Scorecasting (40 page)

In 1983, in one of the finer sports monologues—a soliloquy that true die-hard Cubs fans can recite verbatim—Lee Elia, the Chicago manager at the time, alluded to this sensibility in graphic terms. After drunken bleacher bums booed the team during a desultory loss early in the season, Elia remarked in part: “What the f— am I supposed to do, go out there and let my f—ing players get destroyed every day and be quiet about it? For the f—ing nickel-dime people who turn up? The motherf—s don’t even work. That’s why they’re out at the f—ing game. They oughta go out and get a f—ing job and find out what it’s like to go out and earn a f—ing living. Eighty-five percent of the f—ing world is working. The other fifteen percent come out here.”

Elia knew more than he thought he knew. Attendance at Wrigley is actually more sensitive to beer prices—much more—than it is to the Cubs’ winning percentage. Obtaining beer prices from 1984 to 2009 and adjusting them for general price levels and inflation over this period, attendance was more than four times more sensitive to beer prices than to winning or losing.

What’s more, the Cubs organization has understood this. Despite posting an abysmal 48.6 percent winning percentage over the last two decades, the Cubs’ owners managed to increase ticket
prices by 67 percent since 1990, which is way above the league average of 44.7 percent,
and
attendance still climbed to an all-time high 99 percent of capacity. But beer prices, not unlike the beer itself, remained pretty flat. By 2009, according to Team Marketing Report, Wrigley Field had the third-highest ticket prices in all MLB, averaging nearly $48 a seat, lagging behind only Fenway Park in Boston at $50 and the new Yankee Stadium at $73 a ticket. But the price of a small beer at Wrigley Field was the third
lowest
in the league ($5 at the concession stand, which is how TMR reports prices). Only the small-market Pittsburgh Pirates (at $4.75 a beer) and medium-market Arizona Diamondbacks (at $4.00) had cheaper beer—and their average ticket prices were $15.39 and $14.31, respectively.

In other words, Cubs fans will tolerate bad baseball
and
high ticket prices but draw the line at bad baseball and expensive beer. That makes for a fun day at the ballpark but doesn’t give the ownership much incentive to reverse the culture of losing.

Oh, and just so you don’t think this is simply a case of Chicagoans liking their baseball with (cheap) beer, White Sox attendance was unaffected by beer prices over the same period. White Sox fans, however, were more sensitive to ticket prices, and ticket prices tended to rise only after the team’s winning percentage improved. So the White Sox understood their fans, too. In 2009, the average price of a ticket to see the White Sox was only $32, more than $15 cheaper than the price to see their North Side counterparts. But the same beer at U.S. Cellular Field would cost you $6.50—a 30 percent markup from the Wrigley vendors.

Bottom line: You’d be hard-pressed to call the Cubs’ baseball (mis)fortunes a curse or to blame them on Steve Bartman, who, by the way, wasn’t drinking that night, cheap beer or not.

EPILOGUE
 

If you had half as much fun reading this book as we had writing it, then we’re all doing pretty well. Putting sports conventional wisdom to the test? Marrying sports with economic analysis, writing with statistics? Answering questions we’ve always pondered? Reconnecting with a childhood friend? According to our publisher, this was “work for hire,” but, in truth, the contract should have read “play for hire.”

There was, however, one serious problem. Even after submitting the manuscript to our editor, we had a hell of a time settling on a title. Like a pair of Mad Men—save the heroic drinking—we kicked ideas and concepts back and forth. We wanted a catchy phrase that captured both the sports component and the behavioral economics component. We were after something with both heft and levity. We didn’t want to turn off the casual sports fan with jargon, but we also wanted to convey some rigor and sophistication.
Mathletes
? Too geeky.
Inside the Helmet
? Too trite.
Streakanomics
? Too derivative.
Why We Win
? Too self-helpy.
Unforced Errors
? Too negative.
Breaking Balls
? Too much potential for an unfortunate double entendre.

Unlike naming our kids, we couldn’t delegate the task to our
wives. So on it went. We’d disagree—one of us digging
We’re #1
, the other having a gag reflex every time it was invoked. We’d love a title at first
(I Got It
) and then hate it an hour later. We’d come up with another but then sour when we realized it didn’t lend itself to an arresting cover illustration.

Finally, we had the good sense to remember some of the principles we’ve espoused in this book.
There’s value in data. The bigger the sample size, the more accurate the information. Personal biases and tastes can be mitigated when confronted with independent data. Considering new ways of looking at the problem can provide a new perspective that may help solve it
.

So we polled family members, friends, and colleagues. Why stop there? Next, we solicited title ideas from
Sports Illustrated
readers and Twitter followers. It wasn’t just that we expanded our sample size. There was now real diversity, men in Canada submitting ideas one minute; women in India weighing in a moment later.

Much like our army of unpaid consultants, the ideas were all over the map.
Give Up Hope. By a Shoestring. Impure Luck. @#$% my Regression. Daddy, Why Does Sports Radio Lie to Me? Non-Fantasy Football
. Then there were the academic titles:
Data Analysis and Behavioral Psychology in Sports from an Economic Perspective
. Hostile titles:
I Bet Your Team Will Lose, Dumbass
. Even the religious:
God Wanted Us to Win
. In a nod to our passion for tennis, one reader suggested
Johan Kriek-onomics
. (There was also
Jimmy the Greek-onomics
.) In addition to seeking suggestions from the masses, we hired a consultant, who not only provided title suggestions but also helped us ferret out the best ones we’d received. (Incidentally, and not accidentally, the consultant was
Linda Jines—who coined the phrase
Freakonomics
after its authors went through a similarly agonizing title search.)

So we gathered outside independent opinions. Lots of them. We may have known our book better than anyone, but we’d be fools to think we have all the answers and that we can’t learn from a much wider set of ideas.

In the end, a mixture of data and expertise (thank you, Linda) helped us converge on the title. We finally settled on
Scorecasting
(credit to Jeff Boesiger for the original suggestion). As we’ve tried to emphasize throughout the book: Ignore data and diverse views at your peril. Seeking controversial or opposite opinions and challenging convention improve your decision-making. Book titles included.
Scorecasting
might not have been everyone’s favorite title. But Lord knows, it had empirical backing.

In keeping with this theme, we’d like to solicit more ideas from you. For all the topics we explored, there were plenty of others we couldn’t get to. At least not this time. But with any luck we’ll write a sequel, and we suspect many of you have long-standing sports questions you’d like to put to the data. If so, we’d be happy to do the dirty work and test them. We are certain that, collectively, you will come up with intriguing ideas we hadn’t considered. Send them to
Scorecasting.com
or check out the book’s Facebook page.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
 

We pitched this book as a collaborative effort, but soon the collaboration went well beyond the two of us. Thanks are in order to Roger Scholl at Random House, a writer’s (and, for that matter, economist’s) editor who “got” the idea immediately and trusted us to deliver. Thanks also to Roger’s colleagues Christine Kopprasch and production editor Mark Birkey.

Inasmuch as writing a book is likened to childbirth, Scott Waxman, our agent, was first a capable midwife and then a fine pediatrician. We owe a debt of gratitude to a small army who contributed ideas, comments, anecdotes, interviews, and stories for the book: Mike Carey, Frank Cheng, Tomago Collins, Joshua Coval, Mark Cuban, Jessica Dosen, Welington Dotel, David Epstein, Eugene Fama, Tom Gilovich, Jeff Heckelman, John Huizinga, Kevin Kelley, Steven Levitt, Cade Massey, Mike McCoy, Jack Moore, Daryl Morey, Mike Morin, Natxo Palacios-Huerta, Jeff Pearlman, Tom Perrotta, Devin Pope, Gregg Popovich, Tom Ricketts, Ryan Rodenberg, Scott Rosner, Jeff Spielberger, Susan Szeliga, Richard Thaler, Shino Tsurubuchi, and Charles “Sandy” Weil.

A special thank-you to Daniel Cervone, a University of Chicago undergrad so enamored with sports that he decided to spend a
year between college and grad school helping us gather, organize, and analyze an absolutely massive amount of data. Good luck with your doctoral studies at Harvard—we suspect we’ll be hearing great things from you soon.

Also, special thanks to Rebecca Sun, who challenged and improved our material with her sharp mind, sharp eye, and painstaking attention to detail. (Every author should inquire about her services.) So long as
Sports Illustrated
continues to attract talent of her caliber, it bodes well for the continued strength of the magazine.

I owe a huge debt to my colleagues at the University of Chicago, my co-authors, and my thesis advisors from grad school at UCLA. Everything I’ve learned about economics and finance is owed to them. I am grateful to sit in the wonderful research environment at the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago. There is simply no better place for novel research and critical thinking. Many thanks to my co-author, L. Jon Wertheim—whom I first knew as Lewis—who is not only a brilliant writer and unconventional thinker, but a great friend. It’s been terrific catching up with him over the past two years. Finally, a heartfelt thanks to my wife, Bonnie, and to our children, Isaac, Josh, Sam, and little Sarah, who arrived right around chapter 10.

—TJM

I’m in arrears to Terry McDonell, Chris Hunt, and the other
Sports Illustrated
editors who could not have been more accommodating and supportive of this project. Warm thanks to my co-author, Tobias Moskowitz—whom I first knew as Toby—a first-rate thinker, economist, and analyst. He made a hell of a doubles partner on the Indiana junior tennis circuit, and a better one twenty years later on this project. Finally, my deepest thanks, as ever, are reserved for Ellie, Ben, and Allegra.

—LJW

BIBLIOGRAPHY
 

A list of relevant papers and articles organized by chapter, with web links where possible.