Major League Sports Research Articles

Does the Cheerleading Ever Stop? Major League Baseball and Sports Journalism

Some commentators argue that sports journalists cater to Major League Baseball (MLB) officials; others contend that, although sports reporting at one time included such compliance, times have changed. This article suggests both sides offer too simplistic an explanation for how sports journalists cover the baseball beat. A comparative analysis of newspaper coverage of Major League Baseball labor situations in 1890 and 1975–1976 demonstrates that regardless of the time period some sportswriters supported MLB owner points while others more closely scrutinized management missives.

Capital Structure and Team Performance in Professional Baseball

The successful production of major league sports has become increasingly dependent on stadiums. Although stadiums do not exhibit the properties of public goods, they have increasingly become governmentally funded projects. Lost in the political debate over stadium funding is the usefulness of the residual claimancy argument to the success of a team. If this argument holds, receiving a publicly financed stadium mitigates the incentive for an owner to place a competitive product on the field. The evidence in this article demonstrates that public ownership of a stadium negatively affects the winning percentage of the team that plays in it.

The Value of Public Goods Generated by a Major League Sports Team

This article reports an application of the contingent valuation method to measure the value of public goods generated by a professional sports team, the Pittsburgh Penguins of the National Hockey League. The data and analysis indicate that a major league sports team can produce widely consumed public goods such as civic pride and community spirit and that the value of those public goods may be substantial. However, in the case of the Penguins, the value of the public goods is far less than the cost of building a new arena. Although the analysis of public goods generated by other teams in other cities might lead to different results, the results of this article call into question the widespread practice of government funding of sports stadiums and arenas because it appears that the costs borne by taxpayers exceed the benefits received.

Changing Intra-Urban Location Patterns of Major League Sports Facilities

The boom in U.S. major league sporting venue construction has forced many cities to face issues related to the provision of such facilities, including the location choice. Recent data show that the suburbanization trend long assumed in the literature has been reversed, with a resurgence in downtown venues. This paper demonstrates the reversal and discusses the reasons behind this recent trend. These include a concomitant trend toward smaller market franchises, increasing corporate sponsorship, deliberate downtown revitalization strategies, and the advantages accruing to owners when different parts of an urban area compete for franchises.

Hard ball: the abuse of power in pro team sports

Hard Ball: The Abuse of Power in Pro Team Sports By James Quirk and Rodney Fort. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999. Pp. xi, 233. $22.95. This engaging book is about the sickness plaguing professional sports in America. The diagnosis is a bad case of chronic monopoly. The four high-revenue men's professional team sports each currently operates with a single monopoly league. The source of monopoly differs among the leagues, however. Major League Baseball (MLB) was formed by a 1902 merger that predates the anti-merger section of the 1914 Clayton Act. In 1922, was exempted from antitrust coverage by the Supreme Court because baseball is not a business. The National Football League (NFL) is the product of a 1969 merger with the rival American Football League (AFL), which opened for business in 1960. At the NFL's request, the combination of rival football leagues was explicitly exempted from the Clayton Act by congressional action. The current National Basketball Association (NBA) and National Hockey League (NHL) are products of 1970s mergers between rival leagues-the NBA with surviving parts of the American Basketball Association and the NHL with a few survivors from the World Hockey Association. Neither merger was challenged by antitrust authorities. The result is entrenched monopoly leagues in all four major professional men's team sports today (and since 1999, also in women's professional basketball). The monopolies are more entrenched today than ever before. Since confronting rival leagues in the 1960s, the NFL, NBA, and NHL have recognized that restricting entry to support the scarcity value of franchises is not without risk. Over the past four decades, there has been sufficient expansion in all four sports to place a franchise in many (but, importantly, not all) cities that can financially support a team. Unlike in 1960, today no league leaves enough locations vacant to tempt an entirely new league. In addition to the shortage of locations sufficient for an entire league, a new league today would also have to figure out how to bid for top player talent against established teams that earn huge monopoly rents from the collective sale of television broadcast rights and receive large subsidies from local governments (in the form of playing facilities with concessionary leases). Because I agree wholeheartedly with the authors' diagnosis of what ails the sports industry, I want to praise this book and recommend it enthusiastically. I suspect the book would have been more persuasive if the authors had not only identified the symptoms of the disease plaguing professional team sports--exorbitant player salaries, the blackmailing of cities, and competitive imbalance-and diagnosed the ailment-monopoly power-but also had reported the long-term consequences of the disease. Is the disease fatal, and if so, to whom? Monopoly control of franchise expansion and team relocation causes both economic inefficiency and a redistribution of income. Monopoly contributes to exorbitant player salaries (increasing the marginal revenue component of marginal revenue product), provides credibility for threats to leave a city (or never locate there in the first place) if local residents do not pony up funds to build a revenue-maximizing facility and lease it to the team for a pittance, and leads to the skewed revenue potential that splits teams into haves and have-nots in terms of playing talent. At the heart of all three symptoms is exclusive terri$ories assigned to team owners. Quirk and Fort seem concerned primarily with the distributional consequences of the monopoly power, as it has been used to restrain league expansion, limit team relocations, raise ticket prices, and inhibit access to major league sports in America. A leisure activity that once was enjoyed by the lunch-pail crowd, more and more caters to those who favor crepes and Chardonnay. Ordinary folk are being priced out of live attendance at sporting events. …

Sports, Jobs, and Taxes: The Economic Impact of Sports Teams and Stadiums.

This book examines the economic impact of new stadiums or a sports franchise on the local economy. It explores such general issues as the appropriate method for measuring economic benefits and costs, the source of the bargaining power of teams in obtaining subsidies from local government, the local politics of attracting and retaining teams, the relationship between sports and local employment, and the importance of stadium design in influencing the economic effects of a facility. The book also contains case studies of major league sports facilities in Baltimore, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Indianapolis, San Francisco, and the Twin Cities and of minor league baseball stadiums and spring training facilities. The primary conclusions are the sports teams and stadiums are not a source of local economic growth and employment; the size of the net subsidy exceeds the financial benefit of a new stadium; and cities are probably willing to subsidize sports teams because of the intense popularity of sports among a substantial proportion of voters and businesses and the leverage that teams enjoy from the monopoly position of professional sports leagues.

Perverse Effects of Social Support: Publics and Performance in Major League Sports

Perverse Effects of Social Support: Publics and Performance in Major League Sports

A troubleshooter's analysis of the human predicament

Contemporary media bring us news of wars, political scandal, ecological disasters, space explorations, religious edicts, economic good or bad news and major league sports scores. These appear to be humanity's most pressing issues. But beneath these issues lies a pervasive matter, an issue close to, but inhibited from, the conscious mind and the feeling heart of most humans—the spectre of possible human extinction. It has been pointed out time and again by individuals and scientific groups that exponential population and industrial growth leads directly to the end of planet Earth's ability to sustain human life. It seems that we do not know how to stop this growth, so we do not talk about it. A troubleshooter concludes that we could learn to talk about it, and we could stop this insidious growth.

Becoming a World-Class City: Hallmark Events and Sport Franchises in the Growth Strategies of Western Canadian Cities

This paper examines the role that the pursuit of hallmark events and of major league sports franchises has played in the growth strategies of western Canadian cities. Literature on civic boosterism illustrates the vigorous competition that developed among regional elites to establish their own cities as perceived growth centers. These competitions are sharpened today by the contemporary mobility of capital, by media/information networks that focus unprecedented attention on “world-class” events, and by the growth of event-related tourism. The predictions of the benefits from investment in sports and tourism are typically optimistic, and gloss over significant differences of interest between local elites and others who are less likely to benefit.

Paradoxical effects of supportive audiences on performance under pressure: The home field disadvantage in sports championships.

On the basis of recent research on self-presentation and self-attention, we predicted that the presence of supportive audiences might be detrimental to performance in some circumstances. Specifically, the imminent opportunity to claim a desired identity in front of a supportive audience might engender a state of self-attentio n that could interfere with the execution of skillful responses. Archival data from championship series in two major league sports supported this reasoning. In baseball's World Series, home teams tend to win early games but lose decisive (final) games. Supplementary analyses suggested that the pattern occurs when the home team has the opportunity to win the championship and that it does involve performance decrements by the home team. Similar patterns were found in semifinal and championship series in professional basketball. The present study concerns whether the presence of supportive versus unsympathetic audiences could interact with opportunities for claiming desired identities to cause paradoxical decrements in the quality of performance. Researchers of self-presentation have used terms such as audience and performance to describe self-presentation ever since Goffman's (1959) dramaturgical analysis of behavior. Our study seeks to test self-presentational hypotheses in the context of actual professional performers and their audiences. We chose professional athletic contests because they provide circumscribed, quantifiable performances and because careful records are generally kept. Our hypotheses were derived by the three steps that follow.

Team travel — A major sports problem: Airline competition intense

Major league sports teams have enjoyed tremendous growth in modern times. At the collegiate level, schedules have been lengthened and the number of bowl games has increased. All teams are now traveling farther on more demanding schedules. Transportation requirements have become tremendous, and each business manager needs to be aware of the various means and quality of airline service. The author examines regularly scheduled airline service (inconvenient), charter service (cost unpredictable), and team ownership of aircraft (expensive). Competition among airlines for sports team bookings is intense, and service is top quality. Package offerings are now available as several of the large airlines have branched into the hotel business.

The Puck Stops Here: A Legal Argument for the Establishment of a Domestic Violence Policy in the National Hockey League

Nearly a decade after the National Football League, the National Basketball Association, and Major League Baseball established their domestic violence policies, the National Hockey League (NHL) inexplicably remains the only major professional sports league in the United States without a league-specific policy. While the NHL and the NHL Players’ Association do incorporate a provision regulating off-ice conduct in their collective bargaining agreement, the current provision is highly discretionary, overly vague, and ultimately insufficient to properly protect both survivors and accused players. Domestic violence and sexual misconduct remain urgent issues in professional sports, and it is essential for the NHL to establish a leaguespecific policy. The NHL must codify a domestic violence policy in its collective bargaining agreement to ensure justice for survivors and fair process for accused players, following the lead of the other major sports leagues. This Comment evaluates the inadequacy of both available judicial remedies for survivors and the league’s current regulation of off-ice player conduct. It concludes by providing policy recommendations for drafting an NHL-specific domestic violence policy based on a comparative analysis of existing major professional league policies.