Fellow Players Research Articles

Book Review: Lisa Doris Alexander, When Baseball Isn’t White, Straight and Male: The Media and Difference in the National Pastime

Book Review: Lisa Doris Alexander, When Baseball Isn't White, Straight and Male: The Media and Difference in the National Pastime. McFarland & Company, Inc., 2012. ISBN: 978-0786471133 (Paperback). 200 Pages. $39.95[Article copies available for a fee from The Transformative Studies Institute. E-mail address: journal@transformativestudies.org Website: http://www.transformativestudies.org ©2013 by The Transformative Studies Institute. All rights reserved.]Lisa Doris Alexander's When Baseball Isn 't White, Straight and Male: The Media and Difference in the National Pastime becomes even more poignant now that the Baseball Writers Association of America failed to elect Barry Bonds to the Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility. If one follows Alexander's arguments regarding sports journalists' attitude toward Bonds, the results of the 2013 balloting by the BBWAA are no surprise.In her collection of essays, Alexander takes aim at the news media and the hierarchy of Major League Baseball. One of her prominent themes is that what is now more commonly referred to as white privilege still exists, and that racism, though vanquished from the surface of society, flows like an undercurrent through the coverage of athletes and their connections to various issues, in this case, use of performance enhancing drugs, personality portrayals, and respect for the game and fellow players. Alexander uses players, historical baseball figures and the MLB itself as vehicles to explore these issues. Citing black feminist scholar Patricia Collins, Alexander describes white privilege as the advantages whites have over blacks and others of color, although whites attribute those advantages to their ability, talent, motivation, self-discipline and hard work. (p. 8) As she further contends, seldom whites or press or the media writ large acknowledge what she identifies as the unfair advantage emanating from their group classification as whites in a racial formation that privileges whites... (p. 8)Alexander argues that white privilege permeates the work of journalists who cover baseball. For one thing, most of those journalists are white, but the proof lies in the stories that populate the newspapers and sportscasts. For example, Alexander claims that the home run chase of 1998 and the exploits of Barry Bonds a few years later serve as prime examples of how white privilege molded the public depictions of Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, and Bonds. Press and media framed McGwire as a Paul Bunyan of baseball and Sosa as his smiling and likeable sidekick. Alexander says this became a controlling image that reaffirms the racial hierarchy within the United States with the white male at the top and the 'other' at the bottom. (p. 91) On the other hand, sportswriters cast Bonds as a curmudgeon who didn't deserve accolades while breaking McGwire's home run record.The coverage of McGwire and Bonds also diverged when it came to the issue of performance enhancing drugs. Alexander writes that reporters knew of McGwire's use of Androstenedione during his 1998 home run record year, but they gave it little notice. His use of andro, banned by other sports organizations but not by MLB, did not detract from the adulation sports writers heaped on McGwire. Those writers saved their venom for Bonds. They muted the adulation, as did MLB. Bonds broke the home run marks (McGwire's and Aaron's lifetime record) under a cloud of suspicion and constant innuendo. Consequently, sports writers implied that Bonds was not operating on a playing (p. 104) But Alexander makes a compelling case when she argues that Major League Baseball never operated on a level playing field. If Bonds' entries in the record book deserve an asterisk, so the records of all major league players who played before 1947, when Jackie Robinson re-integrated baseball. [S]portswriters, she writes, do not question whether Ruth would have hit 60 home runs during a single season or 714 career homers if he had had to face the likes of Satchel Paige or Willie Foster on a regular basis. …

Peer Pressure and Thai Amateur Golfers’ Gambling on Their Games: The Mediating Effect of Golf Self-Efficacy

Our study hypothesizes that Thai amateur golfers gamble on their game because of peer pressure and their golf self-efficacy. To support our hypothesis, we conducted a study to examine the mediating effect of golf self-efficacy on the peer pressure-golf gambling relationship among 387 amateur golfers in Thailand. Peer pressure was operationally defined as fellow players' influence on the individual golfer to gamble; golf self-efficacy as the judgment of the golfer's skills to play golf; and golf gambling as the frequency and amounts of gambling. Regression analysis with bootstrapping was used to test the mediation effect of golf self-efficacy on the peer pressure-golf gambling relationship. The results support our hypothesis; peer pressure predicted golf gambling, and the indirect effect of peer pressure to golf gambling through the mediation of golf self-efficacy was significant. The results support the influence of peer pressure on gambling, and the social cognitive theory reciprocal relationship model.

Criminal Records and the Labor Market for Professional Athletes: The Case of the National Football League

This is the first paper to formally analyze character discrimination in the specific labor market for professional athletes. We observe all 1,273 players drafted into the National Football League between 2005-2009 to determine what effects character concerns, namely arrest records and team suspensions, have on draft status and performance in the NFL. Prospects that have a history of formal criminal charges or are suspended for team or university violations fall between 16-22 spots in the draft. The impacts of character concerns on performance depend on the nature of the issue. Players that have a history of suspension (non-criminal related) start and play in fewer games per season, but having an encounter with law enforcement does not negatively predict performance. This suggests that having a problem with coaches or fellow players is an indicator of future problems, but having a run in with the law does not adversely affect on the field performance. We also find some evidence that conditional on where players are picked in the draft, teams undervalue those with criminal records and overvalue those with other types of suspensions.

Games with Synergistic Preferences

Players in economic situations often have preferences not only over their own outcome but also over what happens to fellow players, entirely apart from any strategic considerations. While this can be modeled directly by simply writing down final preferences, these are commonly unknown a priori. In many cases it is therefore both helpful and instructive to explicitly model these interactions. This paper presents a simple structure in the context of game theory, building on a model due to Bergstrom, that incorporates these ‘synergisms’ between players. It is powerful enough to cover a wide range of such interactions and model many disparate experimental and empirical results, yet straightforward enough to be used in many applied situations where altruism, or a baser motive, is implied.

Leading by words: A voluntary contribution experiment with one-way communication

We use experimental methods to study the power of leading by words. The context is a voluntary contribution mechanism with one-way communication. One group member can send a free-form text message to his fellow players. Contrary to the commonly accepted wisdom that the cooperation-enhancing effect of communication requires the mutual exchange of promises, we find that the introduction of one-way communication increases contributions substantially and decreases their variation. When communication is one-shot, its effect on contribution levels persists over time. Moreover, one-way communication is effective even in the absence of strategic concerns.

A Game Theoretic Approach to Conflicting and Evolving Stakeholder Preferences in the E&P Industry

Summary In the high-risk E&P industry, the profit of each stakeholder depends on the strategies of all. The optimal choice for one player may not be optimal for other players, who may opt to prevent it. These characteristics suggest using game theory to model decision situations in the E&P industry. In a business dominated by joint ventures and tight governmental regulation, an understanding of the interests and influence of all stakeholders is particularly important. Although the E&P industry is accustomed to developing complex economic models to obtain insight into the commercial attractiveness of joint ventures, the influence of other stakeholders is often ignored. Each stakeholder must decide how much to invest, in which sequence to make decisions, whether to make decisions before or after the other stakeholders, which decisions to make before vs. after technological and organizational uncertainty is resolved, whether to accept or block the designation of one stakeholder as dominant, and whether to accept or block hub placement within one of multiple oil fields. A joint development program of a portfolio of gas fields and its gas processing and export facility has been analyzed using tools from game theory. The focus is on which infrastructure to develop and when. Players' preferences are functions of equity stakes and expected reserve sizes of the prospects. The analysis provides insight into the preferred development options of the individual players, how preferences change as uncertainty gets resolved, and how much individual players are to gain or lose if certain investment decisions are made. The analysis allows a player (1) to identify under what conditions its objectives are aligned with fellow players, and (2) to quantify the maximum amount it can pay to gain support from its fellow players.

Guest editorial for special issue on massively multiplayer online gaming systems and applications

Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs), now a profitable sector of the industry and subject to academic and industry research, are gaming platforms that allow hundreds of thousands of players to simultaneously play in the same online game, often interacting with tens or even hundreds of other players. Although originally designed for gaming, MMOGs are now widely used for socializing, business, commerce, scientific experimentation, and many other practical purposes. One could say that MMOGs are the “killer app” that brings Virtual Reality into the realm of eSociety. This is evident from the fact that real companies are opening “virtual branches” in these online games, such as Reebok, IBM, and CNN, to name a few. Virtual currencies such as Linden (or L$) in Second Life are already being exchanged for real-world money 1 . Similarly, virtual goods and virtual real-state are being bought and sold with real-world money. Massive numbers of users spend their time with their fellow players at online games like EverQuest, Half-Life, World of Warcraft, and Second Life. World of Warcraft, for example, has over 11.5 million users [3] with a peak of over 500,000 players online at a given time [1]. MMOGs have the potential to be the cornerstone of any eSociety platform in the near future, because they bring the massiveness, awareness, and inter-personal interaction of the real society into the digital realm.

More than a Private Joke: Cross-Media Parody in Roleplaying Games

In contrast to the other pieces in this In Focus feature, this essay deals with media convergence in players' heads, and with how the cross-media cultural encyclopedia of tabletop roleplayers is put to use in their performances. Tabletop roleplaying games are a hybrid entertainment form, part games part storytelling, mixing popular culture interests such as fantasy literature and wargames.' They have therefore always been highly in tertextual and convergent, at the beginning directly inspired by sword and sorcery literary worlds, and later expanding upon media universes drawn from film, television, comics, or computer games. Roleplaying means performance without a script, where players rely on basic char acter descriptions to behave and speak in appropriate ways as they go along in their adventures. This kind of on-the-fly collective storytell ing is highly demanding and requires that players are knowledgeable of the setting, genres, and themes evoked in each particular game so that their utterances and actions will make sense and be productive in story-advancement terms. Imitation, quotation, parody, and other forms of meta-textuality are common strategies to fill the stotytelling gaps. Since the narrative occurs largely in participants' heads, any ref erence to an external diegetic world will help give shape to their imagi nation and steer it in the right direction. Many roleplayers also receive significant pleasure from recognizing fellow players' quotes and from performing the right roles. Roleplaying games are advocated by players, game designers, and academics as active entertainment, as opposed to the passive con sumption of stories. This is often explicit in the game rulebooks them selves.2 But this doesn't mean that roleplaying as an art form is cut off

Our Friend Jack: Alcohol, friendship and masculinity in university football

Mason's (1980) research noted how the public house has been an integral part of the ‘football experience’ in England for more than a century. Drinking alcohol has been positioned both as central to the experiences of those watching the game in their leisure time and as an important activity for professional footballers to relax and bond with their fellow players. In England the consumption of alcohol is also central to the leisure lifestyles of many students, and although organised sport is often promoted as a ‘healthy’ alternative to alcohol consumption in reality the two are implicitly linked. This paper critically examines the ‘locatedness’ of alcohol consumption in the construction of samesex friendships of male football players at a university in the south of England. It posits that the student bar provides a ‘safe’ environment for homosociability and a pretext for a postulated community of footballing men where the imperatives of male hegemony can be realised and defended away from the interference of an itinerant society.

Reversibility in Dynamic Coordination Problems

Agents at the beginning of a dynamic coordination process (1) are uncertain about actions of their fellow players and (2) anticipate receiving strategically relevant information later on in the process. In such environments, the (ir)reversibility of early actions plays an important role in the choice among them. We characterize the strategic effects of the reversibility option on the coordination outcome. Such an option can either enhance or hamper efficient coordination, and we determine the direction of the effect based only on simple features of the coordination problem. The analysis is based on a generalization of the Laplacian property known from static global games: Players at the beginning of a dynamic game act as if they were entirely uninformed about aggregate play of fellow players in each stage of the coordination process.

Knowledge, attitude, and skills regarding sports medicine among football players and team doctors in the football super league in Malawi.

A study was conducted among football players and team doctors in the football super league in Malawi to determine the level of knowledge, skills and attitude in sports medicine. One hundred football players and thirteen team doctors were involved in the study. Standardised questionnaires were used to collect data in an interview format. Among the players 37% had completed tertiary education and 60% had finished secondary school education. Most players had poor knowledge on prevention of injuries; had poor advice on diet; used illicit drugs or knew of fellow players using illicit drugs and believed in the role of magic in sports. All 13 team 'doctors' worked full-time in paramedical fields: 3 were orthopaedic clinical officers, 2 were physiotherapists and the rest were in various fields, such as dental technician, pharmacy assistant, medical assistant and dermatology technician, where trauma is not part of their basic training. Most team "doctors" were aware of the impact of HIV/AIDS on sports but few had good knowledge of the role of nutrition in sports and the effect of performance enhancing drugs in sports. Most believed in the role of magic in sports. Recommendations are made on the basis of these findings.

Application of Achievement Goal Theory in an Urban Youth Tennis Setting

The purpose of this study was to examine the motivational responses of tennis players in relation to their goal orientations and perceptions of the motivational climate. Youngsters completed a survey with tennis-specific measures of goal orientations, motivational climate, attitudes toward tennis, their instructor, their fellow players and sportspersonship behaviors. Results support Nicholls' goal perspective theory. Moderated regression analysis suggested that positive perceptions of a task-involving climate and negative perceptions of an ego-involving motivational climate predicted players' attitudes toward sportpersonship, their instructor, and fellow players. Attitudes toward tennis were predicted by task orientation. Canonical analyses further suggested that perceptions of the climate were most strongly related to attitudes.

William Shakespeare: an illustrated biography

Not for a generation, since the late Anthony Burgess's SHAKESPEARE (1970), has there been anything approaching a popular, mainstream biography of the greatest and most celebrated writer the world has known. Yet Shakespeare's life was as colourful, varied and dramatic as his works: the Warwickshire country boy who 'disappeared' for seven years before fetching up in London as an apprentice actor...whose fellow players could scarcely keep up with the plays he turned out for them...who rapidly became a favourite at the court of Elizabeth I...and returned to Stratford a prosperous 'gentleman', proud to realise his father's dream of a family coat of arms, before his death at 52. 1999 saw the completion of London's biggest new tourist attraction: an international Shakespeare Exhibition Centre alongside the rebuilt Globe Theatre and this splendidly illustrated biography of the greatest of all dramatists and poets will be a highly desirable commemorative volume.

Personal Gender and the Career

AbstractIrrespective of their career performance, women in the academic arena are still having to struggle for recognition as “fellow players”

Dick Allen, the Phillies, and Racism

Dick Allen, the Phillies, and Racism William C. Kashatus (bio) From the days of the Negro Leagues up to the present battles over merit-based excuses for the absence of blacks in management positions, baseball has long served as a barometer of the nation's racial climate. Nowhere is this more true than in Philadelphia, where the Phillies have suffered for their reputation as a racially segregated team in a racially segregated city. The case of Dick Allen is most often cited as the prime example of this inglorious history of race relations. Allen, the first African-American superstar to don the red pinstripes, was at the center of controversy in the 1960s and mid-1970s when he played in Philadelphia. He exploded onto the scene in 1964, winning the Rookie of the Year Award for his .318 average, 29 homers, and 94 RBI. It was a performance that kept the Phillies in the pennant race for most of the summer until their infamous collapse in the final two weeks of the season. Over the next seven years Allen established himself among the ranks of the game's superstars, becoming a consistent .300 hitter and averaging 30 homers and 90 RBI a season. Those statistics, along with a 1972 MVP performance with the Chicago White Sox, earned him a hero's welcome when Allen returned to Philadelphia in 1975. Phillies management and the fans were convinced that his time away from the city had given him the maturity and experience needed to win the pennant for a budding contender. They were wrong. While Allen's tape-measure home runs and exceptional speed gained for him the tremendous admiration of fellow players, his unexcused absences, candid opinions, and pregame beer drinking earned him some of the harshest press in the city's sports history. Through it all the specter of racial prejudice hung over Allen's relationship with the owners, the team, the press, and the city's fans. For some he was the quintessential rebel who did as he pleased when he pleased, with little regard for team rules or his teammates. For others he exemplified the emerging independence of Major League baseball players as well as growing black consciousness in the game. [End Page 151] The controversy has made Dick Allen the greatest player not enshrined in the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Although he became eligible in 1982, his candidacy has been tainted by the scathing opinions of baseball writers like Bill James, who claims that Allen "used racism as an explosive to blow his own teams apart." James specifically cites Allen's 1965 fight with Frank Thomas, a popular white veteran who was subsequently traded, and the slugger's threat not to play in the 1976 post season if the Phillies didn't make room on the roster for Tony Taylor, an aging Hispanic player, as examples of Allen's manipulative nature. James dismisses Allen's eligibility for the Hall on the grounds that he "did more to keep his teams from winning than anybody else who ever played major league baseball."1 This essay argues that Dick Allen was both a victim and a manipulator of racism on a team that had a poor history of race relations, but a team that was making an earnest effort to distance itself from that inglorious reputation during the 1960s. The tragedy of Dick Allen's relationship with the Philadelphia Phillies is that there always existed a fundamental level of distrust between the two that inevitably expressed-itself sometimes willingly, at other times quite unwittingly-in racial terms. That distrust has cost Allen a place in the Hall of Fame and the Phillies the opportunity to acquit themselves of an infamous reputation as a racist organization. Defining Racism At the root of the Allen controversy is a basic misunderstanding of racism. Too often society confuses racism with prejudice. Racial prejudice refers to individual beliefs and attitudes that frequently manifest themselves in psychologically or physically abusive actions toward people of color. Racism, on the other hand, cannot be fully explained as an expression of prejudice alone. It is a much broader cultural phenomenon, encompassing institutions as well as individuals and...

Light and dark in life and death.

Athletic prowess represents the rugged, individualistic, can-do attitude that Americans perceive in themselves. Over the past two weeks the sports metaphor has been particularly poignant, showing the best of America and the saddest. Not surprisingly, the catalyst has been AIDS. On 6 February, a few minutes into a basketball game between the Los Angeles Lakers and the Golden State Warriors, a man perceived to be dying of HIV walked on to the court and received a wild ovation from the 17000 fans and three million more watching on television. In 1991 Magic Johnson, one of the most talented athletes in basketball, retired because he had tested positive for HIV and because of fears that he might infect other players. But this month Johnson stepped on to the court, supported by fellow players, and …

Self-dissemination of environmentally-responsible behavior: The influence of trust in a commons dilemma game

It is postulated that environmentally-responsible behavior can disseminate itself. If mutual trust becomes established between the anonymous individuals in a society, they themselves can exert mutual influence upon each other to behave in environmentally-responsible ways. The concept of ‘verifiable, public commitment’ as the operating mechanism responsible for this process is derived from pertinent social theories. In the experiment, subjects, as fishermen, must subsist on lake-fishing, together with 24 other (computer-simulated) fellow players of the game. In the verifiable, public commitment condition, subjects are informed as to which of their fellow players commit themselves to restricting their catch to a moderate quota. Results demonstrate clearly that persons playing under this condition exhibit changes in fishing behavior and in trust. Further analyses reveal that verifiable, public commitment has its greatest effect upon persons whose environmental consciousness is low.

Why nice guys finish last: A comment on Robert Axelrod's The Evolution of Cooperation

Robert Axelrod's The Evolution of Cooperation (1984) offers a cogent explanation for why mutually-beneficial behavior may emerge in a prisoner's dilemma game. Provided that the game will be repeated an indefinite number of times, that players of the game are capable of recognizing any other player and of remembering the nature of the interaction between the two of them in prior encounters, and that there is not too much discounting of the payoffs to be gained from future interactions, a strategy of reciprocity can be most desirable for players of the game. Even though such a mutual give-and-take strategy runs counter to the dictates of self-interest from a simple, short-run point of view, it can best promote one's interests over the long run when one's fellow players are capable of retaliating sufficiently tomorrow for any transgressions made against them today. As evidence for his argument, Axelrod reports on the results of several computer simulations that he has conducted. Some of the simulations consist of round-robin tournaments between the strategies submitted by various social and natural scientists for playing a repeated prisoner's dilemma game. Invariably, the winner of these tournaments is the simplest decision rule submitted, TIT FOR TAT: an eye-for-eye strategy that starts off by making a cooperative move and then mimics whatever the opposing player has done on the preceding move. TIT FOR TAT wins the tournament even when it is well-known beforehand that such a decision rule will be competing in the tournament. TIT FOR TAT also wins the overall round-robin even though it does no better in any head-to-head competition than the opposing decision rule with which it is paired.

"Licensed by Authority": Ben Jonson and the Politics of Early Stuart Theater

On April 26, 1624, Francis Wambus and his fellow players appeared in Norwich and posted a bill announcing a performance of <<an excellent new Comedy called Spanish Contract By Princesse servants / vivat Rex.'1 Wambus had played Norwich twice before, but on this occasion met with unexpected resistance. Though appeared before local officials with a license authorizing his company to play, Wambus was refused permission by Mayor, who cited as his authority a letter from Privy Council. The letter condemned the lawless liberty taken up and practised in all parts of kingdom by . . . vagrant and licentious rabble, and authorized Mayor to suffer any Companies of players, tumblers or like sort of person to act any plays or to shew any exercise of feats and devices within city or liberty of same. Wambus, however, not simply acquiesce to Privy Council's Instead, called it into question, peremptorily affirming that would pliy in this City & would lay in prison here this Tweluemoneth but would try whether kings command or Counsells be greater. Wambus made it clear intended to turn this occasion into a political contest: he would make tryall what might doe by kings authority for said would play. Two days later, Wambus proceeded to post a bill for an interlude, and again was brought before court. When asked if bill was in his handwriting, Wambus answered affirmatively. But after court again read order forbidding plays, Wambus, as shocked clerk records, did accuse Mr Maior to his face contemned kings authority. When Wambus asserted would play, was committed to prison. The court discharged him on May 26, but case was still not over. On September 28, Wambus and some of his fellow players returned to Norwich with a letter from Sir Henry Herbert, Master of Revels, ordering Wambus's release, and asked recompense for wrongful imprisonment. The court argued, however,

See Sato in the Funny Papers

Certain athletes, paid to play football or baseball, think of relaxation as a game of pool or round of golf. Sato, when he has time to while away, likes to draw in pen and ink and to practice calligraphy. Debbie, pausing in her studio, fools endlessly with a harpsichord, at home sings Heder in a harsh, true voice, and has written songs. They sound like bad Kurt Weill, she will concede with a fine big laugh, but they are not meant to be per formed or published. They are for recreation, though she may spend weeks working one out, before she sets it aside. Where the recreation is in that might conceivably be understood best by someone who enjoys passing time with difficult puzzles. Debbie and Sato have discovered one another almost instantly, not as a couple-that one is an early-middle-aged man, the other a somewhat older woman, is almost irrelevant to their games. What they are is fellow players, like new friends equally matched and equally enthusiastic at tennis or chess, who want to play together every chance they get. Yet to call our conductor and designer well-matched is not to say the) are similar: Sato is inventive, faceted, light. Debbie is more scrupulous and more thorough. Sometimes Debbie will absorb, absorb, contributing mostly her happy concentration of attention to the game. To be an audience is grown-ups' play, too, for those who will have it so, and if there be transcendental possibilities it is possible that some pass as truly into ecstasy from exhilaration as do others from high, holy seriousness. I have been thinking, Debbie, that a life, after all, is only one of those solemn comic strips we all love secretly, except that instead of a handsome doctor or soldier or meddling old woman, to make sure it comes out all right, we have natural irony to make sure it comes out oddly. So you could draw, and I could letter?my calligraphy is disgraceful for a Japanese, but all right for an American, I believe.