The Sports Economist

The Department of Agriculture refused yesterday to allow a Kansas beef producer to test all of its cattle for mad cow disease, saying such sweeping tests were not scientifically warranted.

The producer, Creekstone Farms Premium Beef, wanted to use recently approved rapid tests so it could resume selling its fat-marbled black Angus beef to Japan, which banned American beef after a cow slaughtered in Washington State last December tested positive for mad cow. The company has complained that the ban is costing it $40,000 a day and forced it to lay off 50 employees.

The department's under secretary for marketing and regulation, Bill Hawks, said in a statement yesterday that the rapid tests, which are used in Japan and Europe, were licensed for surveillance of animal health, while Creekstone's use would have "implied a consumer safety aspect that is not scientifically warranted."

Lobbying groups for cattle ranchers and slaughterhouses applauded the decision, but consumer advocates denounced it, saying the department was preventing Creekstone from taking extra steps to prove its product was safe.

Under the Virus Serum Toxin Act of 1913, the department decides where cattle can be tested and for what.

....Gary Weber of the cattlemen's association called 100 percent testing misleading to consumers because it would create a false impression that untested beef was not safe. He compared it to demanding that all cars be crash tested to prove they are safe.

Asked if American beef producers were content to give up the $1.5 billion Japanese market, Mr. Weber said: "We're not going to give in to their demands. If that means in the short-to-medium term that we don't have that market, that's the price we'll pay. But in the long run, it means there's testing that's science based and that creates a level playing field."

Asked if beef producers did not want to be pressured to imitate Creekstone and pay for more tests, Mr. Weber said it was "absolutely not about the money."

The ban began after the University of Wisconsin's Policy, Alternatives, Community and Education, or PACE Project, recommended the creation of an ordinance to ban drink specials in downtown bars.

Instead of making the ban public policy, a group of bar owners decided to voluntarily ban weekend drink specials. These bar owners are now being sued for their actions.

The lawsuit states four main objectives: to break up the Madison Bar cartel, to return price competition to the business of selling alcoholic beverages in downtown Madison, to uncover the full duration, scope, nature of operation and economic impact of the cartel and to recover and return to the victims of the cartel, primarily UW students, the full measure of damages to which they are lawfully entitled.

On Wednesday night, Charles Howell, one of the tour's practical jokers, had used his southern drawl to impersonate a member of Augusta's championship committee. Having dialed Poulter, he told the Englishman that word had reached the committee that he was not planning to be as soberly clad as they would wish.

Poulter, who was completely taken in, had a question for the official. "What about Doug Sanders?" he asked, in a reference to the garish dress of the runner-up in the 1970 Open.

"We weren't happy about that, either," returned Howell. So the conversation continued until Howell decided enough was enough on the eve of the player's first Masters.

The 1976 Montreal Olympics are remembered for three things: Nadia Comaneci's three gold medals, an Olympic Stadium that was a white elephant before the closing ceremonies were over and a huge debt that only recently has been paid off.

I am not against baseball. I am not opposed to public subsidies for baseball stadiums. I am opposed to public financing for sports facilities on the grounds that they will be engines of economic growth, generating thousands of new jobs and raising the income of taxpayers. The evidence from the academic literature on the economic impact of stadiums overwhelmingly suggests that there will be no net economic benefits from a new stadium. So let this be your guiding question: Is it worth $338 million in tax money spent on a new baseball stadium to incrementally improve the quality of life of the taxpayers, civic pride, and the national image of the District?

The Duhon shot caused a $630,000 positive swing for BetCBSports.com, an online sportsbook based in Costa Rica. The sportsbook took more than 10,000 bets on the Duke-Connecticut matchup, with more than 8,000 bettors placing an average wager of $50 on UCONN to cover a 2- to 2 1/2-point spread. If Duhon didn't hit the shot and Connecticut prevailed 79-75, BetCBSports.com, which has no affiliation to the network broadcast partner, would have lost $290,000 instead of making $340,000, according to Dan Johnson, senior oddsmaker for the betting site.

When Duhon made the shot, there was an overwhelming feeling of euphoria here," said Johnson, who was in the company's headquarters surrounded by televisions. "We all jumped up in unison and that doesn't normally happen in this business.

Off the ball defender charges should be eliminated. It should ALWAYS be a block. It would mean we could get rid of the half circle under the basket since that only applies to off the ball, 2ndary defenders, and we would speed up the game and add highlight plays to every game and reduce the number of injuries suffered by our best players every year.

One thing to clarify on for those who aren’t familiar with NBA rules. This would in no way apply to charges taken when you are actively guarding your man. So if Nash is guarding Marbury, and Marbury lowers a shoulder and knocks over Nash, or vice versa, it would still be a charge.

Ever hopeful, many economists are still expecting a burst of employment. The consensus forecast this week puts employment growth at 120,000 jobs in March. Goldman Sachs is betting on 160,000. And High Frequency Economics is forecasting 200,000, saying good weather and the end of a supermarket strike in California should give the jobs data a big boost.

Some "whisper numbers," which economists do not write down but which make their way into trading rooms along Wall Street, are even higher.

As a single-entity operation, M.L.S. had the luxury of engineering the swapping of the rights to Adu from Dallas, which held the first selection in its draft, to D.C. United, which is based close to Adu's home in Potomac, Md. ....

Ultimately, it was Adu's mother, Emelia, who insisted that her young son live at home, intimating that if the league did not agree, the family might accept a more lucrative deal from a European club.

During the past couple of years Ms. Hoffman has been pushing for even more autonomy. She wants the state's General Assembly to grant the university "enterprise status," which would make it a semiprivate institution with more independence over financial matters such as raising money and setting tuition rates.

Even in the midst of the athletics scandal, she has continued to lobby for passage of a measure that would create a voucher system for students at the state's public and private colleges, bringing out pages of charts and graphs on the university's budget over lunches and dinners with state legislators. If the bill passes this spring, Ms. Hoffman says, the university's "enterprise status" is a done deal.

The new status is essential for the university's financial future, she says. The university system now receives only about 10 percent of its funding from the state. After three years of significant cuts in money from the state, she says, the university needs more autonomy to manage its finances in order to maintain quality.

In what some people call the most unlikely turn of events since Bobby Ewing's return to Dallas, George Steinbrenner apologized today for running the Yankees as an evil empire. As a way of doing penance, Steinbrenner has traded rosters with the Tampa Bay Devil Rays.

"I didn't know what else I could do," Steinbrenner explained. "We've been on a ten year roll, and Tampa's never won more than 63 games. Besides, I thought I owed Lou one after firing him two or three times. And with all the time I spend in Tampa, I'll still get to see a championship team. Besides, maybe now the fans will get off my back for letting Tino go."

....

Derek Jeter looks forward to playing in the relative obscurity of Tampa Bay.

"It's cool. I'm tired of staying out late and partying at night clubs anyway. I can use the extra time to work on my defense."

During its stay in the Los Angeles area, Washington State held its practice sessions on the movie set of the film Tom Brown of Harvard. The players worked as extras in the low-budget film with a football theme, and Coach Dietz had a principal role. Dick Hanley, a star halfback of the 1915 team, recalled that "for two weeks before the game we were busy all day filming the football scenes. We thus combined our movie work with training for the game." He added that the players made about $100 apiece for their movie work and "bet it all on ourselves to beat Brown." ... Most sportswriters, in deference to the alleged superiority of Eastern football, made Brown a heavy favorite in the contest.

Half a century after Germany's 1954 World Cup victory, widely considered to mark the moment the country regained international respectability, Germans are transfixed by a row over allegations that the players may have been doped.

The German football team, who emerged as the "Heroes of Bern" after a 3-2 victory over Hungary in the Swiss capital, may have been injected with performance-enhancing substances before the match, according to a new book and two television documentaries by publicly funded broadcasters.

Former doctors claim that they injected the men with Vitamin C, but the documentaries suggest that subsequent health problems raise further questions.

The victory was an unlikely one. Hungary were regarded as the finest side in the world and in an earlier game in the tournament beat the Germans 8-3. The events were dramatized last year in the film The Miracle of Bern which has broken box office records in Germany and on his own admission, reduced Chancellor Gerhard Schröder to tears.

To football enthusiasts the very fact that the topic has been brought up at all has come as a crushing blow. Bild, the mass tabloid, yesterday referred to the claims as "the most horrendous accusation in the history of football".

Priorities were put to a vote earlier this month at San Francisco State, and sports lost. Students narrowly rejected taxing themselves $33 a semester to pay for half of the $2.6-million athletic budget, putting the school's 16 remaining intercollegiate teams in jeopardy. Swimming has already been axed.

"It's saying that healthy growth through sports is not a priority and that college athletics is not important," said student body President Natalie Batista, a former softball star.

When Bob Brooks started covering Big Ten football in the 1940s, media guides did not exist.

"You'd be given a roster," Brooks recalled. "And maybe a background of the head coach."

As the years went by, an entirely different problem emerged. Football media guides grew like sewer rats, some swelling to 500-plus pages as schools beefed up their books to impress recruits.

"From the press standpoint, those things are terrible," said Brooks, who talks Iowa football on KMRY-AM in Cedar Rapids. "What I did for years was go through them and rip out all the fluff."

......Most NFL guides weigh a fraction of what college guides do. Although they're often more than 300 pages, they can be half the size of the 8½-by-11-inch college guides and typically contain thin paper, rather than the shiny and glossy pages.

"Why they have not done something about this in the past is unbelievable," Brooks said. "Michigan wanted to have the biggest guide. Then Michigan State did. Now we're up to the Webster Fully Unabridged Dictionary."

Shrewd observers seek understanding not through received wisdom but from the statistics that accrue over weeks and seasons. Analysing those statistics allows one better to determine which players are better than others or what the best strategy might be against a certain team. ....

And the cross-pollination between sport and social science works both ways. In September 2002, a group of economists at the University of Chicago wrote a paper in the American Economic Review arguing that in taking penalty kicks in football, strikers would do better to aim at the centre of the goal, as goalkeepers invariably dive one way or the other in a desperate blocking attempt. Steven Levitt and his colleagues had an added motivation for their subject: game theory, their discipline, often lacks real-world examples, and in sport they saw a rich set of unbiased, real-world data with which they could validate their theoretical constructions. They saw, in other words, the opposite of what those grizzled scouts and coaches see: a field of data rather than a field of dreams.

The United States needs 1 million barrels per day of gasoline imports during the summer just to keep the cars and trucks rolling .... Over the course of a year, imports amount to about 10 percent.

But even that source of supply has its environmental problems. Regulations that went into effect on Jan. 1 are keeping the equivalent of 150,000 barrels per day out of the country. Gasoline imports for the year to date are down about 6 percent, the equivalent of about 50,000 barrels per day.

Much of the 150,000 barrels has been coming from suppliers such as Russia, Turkey and South America, where refineries aren't set up to produce the lower-sulfur fuel that is now required.

In 1950, for example, City College of New York played in and won both tournaments.

In 1962, Loyola, Mississippi State, Dayton, the University of Houston and St. John's all chose to participate in the N.I.T. rather than accept invitations to the N.C.A.A. tournament. In 1970, Marquette, one of the best teams in the nation that year, chose to go to the N.I.T. over the N.C.A.A. tournament, which provoked an outcry by the powers that ran the N.C.A.A. tournament. .....

[I]n the early 1980's, [the NCAA] took decisive action.

The N.C.A.A. changed its rules so that all schools invited to its tournament would be required to boycott the N.I.T. under the pain of N.C.A.A. penalties, and combined that rule with a major expansion of the N.C.A.A. tournament field to 64 teams from 32. The result is that each year the N.I.T., or any other tournament that may try to enter the market, is prevented from competing for any of the best teams in the country, and the N.C.A.A.'s monopoly power and profits are assured.

Anthony Myles looked to see his replacement scampering up to the scorer's table, but Coach Thad Matta had summoned the sub a moment too late to get him into the game...... Just don't foul.

Six ticks of the clock later, the great deus ex machina of sport struck again. The same practical joker who allowed Christian Laettner to catch an unobstructed pass and turn and shoot against Kentucky a decade ago was back. The same prankster who used to favor Notre Dame and the Boston Celtics back in the old days was pulling the strings once again.

The same mischief-maker who flicked Derek Jeter's fly ball into a home run, the same sadist who made some poor boob in Wrigley Field stick out his hands and deflect a foul fly, was in midseason form.

Before Myles could get out of the game for a rest, he made contact with Duke's Shelden Williams under the Blue Devils' basket. This was not some blatant collision that made the Georgia Dome shake, but rather two large and determined athletes grappling for the same little corner of this crazy universe.

One tweet of the whistle and Myles was out of the game for good, with 16 points and 10 rebounds, with 12 momentous minutes and 27 significant seconds left in the game.

I initially came up with the idea right before the 2001 NBA Draft. At the time, I had read a number of newspaper stories criticizing the ability of high school players like Kwame Brown, Tyson Chandler, and Eddy Curry to participate in the Draft, and how their participation was somehow harmful to both them individually and to the NBA. These stories would often say something to the effect of, "for every Kobe Bryant, there are two or three Korleone Youngs" and how history showed that high school players tended to fail in the NBA. I was honestly struck by the fact that no one seemed willing or interested to challenge this assertion, and I was curious to see if it was indeed correct. After conducting preliminary research, I soon realized that this assertion was woefully wrong, and, in all likelihood, had only become accepted as fact because it was repeated and repeated until it became recognized as such.

Question: Critics of your theory claim that a player like Korleone Young is a prime example of why a ban on high school players makes sense. How do you respond?

Michael McCann: You're right - many people regard Korleone Young as a "failure" because he was a second round pick in 1998 and only played one season in the NBA. Well, first off, bear in mind that at age 19, he earned $289,750 to play in the NBA. Had he never earned another dollar playing basketball, he could have returned to college at age 20 with plenty of money in the bank - and certainly more money than any 20 year old that I knew in college.

Instead, however, Young has continued to play basketball professionally over the past five years, earning between $50,000 and $100,000 per year to live abroad and play two or three basketball games a week for eight months of the year.

TAE: You've advocated a number of changes to speed up games, such as thickening the barrels of today's whippet-thin bats, limiting time outs, limiting pitchers, etc. A couple of years ago, some suggested limiting the number of intentional walks. You might call this the Barry Bonds Rule.

JAMES: I think intentional walks should be limited, but among the things that slow down baseball games intentional walks don't rank in the top 50.

I suggest a batter should be able to decline a walk. Not only an intentional walk, but any walk. The batter's team should able to say, "No thanks, I don't want that walk." And if you walk him again, he goes to second base and anybody already on moves up two bases. The reason that should be the rule is because the walk was created to force the pitcher to throw hittable pitches to the batter. That is the walk's natural function. To allow the walk to become something the defense can use to its advantage with no response from the offense is illogical and counterproductive.

TAE: Don't TV time outs, which break the rhythm of the game, make baseball unendurable for many viewers?

JAMES: I think prolonged TV time outs are a serious mistake, because they do make the game less enjoyable. That depresses both live attendance and viewership. And it also tends to create an artificial surplus of advertising time on baseball games, which drives down the price of advertising minutes.

TAE: In his recent State of the Union speech, President Bush called for a ban on steroids in baseball.

JAMES: I was glad to see it. I think it is a serious issue. It's serious because what professional athletes do now, college athletes will be doing in five years, and high school athletes will be doing in ten years or sooner than that, and there are serious negative health consequences. We can't permit baseball to be a wedge which opens that door. So I was glad to see him pay some attention to it.