Tony La Russa’s tribute to Moneyball

Moneyball fever is hitting the U.S., as people flock to theaters to watch a movie staring Brad Pitt where the theme of the movie is baseball, statistics, and finance/economics.  I did a quick informal survey of a class of 90 students here at my university, and found that everyone knew about Moneyball the movie, but only two had ever read the book “Moneyball; the Art of Winning an Unfair Game” written by Michael Lewis.  The book (and movie to some extent) tells the story of Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland Athletics.  Beane realizes he doesn’t have the money to pay his star players, and instead starts to dive into a more statistical and analytical approach to identifying talent that is able to play in Major League Baseball (MLB).  Really, all of this goes back to Bill James who did a lot of work on baseball statistics, but Beane was someone in a position to really make the decisions based on these stats.

Following Beane’s success with a low budget (the A’s made the playoffs, won 20 games in a row during the season with a budget only a fraction of that of the New York Yankees), others in baseball began to pay attention to what is now referred to as “Moneyball.”  However, Moneyball does have its critics, and they have been especially vocal recently as the movie has helped gain the Moneyball movement some more popularity and notoriety.  In a previous post, I talked about how Tampa Bay gutted their team, cutting $30 million in salaries, and continued to win.  They mentioned that the only other team really to be able to do that was the Oakland A’s, referring to ball club under Beane’s management.  One big critic, is Tony La Russa, the manager for the St. Louis Cardinals who are facing a must-win game 5 of their playoff series against the Philadelphia Phillies.  The winner goes to the National League Championship Series, the loser of the game, goes home and waits till next year.  So, Tony La Russa paid his own special homage to Moneyball, telling what he thinks of it as a baseball manager.

“It’s my tribute to Moneyball,”

“I’m not a big Moneyball fan. I have this little place, don’t have a big place. So what we do is we take the square footage between the right field line and center field and the square footage and from left field to center field, divide that by pi and we multiply it by bulls***, and then we pick the dugout. The field that’s closest to the dugout and that’s where Lance plays. That’s almost always true. Some places there may be — if it’s spacious, probably not good. Here it’s close to the dugout, that’s where he plays.”

That’s right, Tony La Russa has pretty much said that Moneyball = Bulls***.  Or if you want the actual equation, John Finger of PhilliesTalk has written it out as:

That formula is written: (RF+CF)-(LF+CF) / π * BS (dugout) = Berkman

It is clear that La Russa is not a fan of Moneyball, and probably most managers will not be as the movie makes former A’s skipper Art Howe look like a bit of a fool.  That is, the movie really heavily pushes a new way of thinking, and classifies many of the old scouts and managers, the people who “know” baseball as the ones who really are ignorant.  I can understand people being defensive, but La Russa’s comments show a lot of the attitude which stands against better use of statistics to manage sport franchises.  Personally, I think there is a middle ground which could allow an understanding of both sides, that could be very beneficial to a number of clubs.  It could potentially make things a lot more efficient and cheaper for professional sport teams.  As Chicago White Sox chairman Jerry Reinsdorf once said:

“We operate at the mercy of the worst decisions of our dumbest competitors.”

In other words, as long as some franchises are paying big money to athletes without careful analysis of their value and worth to the team, they are forced to pay these prices as well.

As a side note, my class will all have Moneyball assigned to them as a secondary text they will need to read in class next semester.

How a landlady may have changed the face of Broadcasting sport in Europe

This is a story of a landlady for a Portsmouth pub in the UK, who bought a satellite television decoder from another European country to show Premier League games.  Karen Murphy, the landlady for the Red, White and Blue pub in Portsmouth bought a Greek decoder card to show Premier League games, the key point in all of this is the decoder card is cheaper than paying to show the games on BSkyB, as most establishments do in the UK.  This case made it all the way to the European Court of Justice (ECJ), where a ruling was made yesterday against Ms. Murphy who will be allowed to continue broadcasting games using the decoder.  The ECJ states that prohibiting:

“import, sale or use of foreign decoder cards is contrary to the freedom to provide services and cannot be justified either in light of the objective of protecting intellectual property rights or by the objective of encouraging the public to attend football stadiums”

However, the ECJ said that this area does fall under copyright protection in the UK which means that while Ms. Murphy lost because the card is used for broadcast to the public, it does open the door for private use of the cards.  The Guardian article notes:

However, the ECJ said live match coverage itself was not covered by copyright protection, although the Premier League could claim ownership of FAPL-branded opening video sequences, theme music, on-screen graphics and highlights of previous matches.

This means that as long as the FAPL and BSkyB ensure that match coverage includes enough copyright elements pubs will not be allowed to show foreign broadcasts.

The big implications of this case, is for individuals.  The ruling basically counter acts the territorial region-by-region rights which the Premier League sells.  It is now possible for fans to go out and get the cards and get Premier League for cheaper.  This means that fans could potentially try and get around paying the high BSkyB fees, which BSkyB can’t be a fan of as they paid over one billion pounds for the broadcast rights in the U.K.  The big implication is that the Premier League may be forced to change the method in which they sell broadcast rights from regional, to a single Pan-European package.

The Premier League had this to say:

“The areas of law involved are complicated and necessarily we will take our time to digest and understand the full meaning of the judgment and how it might influence the future sale of Premier League audio-visual rights in the European Economic Area.”

The Premier League will have to wait for some further court rulings in the UK high courts in regards to this case, but they are probably worried.  They are said to make a billion pounds for their non-UK television rights this year, and are receiving around 1.6 billion pounds for UK rights from BSkyB.  How they will potentially switch their sales of broadcast rights is an important question, with big financial implications for the league as well as fans and consumers alike.  As a side note, the Guardian had a poll, and almost 75% of people said they would now try to buy the foreign decoder cards to watch Premier League matches.