starting with police and congestion costs.  Only in comparison to the financial disaster that was Montreal could the LA Olympics be called a financial success.

I suppose we all fantasize about being a teenager again.  One reason not to be young again:  My son's high school soccer team played at 4PM the other day in Phoenix.  Game time temperature:  114F.

Harvard Business School has (or at least had in 1987) its own equivalent of the show Big Brother.  During the first year, a new student gets locked in a classroom for a year with 88 other high-strung, type-A overachievers in an explicitly zero-sum process (there are a fixed number of each grade to be handed out) conducted by sometimes sadistic professors bent on eeking out the maximum amount of stress, fear, and verbal conflict.  Think John Housman's class in the movie "Paper Chase."  Students for some reason react to this process by, instead of branching out and meeting the other 800 students in the class, spending most of their social time with these same 88  (the rugby team saved me to some extent from such narrowness).

By no means are all these folks my "friends," in part because I have a fairly limited definition of that word, but they all became pretty close associates.  I knew most all of them pretty well -- well enough that both the couple that ended up in jail and the couple that became spectacularly successful were no real surprise.

One of those 88 I spent a year with was a guy named Jim Balsillie, now famous as billionaire CEO of RIM (Blackberry) and, more recently, for trying to buy an NHL franchise.  Jim is not a close friend, and in fact I probably haven't exchanged a hundred words with him since we graduated.  But over the period of a year I feel like I had the measure of him, as quiet, bright, kind and fairly humble.   Jim was a much, much nicer guy than I was -- certainly I was far, far more likely in class to rip into another student for being an idiot in class discussion.   I once got so frustrated with a teacher that I went to the front of class and took over.  I can't even imagine Jim doing something like that.

I write this all because I just have to make a public statement concerning a recent statement about Jim Balsillie by the NHL.  The NHL recently chose to vote against letting Balsillie buy the Phoenix Coyotes.  Fine.  I think they are idiots - they should be begging to have a guy of his talents and money in their fraternity - but whatever.  What ticks me off, though, is that instead of dicussing the controversial business reasons for the vote and they choose to smear Jim:  (via Market Power)

"We voted to deny approval to Mr. Balsillie because we concluded he lacks the good character and integrity required of a new owner" under NHL bylaws, said Boston Bruins Owner Jeremy Jacobs, chairman of the league's board of governors.

I suppose it is possible that Jim is some kind of evil smiling sociopath and managed to fool 88 of us for over a year, despite living in close proximity.  I seriously doubt it, but it is remotely possible.  But even if that were the case, there is no way the NHL suddenly figured this out when those who know him better have not.

Matt Nestor has some fun with this:

The NHL owners are obviously good judges of character. Some that have been approved:

● William "Boots" Del Biaggio (Nashville Predators), now headed to jail on fraud charges.

● Henry Samueli (Anaheim Ducks), now awaiting sentencing on SEC violations.

● John Rigas (Buffalo Sabres), currently in jail on embezzlement charges.

● Sanjay Kumar (New York Islanders), now serving time for conspiracy.

● John Spano (Islanders), who deliberately misled the NHL and the Islanders about his net worth.

● Bruce McNall (Los Angeles Kings), who pleaded guilty to conspiracy and defrauding six banks of $236 million.

Why would you want a successful businessman to taint such a group?

People often use terrible, specious logic when arguing things political.  I have particularly seen this over the last 6 months.  The argument typically goes like this:

1. I make a critique of a policy in the Obama administration, say on health care
2. Sometimes as an opening response, or sometimes when other person is unable to specifically counter what I have said, they respond instead, "well, your guys  fill in the blank ." The latter part might be "got us into Iraq" or possibly "are pushing this birther nonsense."
3. I respond that  fill in the blank was not something I support(ed) and that if  by "my guys" they mean Republicans, that I was not a Republican, that I do not think the Republicans have an internally consistent position, and that I disagree with many programs and policies typically advocated by Republicans.  And besides, how did this have anything to do with the original conversation?
4. They respond to me now as if I am somehow cheating.  Confusion reigns.

I am not a student of logic, so I don't know what this technique or fallacy is called, though I have learned that such common behaviors generally do have academic sounding names.  I think of it as the sports-team-argument approach.  When my son (Yankees fan, much to the embarrassment of the whole family) argues with his Red Sox cousins, he might say "Kevin Youkilis has to be the creepiest looking guy in the league," and his cousins might respond "Yeah, well how many steroids has A-Rod done this week?"

Strictly speaking, bringing up A-Rod does not answer the Youkilis barb.  But it is understood to be in the broader context of my team vs. your team, and in that context the exchange makes logical sense, and the A-Rod comeback is a perfectly appropriate rejoinder to the Youkilis insult.  You point out a blemish in my team, I respond with a blemish on your team.

But what if you don' t have a team?

I am starting to understand better that this is how most people approach political discourse.  For someone looking for a quality discussion on key public policy questions, arguments seldom make sense.  Why does something Rush Limbaugh is saying have any bearing on the point I just made on health care or cap-and-trade?  The answer is that it does not, unless the whole point is a red team-blue team one-upmanship between the Coke and Pepsi parties.

Postscript / Disclosure: I am actually an agnostic in the Yankees / Red Sox battles, but I am a big fan of Kevin Youkilis.  The story of how Oakland's Billy Bean tried to pry Youkilis out of the Red Sox farm system in Moneyball is priceless.  According to the story, Bean knew before the Red Sox what talent they had lurking in the Minors.

A new stadium for a professional sports team is going to be built without public money.  At least, that is, without any money from governments of the United States.  It will be built and owned by the Pima-Maricopa Indian Community, agruably a nation unto itself.

I am back in the USA, but I am missing my daily dose of cricket each evening.  I found watching cricket incredibly relaxing in the evening.  Despite common perception, it is not a difficult sport to understand -- it just has a vocabulary all its own.

This is actually a pretty big week in British cricket, as the biennial Ashes matches between Australia and England begin on Wednesday.  Apparently, Australia has pretty much owned England over the years, with the exception of an exciting victory by England four years ago.   The only way I have found to watch it in the US is via a pay internet site associated with Sky TV.  Anyone have any better ways?

Cricket for American Baseball Fans

As a public service, here is my quick description of cricket in terms American baseball fans will understand.  This will leave out some details and arcana (just as one can easily describe the basics of baseball without mentioning catcher interference or running on a dropped third strike).  Commenters are free to get all over me with exaggerated anger for any small mistakes I make.  Note that I purposefully am using some American baseball terms for things in order to make the translation easier.

The cricket field is a large oval (of varying sizes) with two wickets or stumps about 66 feet apart in the middle of the field (about 6 feet longer than the distance from an American pitching mound to home plate) (picture).  Think of the two stumps as two home plates separated by a single base path.   This is a useful way to think of it because herein we get to the part that is most confusing to Americans:  At any one time, there are two batsmen, one at each end.  And, there are two bowlers (the equivalent of pitchers), again one on each end.  If you think of it as two home plates, each with its own batter and pitcher alternating play, you get the idea.

Play progresses in a series of overs, which is 6 balls or pitches in a row.  A single bowler will bowl 6 balls, or one over, from his end, and then play reverses and the other bowler at the other end will bowl six balls.  This continues until all the batters on the team are out (more in a minute).  As in baseball, bowlers get tired and get replaced over time.  Much like high school or little league baseball, bowlers are not specialists but are fielders who are rotated in and out of the bowling position from the field.  Again, just like American baseball, bowlers can be straight ahead speed specialists or they can be spinners (ie throw a variety of curving balls).  Bowlers generally bounce the ball into the batsman (though they don't have to), as they can then take advantage of funny hops off the uneven playing surface and because the bounce can accentuate the effects of spin.  Unlike American pitchers who are fixed to a spot on the mound, cricket bowlers can make long running starts to their bowling.

Since there are two batsmen, whoever is facing the current bowler is the active batter. In addition to the bowlers and the keeper (like an American catcher) there are 9 fielders dispersed 360 degrees around the batter.  Only the catcher wears something like an American-style leather glove -- all the other fielders are bare-handed.

OK, here is the second thing that befuddles American baseball fans:  Batsmen continue to bat and score runs until they are out - even if this takes hours and scores of pitches.   There are no ball and strike counts that limit the time batting.  If the batter hits a short ground ball to a fielder, a sure out in American baseball, he does not have to run in cricket and therefore cannot get out.  And once he hits and gets some runs, he still keeps batting.  These are all differences from American baseball.

When the batsman gets a hit, he has a choice to run.   If he chooses to run, both he and his partner (remember there are two batsman at a time) run to the opposite stump.  Making it safely is one run.    If the ball is hit well enough, he may run back and forth for more than one run.  If the ball rolls all the way to the "outfield" wall, it is automatically scored as four runs.  If the ball clears the "outfield" fence on the fly (the equivalent of an American home run) it is automatically 6 runs.

Note that if the batter runs an even number of bases, he ends up back at the stump where he started and he will be the one to face the bowler on the next pitch.  If he scores an odd number of runs, the other batsman will now face the bowler.  There is some strategy involved in this, as it gives the batting team some leeway to determine which of its two batters will face the current bowler.

There are a number of arcane ways to get a batter out, but the most common are the following:

• Bowled:  The ball hits and breaks the wicket.  First and foremost, then, a batter is defensive.  He needs to make contact with any ball that is headed for the wicket.  If any part of the batsman hits the wicket (eg he hits it with his bat or with his leg while running) this is also an out.
• Leg before wicket (LBW):  If the ball hits the batters leg, and the referee rules the ball would have hit the stump, the batter is out
• Run out:  When the batter chooses to run (and this is a choice) he can be "thrown out" in baseball parlance if a fielder throws the ball back and hits the stump  (or someone tags the stump with the ball) before the runner gets back to the wicket (the equivalent to a force-out in baseball).  I have not watched a lot of cricket, but I have never seen anyone run out.  Batsmen tend to be pretty conservative in going for runs this way, as a single out is far more devastating than in American baseball so they take fewer chances.  Its better to live and bat some more than try to stretch out a single extra run.  Particularly since a good batter can score 50 or even 100 runs in a single at-bat (or inning) before getting out.
• Caught:  If the batter hits the ball in the air and it is caught, the batter is out.  There are several fielders typically concentrated just behind the batter as catching the equivalent of an American foul tip backwards (there is no foul territory in cricket)  seems a particularly rich source of caught balls.

Batters therefor face a tension.  They must guard the wicket at all costs, and the safest way to do so is to hit a lot of ground balls to avoid being caught out.  But the batter also needs to score, and so must sometimes take some chances in order to score runs by putting the ball in the air.  The best batters seem to be the ones who can hit the ball hard on the ground and consciously seek out gaps in the fielders.  The best equivalent in baseball I can think of is batters who are good at hitting the infield gaps on hit and run plays.

An inning is the process of having an entire team bat and be put out once.  In a test match, typically over four days, each team might have two innings.  There are a number of rules variations that might end innings sooner on time or number of overs.

A note on scoring:  When watching TV, they still flash a lot of stats I do not frankly understand.  But the most common will be a score after a test match might say England was 292 and 165.  This means they had 292 runs in their first innings and 165 in their second.  For an inning in progress, the score will look something like this:  164-4.  This means that the team batting has so far scored 164 runs and has had four batsmen put out.

There are many other unique terms (I personally like "maiden" as a particularly apt term for a no-run over) but I think this is a good start.   There is a lot of arcana in test cricket I don't yet understand, but none of it stops me from enjoying the games.   Enjoy.  That is, if one could ever get any cricket on American TV.

Ties occur at the end of regulation in NBA basketball games way more frequently than one might expect from a normal distribution of scores.    The distribution of point differential at the end of regulation looks really weird:

Why this is, and the role of strategy, is here (via the sports economist).

I am not at all a bankruptcy expert, but I have watched the Administration's efforts to evade bankruptcy law in favor of the UAW and at the expense of secured creditors with great interest.

I am wondering now whether something similar might be going on in the Phoenix Coyote's hockey team bankruptcy.  The Coyotes are in bankruptcy, and the former owner (there is actually an interesting question as to whether he still is the owner) has solicited an offer of $212.5 million for the team from Jim Balsillie, contingent on Jim moving the team to Canada.   This amount would pay off some but not all the creditors and would not leave the stadium authority whole on their lease (though I have limited sympathy there, as I begged and pleaded for our local governments not to subsidize hockey in Arizona).

Now, the league is demanding an extra $100+ million to be paid to the other team owners by Balsillie as a relocation fee for the team as an adjunct to the sale.  There is some sense that this is a poison pill to kill the deal, because the league is mad that a) this sale is happening without its involvement and b) they sense the team has not done enough to keep the team in Arizona.

Nevertheless, if Balsillie were to agree to pay the extra $100 million, isn't this a total ripoff of creditors?  In effect, he will be paying $312.5 for the team, but structuring the transaction so NHL team owners, rather than Coyote's creditors, get $100 million of the transaction.  Am I missing something?

Disclosure:  Jim Balsillie and I were section-mates at HBS.

Well, you can't say I didn't predict this.  The Phoenix NHL hockey franchise (the Coyotes, a case of obvious before-the-fact trademark infringement on this blog) has declared bankruptcy.  The only current buyer is RIM's Jim Balsillie (a section-mate of mine at HBS) who will only buy the team if he can move it to Canada.  Gee, who would have thought that ice hockey would struggle to be successful in Phoenix?

Several years ago, Phoenix suburb Glendale paid about $180 million to build a hockey stadium for the Coyotes.  The Coyotes had already been in the Valley for several years, losing money all the while, and had shed one ownership team for another fronted by Wayne Gretzky.  It was shear madness to build them a stadium, as their chances of financial success were almost non-existant.  It was already clear at this point that hockey was not going to be a big draw in Arizona.  For this reason, Scottsdale and Phoenix both ended up passing on subsidizing the team before Glendale, out to prove it was a "real" city, stepped up to the plate with a wad of taxpayer money.   The stadium ended up being about as close to the center of mass of the metropolitan area as the Denver airport is in that city.

... because an Arizona Cardinal will be on the cover of EA's Madden 10 game.  Actually, Larry Fitzgerald of the Cardinals will share the cover with Troy Polamalu of the Steelers.  I suppose believers in the Madden curse can take heart that it may not have much affect on the Cardinals, who have historically been dogged by plenty of curses of their own making.   Maybe there is some sort of acquired immunity.  Great choice, though, as Larry Fitzgerald is not only rediculously talented and exciting to watch, but also seems to be as good of a guy as one can find in professional sports.

For the first time in years, we have a winner in our bracket contest even before the Finals are played.  Publicity shy Steve Anonymous is the winner, no matter who wins tonight.  He has North Carolina to win, but no one with Michigan State is close enough to catch him.  Congratulations!  As usual, I entered the sweet-16 in the top 10, but then just got crushed on the second weekend.  After having 12 of the Sweet-16 correct, I only had 3 of the final 8 correct.

After the first two rounds of the NCAA tournament, here are the standings:

Note your humble scribe in 7th place.  Moses has led right from the starting gate, and still has a decent chance of ultimate victory, but his chances fell a lot when the Longhorns couldn't quite pull out the win the other day.

You can look at your best possible finish here.  Retain hope -- even Andrew Ivey, at #137, still has a statistical chance of victory, as do many others.  A large majority of the top 75 current brackets still have a statistical chance of victory.

Update: If you wonder why so many folks have a chance, from this point forward there are 32,768 different possible bracket outcomes.  After this weekend, there will only be 8.

We had 144 brackets entered (thanks everyone!) and this is the distribution of picks.   Interestingly, the most popular first round upset pick (excluding 9-8 games) was #10 Maryland over #7 California, with 61% calling the upset.  And the majority were right, as Maryland won today over Cal.   Overall the picks show an incredible lack of respect for the Pac-10 and the Big-12, with teams like Cal, Washington, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Kansas getting a lot of votes to fall in early to mid round upsets.  North Carolina garnered the most picks to win it all, followed by Louisville and Pitt.

Brackets are due circa noon Eastern time on Thursday.  Right now we have 107 brackets!  This should be a blast this year.

To join, go to http://www.pickhoops.com/CoyoteBlog and sign up, then enter your bracket.  This year, you may enter two different brackets if you wish.  The detailed rules are here.

Online bracket entry closes Thursday, March 19th at 12:20pm EDT.  Be sure to get your brackets in early.  Anyone can play "” the more the better.  Each participant will be allows to submit up to two brackets.

A month ago, the Arizona Cardinals mailed me (as a season ticket holder) my playoffs tickets.  I usually don't advertise myself as an Arizona Cardinals season ticket holder, just because numerous academic studies have demonstrated that this fact is not highly correlated with the average person's perceptions of intelligence.

Because of logistics and time limitations, when one gets NFL playoff tickets one typically gets a ticket for every possible game the team could play in.  Because there was an oddball small statistical chance the Cardinals could host an NFC championship game if a) the Cardinals won two playoff games, which has never happened in franchise history and b) all the top 3 seeds lost, they sent me NFC championship game tickets.  My son and I literally laughed out loud when we saw them.  Hosting an NFC championship game with a franchise that has not hosted any sort of playoff game for 60 years seemed, well, laughable.

Well, I just ran to my desk to make sure I actually kept the tickets, because with the Eagle's win today the Cardinals will actually be hosting the NFC championship game next week.  Go Cards!