THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

The 2016 Olympics have the potential to be a huge disaster, not because of money or corruption, but because Rio is a party town that sucks people in.  (The story is it ruined the Hollywood career of Orson Wells.) Imagine the NBC crews to drunk to cover games, the Athletes too worn out from late nights to break records.  I can’t wait to see what happens!

I’m not sure I agree that representation in the IOC should even be representational.  I don’t particularly like the idea that the countries that send the most athletes, like the U.S. and China, should have the most control over the IOC.  Just as the Olympics try to use officials from countries uninvolved in the match (at least for some sports, I’m not sure how all the rules work), I think there is value having the control of the IOC disproportionately in the hands of countries with less reason to act in their own interests.  Nate opines that Chicago may have won if the U.S. had proportional representation, but should that be the case?  The Olympics are the premier international showcase, meant to bring the world together and showcase its premier cities throughout.

The U.S. has hosted several Olympics.  China won Beijing.  I don’t know if they had more representation when they won those, but absent evidence that the IOC has drastically shifted its composition, I would assume they didn’t have proportional representation then.  This year, Rio won with 2 delagates from Brazil, a small slice of South American representation, and much more voting delegates closer to Madrid’s time zone.  If the IOC is not handing out the Olympics and acting in general based on its composition voting in its own interests, should we change it based on the idea that the amount of power a country has is based on the extent of its personal interest in the decisions of the IOC?  I don’t think so.

I also don’t have a problem with Africa’s representation even if you want it to be proportional to number of athletes.  Is Africa sending fewer athletes because it has fewer people capable of reaching world-class athletic levels, or because they have less funding for their programs?  I would guess the latter is an issue, and cutting their representation because they lack the funding and power of more developed continents is not going to help them get their top athletes developed and into the games.  I don’t know how much their IOC representation is helping them, but I think we should at least have their perspective in the IOC in a greater capacity than proportionally to their diminished representation by number of athletes.  At the very least, they should have the power to keep the IOC aware of when it is specifically in the interests of more developed or wealthy or powerful nations, which could happen even unintentionally if that is where most of the IOC is coming from.

The politicization of this is a major turnoff for me, and one of many reasons I don’t really care about the Olympics.  And grateful for baseball.  I’m sure the decision of where to play the allstar game is just as arbitrary but you don’t see people make so big a deal out of it.

There was about zero chance that had the Olympics gone to Chicago that I would have traveled there to see anything.  From my TV set, tracks and pools in Chicago look the same as those in Rio.

Something to keep in mind. If the article on the link below is correct, the delegates must recuse themselves from voting if a city from their country is in the particular round of voting. Meaning the US delegates couldn’t participate in the 1st round yesterday. So even if the US had 20 delegates, all that would do was increase the weight of the vote of the voting delegates.

source: http://www.nbcchicago.com/news/sports/IOC-host-city-voting-how-it-works-62410782.html

Anyway, I couldn’t care less where the Olympics would be hosted. I don’t get all the hoopla about it.

BTW, thank you for all your baseball work Tango.

I’m absolutely with Rally.  I have lots of family in Chicago and they wanted the olympics about as much as a hole in their head (lots of traffic and a pain).  Furthermore, to not realize that the sports in the Olympics are culturally biased (and therefore the number of athletes and the medals) by Nate is extremely negligent.

Basically, the sports chosen for a lot of medals (swimming is a great example, there are 20 million swimming events) disproportionately favor wealthy (read - largely white) countries (got enough money to swim and have a pool) and when they don’t they have occasionally just change the rules - see field hockey where countries such as Pakistan and India used to dominate but now they play on an artificial surface which dramatically increases the game speed, which they can’t afford in India and Pakistan, so they no longer dominate.

Even if this weren’t the case,you have a further bias in the best athletes in certain countries not going into certain sports and again biasing the olympics.  In America the best (male) athletes play baseball, football, hockey (none of which are represented) and basketball (1 medal - although 12 participants).  So you aren’t getting the best athletes into a proportion with the sports they play at the olympics, and therefore you may be biasing what number of athletes they bring.

This last point is sort of an aside, but why must they find a way to make every sport I might enjoy watching various kinds of terrible.  Boxing is ruined by their terrible rules, as is soccer (2 players over 22), as is basketball (international basketball is not really basketball), trying to decide better baseball teams based on a single game is dumb, I used to run track and it is fundamentally hard to appreciate their speed from television despite that I enjoyed it.....

I knew Rio would win if their proposal met the technical requirements because they had the reasonable argument that no Olympics had been played in South America, in Brazil or in any Portuguese-speaking country.  The US media looks on this as some terrible loss for Obama or whatever, but the fact is that this bid didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell all along.  The surprise is that Madrid made it so far, since the next Olympics is already in Europe.  But Rio had this in the bag.

The only possible argument against Rio is that they will also be hosting the FIFA World Cup in 2014. Of course, that also gives them an advantage, since they’ve already been preparing the necessary infrastructure. I don’t think Chicago would have been able to come up with any venue close in size or significance to the Estádio do Maracanã.

While I was rooting for Chicago, Rio should be a great venue for the games.  Let the samba begin!

The point about whether a country’s delegates can vote for their own country (or at all if their country is a contender) is not necessarily how many votes they have in a given “selection” but their bargaining power on procedural and planning issues, including decisions such as whether baseball is excluded from the Olympic sports.

Also, there is logrolling on votes. I recall being in China when their first bid was being prepared. They were sooo disappointed that they didn’t get the millenial games.  But they were a lock for getting one down the road in part because they went along on that decision calmly, and methodolically prepared for the future anyway.

Craig makes some excellent points.  This is primarily a baseball blog, so we should be familiar of the ridiculousness of baseball not being an Olympic sport while there are all sorts of sports included that are only played in a handful of nordic countries.  Probably the top team sport in the world is soccer (an Olympic sport, though no one cares about Olympic soccer), followed by basketball, then baseball, than hockey.

One factor in Chicago not getting the nod that hasn’t gotten much attention in the US is our harrassment of non-Americans who want to visit this country legally (while turning a blind eye to illegal migrant workers).  I have a non-American friend trying to visit and I’m fine with the US getting no international sporting events until this is fixed.  Plus the country is going bankrupt.  I don’t want to be so negative but this is simply a bad time for the US to host the Olympics.

Rio has Maracana stadium plus the Sambodrone for the opening and closing ceremonies.  They could put some events on the beaches (Chicago has beaches too but its not quite the same).  They could just turn the opening ceremony over to the bloco that won the Carnival that year and still have a better opening ceremony than we see most years.  The city has problems but it should be a great games.

Probably the top team sport in the world is soccer (an Olympic sport, though no one cares about Olympic soccer), followed by basketball, then baseball, than hockey.

How do you define “top”?  You mean popular?  Hockey is more popular worldwide than baseball.  Is it even close?  And I’m sure rugby and cricket are more followed than baseball.

Do you mean revenue generated?  I suppose your ordering might make sense.

Ed, what country is your non-American friend trying to visit the US from?  What kind of harassment is he or she getting?
vr, Xei

In reference to the immigration control issues, I was actually referencing this:

http://fabiusmaximus.wordpress.com/2009/10/04/olympics/#more-10245

The post contains other links.  But there are alot of other sources.  Its not a big secret that entering the US now is relatively difficult, compared to other countries and compared to past years.  Its hurt the US economy due to the effect on tourism.

My friend is visiting from Brazil, and is not being harrassed (the harrassment reference was to the treatment visitors get at the airport), but has had to jump through a ridiculous number of hoops.

Really, if this was the reason for Chicago to come in last in the voting, it was a good reason.

Popularity of sports, OK based on revenue, but it was a quick estimate.  Baseball has fans in the US, Canada, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, the Caribbean, much of Latin America, which is a perfectly respectable group of countries compared to many Olympic sports.  Hockey, the US (not as much as baseball), Canada, Russia, Scandinavia, Eastern Europe.  I would think that baseball’s presence in East Asia would give the sport more fans overall.

Ed, without reading your link (I was hoping to hear your personal, or your friends experience as it’s probably a more typical experience than a list of horror stories), I would say that 911 has changed a lot of things for travelling in and out of the US.  Even for US passengers at the very least things are much more inconvenient.

I do a lot of overseas travel, and know a lot of people who would love to come visit or even move to the US from poorer countries.  The US embassies in those countries are not particularly friendly to the people attempting to get a Visa to enter our country.  There are a ton of applicants, way too many more than they are allowed to allow in.  What in essence they do is weed them out by making it difficult for them to get a Visa into our country.  Lots of paperwork that almost takes a lawyer to figure out how to fill it out.  Then when you apply for your Visa, you are often/usually rejected for no reason.  Often the reason is that you are a “risk” to stay in the US and not return back to your country of origin.  Single women are often rejected for this reason.  This is just for a tourist visit.  From richer countries, these same individuals are not considered a risk to stay as they have financial reasons to return back home.

But the harrassment goes both ways.  I’ve been required to pay fees, which are nothing more than bribes to customs officials in foriegn airports just because I am American and very rich by their standards.  The alternative to not paying the fee/bribe is not a rather pleasant one.

I’m sure there are examples of improper harrassment by our immigration folks, but I believe the more common scenario is one like I described above.

vr, Xei

i can see how some chicagoans are disappointed but objectively, isnt it obvious that the olympics should be help in rio?  south american market seems way to important right now.  anyway, im glad that i get to see world class wrestling once every four years but otherwise i dont get too worked up about this stuff.  its a bunch of exhibition games, no big whoop.  phelps getting busted for pot after winning all those golds was pretty funny tho.  so yeah, if nbc crews get too drunk to properly cover the olympics then they will be by far the most interesting games ever held.