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Not even this guy could buy a team if MLB wouldn’t let him

Major League Baseball remains one of the few industries unregulated by the antitrust regulation. The purpose of the statutes  according to the US Supreme Court, is “The purpose of the [Sherman] Act is not to protect businesses from the working of the market; it is to protect the public from the failure of the market. The law directs itself not against conduct which is competitive, even severely so, but against conduct which unfairly tends to destroy competition itself.” Spectrum Sports, Inc. v. McQuillan, 506 U.S. 447 (1993). However, Baseball’s latitude in application allows it to function unfettered in the marketplace while creating an internal economy that stifles true competition. (more…)

What you missed while slipping into flashbacks… (more…)

What you missed while Tigers figured out new ways to spend their time. (more…)

One of the great things about October is the sheer variety of sports available for consumption. NFL football is in full swing, as are both Canadian and American college football and most European football (soccer) leagues. CFL teams are in the middle of their playoff stretch drive, as are MLS teams. The NHL season is underway, the NBA season is about to get going and the MLB playoffs are just taking off, and there are plenty of smaller sports and leagues to follow as well.

The problem with this abundance of sports is it often leads to oversimplifying in a search for an overarching narrative, which results in some of the less popular sports being driven to the margins. The biggest culprit in this is the NFL, which dominates the North American sporting landscape for a variety of reasons including the limited supply of games, the limited amount of time it takes to follow the league and the league’s use of narrativium.

Now, that dominance isn’t necessarily bad, as it provides a ton of access and coverage for football fans. However, it does make life difficult for other sports. Canadian prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s famous quote in a 1969 speech to the Washington D.C. Press Club comes to mind: “Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt.” Those words are quite reflective of the Canada – U.S. relationship, which Trudeau was discussing, but they can also apply to the NFL’s relationship with other sports.
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What you missed while brushing up on your calculus. (more…)

One of the most intriguing aspects of sports to me has always been the mental factors that come into play. To me, the cerebral decisions that influence actions are far more interesting than just the raw athleticism on display. It fascinates me how physically unremarkable specimens like Wayne Gretzky can rise to the top of their sport through a superior ability to predict where players would go. That may not be as impressive to watch as an Alex Ovechkin feat of raw athleticism*, but it can be even more effective.
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