I miss the regular blogging, but the break has been good. I’ve spent plenty of time writing, and my next book on valuing players is moving along nicely. Though I won’t be returning to blogging until August I am posting short comments (mostly baseball related) on Twitter and Facebook. If you would like to follow my feed or add me as a friend, you can do so using the addresses below.

http://twitter.com/jc_bradbury

http://www.facebook.com/jcbradbury

I’m sorry, I know I’m supposed to be taking a break, but I can’t let this pass.

Mark Bradley has finally realized that Jeff Francoeur isn’t going to be a star, and that he has some serious flaws in his game.

It’s time to trade Frenchy.

What could the Braves get for him? Probably not all that much, but that’s not really the point . They’d be better off without him, and he without them.

Way to get in on this early, Mark. What’s next? A scathing critique of foul language and sexism in rap music. If the Atlanta media, which includes Bradley, had had the balls to call out the Braves in 2006, maybe he could have been sent down to the minors to get some work. It’s only been a year since Bradley blasted fans for turning on Golden Boy with a stern lecture.

He’s struggling now, but the belief here, as it would be with any big-leaguer, is that he’ll eventually rise to his established level.

It’s understandable fans would be anxious, especially at a time when the entire team is listing. What’s curious is how quickly we Atlantans seem to turn on the guy from Gwinnett. Has almost a decade of his derring-do, first at Parkview and now as a Brave, bred such contempt? Have we tired of the famous Frenchy? Have we forgotten that, for all his notoriety, he’s only 24?

If that’s the case, then I don’t feel sorry for Jeff Francoeur. I feel sorry for us.

Pretty bold words. Apparently, 2 1/2 years of below-average corner outfield play wasn’t a large enough sample, but 3 1/2 years is. This was my response at the time.

The problem with Francoeur is that the media has been so accepting of the Braves talking points that he is a rising superstar that they haven’t even bothered to notice that Francoeur has always had glaring holes in his game. He was a good high school player? That is no more relevant than the fact that I once hit two home runs in one game for my Little League team. (I still like to bring this up when I can. Yes, they both went over the fence, and I can tell you the names of the pitchers who gave them up: Robbie and John.)

Bradley has the nerve, THE NERVE, to lecture fans on giving Francoeur criticism, which the media neglected to do for three years. In New York, they give grief to players who are far better than Francoeur. Jerry Manuel is making David Wright practice plate discipline, and he has a career OBP of .390. Wright’s slumps are equal to Frenchy’s peaks, but Terry Pendleton just keeps telling Frenchy to “stay aggressive.”

Why didn’t Mark Bradley ask about sending Francoeur to the minors in 2006, when it was clear that he had more to learn? Why didn’t Mark Bradley question Frenchy’s presence in the line-up every day for over two years? I don’t know whether demoting or resting him would have helped, but they were legitimate options that should have been put to the general manager and the manager.

I was thinking this morning as to how easily the Braves could have handled the demotion in 2006. It seemed difficult at the time, but it really wasn’t. David Price was a hero in Tampa Bay, a franchise without any history of stars. Yet, the Rays front office just said, “Hey folks, he’s young. We know he’s done some good stuff up here, but he needs more work.” Some fans were pissed, but the storm didn’t last long.

The problem was that the Braves front office allowed itself to think that his 2005 was exactly what Francoeur was. He was already the star they imagined when he was the Good Face prospect at Parkview: “The Natural.” Baseball professionals shouldn’t allow this to happen. Teenage girls in pink #7 jerseys, yes; but not a GM and his assistants—nor veteran sports columnists.

Maybe Francoeur would be the same player he is, but he should have been sent down in 2006. And if folks like Mark Bradley had been writing with critical pens instead of pompons, maybe this would have happened.

The New York Times has published an obituary for Gerald Scully.

I recently remembered that I wrote up a post on Scully’s contribution to baseball economics last year. It was published at The Baseball Project, so I repost it below.
— — —
Gratitude (for Gerald Scully)

Curt Flood is an important player in baseball history for his contribution to the current economic climate of major league baseball. Flood is famous for demanding higher wages for himself, and standing up to owners for not meeting his demands. Though he lost his court case, his discontent helped pave the way for the players union to successfully win concessions from owners (such as salary arbitration and free agency) that would boost the baseball player salaries.

Why should we celebrate this man, as The Baseball Project does? These people play a child’s game and make millions of dollars. Flood himself was no pauper—he turned down a $90,000 contract because he didn’t want to play for Philadelphia. Why should we feel sorry for any of these money-grubbing athletes?

The answer lies in the work of economist Gerald Scully. Using economic theory as a guide, Scully viewed Major League Baseball as a monopsonist employer—the sole buyer of a particular type of labor. Being the only organization that purchased major league baseball talent, players had little bargaining room to negotiate their pay. And MLB understood this, enforcing its reserve clause that required players to play for the team that they previously played for, or to play for no team at all. Scully understood that the impact of this relationship between teams and players meant that owners collected a large percentage of revenues that players generated by playing baseball.

Using estimates of team revenues and performance metrics (SLG for hitters and K/BB for pitchers) Scully estimated how much performance affected winning and how much winning affected revenues. Thus, he was able to generate a dollar-value estimate of the revenue that players generate. When he compared what players made to what the players actually earned, the difference was striking. Players earned 90-percent less than the revenue they generated through their play. This means that a player like Flood, who earned around $100,000 year was generating nearly $1 million in revenue. What was at stake was how this was shared between owners and players. It is easy to see why players were upset, owners were profiting from the low salaries of players.

The Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally cases in 1975 finally led to the repeal of the traditional reserve clause, and player wages rose accordingly. Now that players were no longer bound to a single team during free agency, teams compete for players and offer to pay them salaries commensurate with the revenues they expect players to generate.

Gerald Scully published his paper in 1974 in American Economic Review, and it most certainly had an impact on the atmosphere; although, I can’t say how much. In almost any history you read of about free agency, Scully doesn’t receive a mention. There is no doubt that once Scully’s conclusions were published that the reserve clause would soon fall. Either a rogue league would enter the market to pay players higher wages or the courts or Congress would finally be convinced of the damage being done to players.

Players earn high salaries because they possess unique skills that fans will pay to watch. While it is had to sympathize with the plight of wealthy players in their labor struggles with owners, it is important to understand that what players don’t get goes to the owners, who tend to be much wealthier than players.

A great pioneer of sports economics has passed on.

Jerry was one of the most prolific, innovative and imaginative economists of our age. One of the most fundamental building blocks of economics is the idea of “marginal product.” Jerry was the first economist to ever measure one. He did it in, of all places, baseball.

He pioneered sports economics and went on to make many contributions in other fields. One of his most important contributions was the “Scully Curve.” Jerry showed that the size of government can contribute to economic growth in a nation’s early stages, but at some point, the size of government becomes a burden - reducing the rate of growth and causing national income to be lower than it otherwise would be.

I never met him, but his work greatly influenced my own. RIP Dr. Scully.

Thanks to Marginal Revolution for the pointer.

Addendum: Further thoughts from Skip Sauer.

My colleague Bill Dougan once told me that he regarded “Pay and Performance” as one of the best pieces of economic scholarship in the last quarter-century, something that I repeat to my students in sports economics classes to this day. Note that we are speaking of economic scholarship, and not just scholarship in the economics of sports. Scully’s 1974 paper is evidence that the study of economics in the context of sport can be important, and make a significant contribution to the discipline as a whole.

Sports history had thus subjected Scully’s model to a stern test, which it passed with flying colors. It is not common for economic theory and evidence to produce an estimated effect that is so clear and so large as was Scully’s (for example, we are still arguing about the size of fiscal multipliers seventy-odd years after Keynes). It is even less common for such an estimate to be tested by events so promptly and directly, and in addition to have these events support the author’s work so convincingly.

A few years ago, I recall hearing Skip say something like this, and I was nearly knocked off my feet at how right he was. Skip also pointed out to me that Scully understood the problems of ERA long before sabermetricians began arguing over DIPS. In 1974, he used strikeout-to-walk ratio to proxy pitcher quality instead of ERA, which would have seemed to be the intuitive choice. Scully knew better.

Today, the AJC published an Op-Ed by yours truly on the potential economic development benefits of the new Gwinnett Stadium. Here is a snippet.

Braves 1, taxpayers 0
Economic benefits overstated for publicly funded Gwinnett stadium

By J.C. Bradbury

For the Journal-Constitution

Saturday, April 25, 2009

On April 17, the Gwinnett Braves began play at their new home in Gwinnett County. The publicly funded stadium was initially slated to cost $45 million, but the price quickly ballooned to $64 million, with no word yet on what the final construction tab will be. In addition, the county has been unable to sell naming rights to the stadium, which the county anticipated returning $500,000 annually to cover 20 percent of the debt service.

Despite recent county government budget cuts, layoffs and tax hikes, the commissioners have insisted that the stadium will increase economic activity more than enough to offset construction costs. However, economists have long known that the frequently touted economic benefits of sports facilities are pure fantasy.

For further details see this post.

How to run an effective PR campaign. Step 1: get the incentives right.

Yeah, I’m still on blogging hiatus, but this post by Julian Sanchez was too good to ignore.

Sometimes, of course, the arguments are such that the specialists can develop and summarize them to the point that an intelligent layman can evaluate them. But often—and I feel pretty sure here—that’s just not the case. Give me a topic I know fairly intimately, and I can often make a convincing case for absolute horseshit. Convincing, at any rate, to an ordinary educated person with only passing acquaintance with the topic. A specialist would surely see through it, but in an argument between us, the lay observer wouldn’t necessarily be able to tell which of us really had the better case on the basis of the arguments alone—at least not without putting in the time to become something of a specialist himself. Actually, I have a plausible advantage here as a peddler of horseshit: I need only worry about what sounds plausible. If my opponent is trying to explain what’s true, he may be constrained to introduce concepts that take a while to explain and are hard to follow, trying the patience (and perhaps wounding the ego) of the audience.

Come to think of it, there’s a certain class of rhetoric I’m going to call the “one way hash” argument. Most modern cryptographic systems in wide use are based on a certain mathematical asymmetry: You can multiply a couple of large prime numbers much (much, much, much, much) more quickly than you can factor the product back into primes. Certain bad arguments work the same way—skim online debates between biologists and earnest ID afficionados armed with talking points if you want a few examples: The talking point on one side is just complex enough that it’s both intelligible—even somewhat intuitive—to the layman and sounds as though it might qualify as some kind of insight. (If it seems too obvious, perhaps paradoxically, we’ll tend to assume everyone on the other side thought of it themselves and had some good reason to reject it.) The rebuttal, by contrast, may require explaining a whole series of preliminary concepts before it’s really possible to explain why the talking point is wrong. So the setup is “snappy, intuitively appealing argument without obvious problems” vs. “rebuttal I probably don’t have time to read, let alone analyze closely.”

If we don’t sometimes defer to the expert consensus, we’ll systematically tend to go wrong in the face of one-way-hash arguments, at least our own necessarily limited domains of knowledge. Indeed, in such cases, trying to evaluate the arguments on their merits will tend to lead to an erroneous conclusion more often than simply trying to gauge the credibility of the various disputants. The problem, of course, is gauging your own competence level well enough to know when to assess arguments and when to assess arguers. Thanks to the perverse phenomenon psychologists have dubbed the Dunning-Kruger effect, those who are least competent tend to have the most wildly inflated estimates of their own knowledge and competence. They don’t know enough to know that they don’t know, as it were.

I’ve encountered the Dunning-Kruger effect from both sides. I have observed/experienced that hubris is a great barrier to learning (I am so thankful to a few Wofford professors who cut me down to size), but I did not realize that someone had studied it. Here’s my version.

Thanks to Dave Berri for the pointer.

As I mentioned, my blogging vacation doesn’t preclude occasional updates.

Alex Remington interviews me over at Chop-n-Change. Thanks to Alex for asking such thoughtful questions.

As I mentioned, my blogging vacation doesn’t preclude occasional updates.

— My article on aging in baseball is now available from Journal of Sports Sciences. Here is the abstract.

Peak athletic performance and ageing: Evidence from baseball

Baseball players exhibit a pattern of improvement and decline in performance; however, differing lengths of careers and changes in rules and characteristics of the game complicate assessments of age-related effects on performance. This study attempts to isolate the impact of age on several player skills while controlling for relevant outside factors using longitudinal data from 86 seasons of Major League Baseball. The results indicate that players age in different skills in accord with studies of ageing in other athletic contests. For overall performance, multiple-regression estimates indicate that hitters and pitchers peak around the age of 29 - later than previous estimates. Athletic skills such as hitting and running peak earlier than skills that rely heavily on experience and knowledge, such as issuing and drawing walks.

— You can read why I think the United Football League (UFL) is more likely to succeed than many people believe in the April 09, 2009 issue of ESPN Magazine.

— I am quoted as a Gwinnett Stadium critic in the April 2009 issue of Atlanta Magazine. Commissioner Bert Nasuti thinks what the Board of Commissioners did—revealing its secret deal to the public a few days before approving it without opening the floor for discussion—was consistent with good representative democracy. I disagree.

— I offer my sincere thanks to the US Military Academy at West Point for hosting my visit to the school last week. It is an impressive place to visit, and I very much enjoyed my time there.

It’s hard to believe that I have been doing this for five years. I started blogging with one arm, while the other one held my infant daughter. She’s now in kindergarten. I’ve moved, I’ve had a second daughter, I’ve published one book, and I’m writing another; yet, nearly every morning of my life for the past five years has been spent staring at the content field of a blog post.

I haven’t written something every day, but it’s always been an option. And I have to be honest, it’s weighing on me. I can’t write the way I used to. I’m still sitting on posts that I had planned six months ago. I can’t give this up—I really do enjoy the outlet—but I need a break…a forced break. I’ve tried to take time off before, but nearly every time a big story breaks and I get pulled back in. So, I’ve decided to take a vacation (hiatus is probably the more appropriate term): no blogging for the next four months. I don’t care if Buzz Bissinger finds Jeff Francoeur buying human growth hormone in Gwinnett Stadium; I’m not going to comment here.

I won’t quit writing or commenting. I have a few articles in the works, and I may pop up from time to time to point out where articles and commentary are published. But, other than that, I won’t be posting here until August. This will also give me more time to spend on my current book.

Thanks for all of you who stop by to read what I have to say. I appreciate your support, and I look forward to returning to regular blogging in August.