Baseball Player Salaries vs. American Presidents'

When a reporter asked Babe Ruth to justify making more money than the president (this at the dawn of the Great Depression), Babe replied, "Well, I had a better year than him."

Today, even an average baseball player is 8X as valuable as the president.

Why the US Hasn't Caught Soccer Fever

The recent World Cup revealed a number of reasons that soccer is unlikely to ever catch on in the US.

Perhaps the most obvious reason soccer will have trouble winning the hearts of American sports fans is that it is a constant challenge to how Americans make sense of the world. We know that we are the reason that we are the richest and most powerful nation in the world. Just as the Germans, British, Dutch, Spanish, and Italians before us, we misconstrue our fortune of having been born into such privilege with the fact of our actually being special. American exceptionalism means, of course, that we Americans are exceptional. Regularly unable to beat teams from countries 1% our size, we are reminded that this simply is not so. Fans simply want to cheer. They don't want cognitive dissonance with their color commentary.

Another thing about the game that offends any reasonable American is its inefficiency. You can't use your hands? What are you supposed to do with that half of your body? Given their hands are free, you might expect that the players would at least be texting.

Any self-respecting American is clear that a person needs a goal. Without goals, one's life just meanders from place to place ... like the ball on a soccer field. Everyone should have a goal but apparently no one has told soccer fans. They seem perfectly content to watch 90 minutes of a game that is played, uninterrupted by a single goal.

Finally, one has only to watch a single game to realize why so many of the countries that love soccer are poor. This game never pauses. There is no opportunity for ads that remind fans that after the game they could go shopping. Compare that with any American sport. Even if there is not a single change in pitchers, baseball is good for at least 18 commercial interruptions. The last "five" minutes of football can take 50. Consumers drive the American economy and if we were to become soccer fans, our economy would likely collapse to the level of Argentina's or Cameroon's. It seems to me that the single simplest stimulus to economic growth that these soccer-crazed countries could undertake would be to change the rules so that commercial breaks are taken every 4 to 5 minutes rather than every 45 minutes. Until that happens, we Americans don't just have a right but actually have an obligation to show tepid interest in soccer.

NBA News! (Just like ESPN)

I get so many requests for more sports coverage here at R World. I try to be responsive to my reader, so here goes.

Business idea: little green hat labeled, "NBA Salary Cap." The optional t-shirt could read, "Doing my bit to support the home team: I kept my salary under $20 million this year."

I'm shopping a book on this topic now, but few people realize how close Obama came to making a package deal of the Russian - American spy for spy swap and simply trading LeBron James and Chris Bosh to Brazil for soccer players Kaka and Fabiano to raise our world standing.

LeBron James will get about $240,000 per game (or more than $8,000 per point at the rate he scores.) If he played just one game per year, his income would put him in the top 2% of Americans.

It's a pity that James did not sign with the Houston Rockets. He missed a major marketing opportunity there. It's hard to believe that anyone could have a cooler nickname than VonBron James.

Shaq is still active? I find this sort of amazing and mostly heartening. He must be in his 50s by now and the thought of him still playing at that age inspires me. It's amazing that a guy over 300 pounds who runs and jumps could have a career last longer than 98% of the rappers from his era.

I just love the fact that a guy whose nickname is King James took one hour to announce that he was playing for the Heat. He must use really old English to take that long to express something so simple. I could understand it taking an hour to tell his grandmother, for instance, but not to tell basketball fans.
"Grandma, I'm going to play for the Heat."
"What?"
"I've decided to play for the Heat."
"You've decided to play in the heat?"
"The team. The team is the heat."
"Why is it that every generation thinks they gotta make up new slang? Your grandpa would say, 'The team is so cool.' You say 'heat.' Well at least you are not as crude as your daddy and his friends. They'd have said, 'the team is the s**t.' There is no excuse for that."
"No. Grandma. I'm going to play for the Miami Heat."
"When you get to be my age, son, the Miami heat is reason enough NOT to play. A boy from Cleveland, like you, is likely to melt down there."
And on goes the conversation ...

Demetri Martin: “I used to like to watch sports a lot, but not as much anymore, ‘cause I’m always disappointed. I’d always rather see the actual animals fighting than the teams with those names. Colts vs Bears — yeah! Wizards vs Heat — freaking awesome! Magic vs Jazz — that’s a little too gay for me, I’m gonna pass on that one.”

Stay tuned for when LeBron takes on Harry Potter. Maybe Demetri Martin will do the color commentary.

Why Sports Matter So Much

I suspect that we obsess about sports for at least two reasons. One, during a game is one time where a guy can pull up a chair and ask "What is the score," and anyone can tell him. In love, relationships, politics, careers, parenting ... in all these arenas the score is always, at best, murky, and one hears only conflicting reports. Not so in sports. No one doubts that Cleveland beat Boston last night.

We focus on the sports heroes for a number of reasons but I wonder if that doesn't trace back to some evolutionary hijacking. Battle and the warriors who represent us have mattered for millennia. We've probably evolved to be acutely interested in how our warriors are doing and feeling. Sports have, of course, become the outlet for the impulse for war. We still pay close attention to the athletes because we're still interested in how the battle will turn out. Of course, what was vital to survival of the tribe or state in one period has become of no consequence in the next. If the Boston Celtics beat Cleveland, the Celtics don't get to take Cleveland's factories and women. There is no longer any consequence, but we still pay attention.

Apparently, the Child Abuse Settlements Haven't Hurt Them Too Much

From The Week magazine:

Good week for: The God squad, after the Vatican purchased a controlling interest in Italy’s AC Ancona soccer club and announced that the team and its fans would henceforth eschew taunting the opposition, cursing, and bribing officials. The team will soon receive a pep talk from Pope Benedict XVI.

Now, who are the opposition teams going to thank for making their victory possible? And one has to wonder if this is only the beginning of the church's attempt to diversify their holdings of idols.

Meanwhile, here in California, priests have been asked to donate a month's salary to the church to help fund a $200 million sexual abuse settlement.

Globalization and Tribal Nation

Since 1989, the NFL's revenues have grown by more than 6X, to over $6 billion a year. Major League Baseball and the NBA have also steadily grown, fueling in turn a sports reporting and analysis industry that has benefited companies like ESPN, Fox Sports, and the major networks.

What has driven demand for sports? I think it's obvious that we're wired to want "us vs. them" situations - to take a side in a conflict. We want something visceral, something engaging, something that smacks of violence and tribal warfare. The problem is, in a world increasingly global where former enemies (or at least those we didn't care about) are now trading partners, there is a dwindling opportunity for such situations to arise in the natural world. Gone are the days before the birth of agriculture when 15% of the population could expect to die in physical conflict. Such situations are gone, but the genes that helped us to survive this period are not.

Into this void of the modern age stepped professional sports, offering us a fix for our tribal impulse. We have an us vs. them. We have conflict. We have clear winners and clear losers. And, thanks to stadiums and broadcasting, the experience of a few can be shared by many, the vicarious thrill and frustration packaged for easy consumption by those of us whose daily lives are not the sites of any great drama or such clear rules and score keeping.

In an age when abstract, global dynamics define our lives, and vague goals define success or failure, professional sports gives us a means to feed those parts of our psyche that felt most at home in kilts or loin clothes, a time of tribal chiefs and the ability to see one's community around a single camp fire. 15 to 40 men on the field or bench, success clearly defined and important, outcomes decided in the space of hours rather than decades. It's a chance to feed one's inner warrior without the risk of blood shed. It's modern sports.

Professional sports - making the world safer for primal impulses.