THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Monday, August 04, 2008

Business of Sports

If you are interested in a $300 book on the business of sports.  (If you are going to buy this book, click on the $300 link, so we get a small referral fee.) And if someone is going to buy the book, feel free to post your review and whatever interesting tidbits you find.  Normally, I would encourage people to buy books, but a $300 book is pretty ridiculous.  Is that what schools are charging these days?  (*)

Here is Dave Berri expanded view of the book.

Why is hockey always neglected?  A league competitive to the NHL in the 1970s, mergers of teams, expansion of teams (from only six!), strike, lockout, European competition, changes in styles of play brings in different talent types, Olympic hockey, collusion between NHL president and head of the NHLPA.  It has a rich history that would be ripe for the business heavyweights, certainly at least on par with baseball.  And yet, all we get is baseball, baseball, baseball.

(*) I remember 20 years ago, our books cost 50-75$ each, and they always had to be the latest edition, and professors “forcing” us to get those editions.  I wonder what kind of payola deals those professors got.  One of our professors actually wrote his own book, bound it in crappy spiral bounding, and then charged us the enormous going rate.  He may as well have said “I need a new deck, and with 150 students at 50$ a pop, you guys will have furnished me a great setting for my BBQ”.

And I took a nighttime course a few years ago, and I approached the professor that I found a site that will give a deep discount for large orders.  Her reply?  “That’d be a conflict of interest”.  Meaning: “I get a huge cut here, and you are going to take money out of my pocket and leaving it in the students’ pockets”.