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Tuesday, November 24, 2009
The Blue Ribbon panel, 9 years later
In July 2000…
MLB commissioned a report as a press release to distribute ahead of bargaining with the union, on the CBA. The press, not wanting to be a press agent so obviously, implicitly demanded that the report be titled something else. MLB, not even waiting for the press to make this implicit demand, beat them to the punch by calling it a “blue ribbon panel on baseball economics”. There, everyone is happy.
MLB, rather than going after impartial economists (they’ve gotten bitten real bad when they’ve done that in the past) instead hand-picked their panel. The biggest name was the extremely highly respected (and future Redsox owner) George Mitchell. This guy is huge. For a Canadian like me, I don’t care too much about who was the U.S. Senate leader, any more than an American cares about Pierre Elliot Trudeau (unless he’s dating a starlet). But, being a peace envoy to the middle east is a huge deal. The only other peace envoy I heard of was the galaxy-renowned Sarek. Credentials, George Mitchell’s got.
That said, just because you are honest and respected doesn’t mean you are not biased. Indeed, because you are human you are biased. It’s part of being human. This is why we say things like “avoid appearance of impropriety”. It’s not that we believe there is impropriety, but we want to avoid the appearance of such. This is why MLB doesn’t select its arbitrators. George Mitchell, as fine a person as he is, as fine a public servant as he is, as impartial a person as you may find, would not qualify as one. Indeed, as strange as it sounds, knucklehead Carrie Prejean would be more qualified to be an arbitrator in MLB than George Mitchell.
The only time I’ve ever heard of that both sides chose against the Carrie Prejean pick and chose for a George Mitchell pick was when USSR was playing Canada for the Canada Cup. All the referees were from the NHL, and the organizers schedules an American to referee the game. The Russians insisted on a Canadian to referee. Such was the hostility that the Russians had for the Americans that they thought that a Canadian would be more unbiased involving a Canadian team than an American would be involving a Russian team. When Jason Jones says that everyone loves Canadians because we are like “the world’s gay friend”, this is what he’s talking about.
Who else was on that panel? George Will is another one. Yup, the press loves to report on its own. Why do you think the MLB MVP awards are so popular in the press. That’s right, because the press owns the awards. How convenient. Having George Will in there guarantees press coverage.
Then we have Paul Volcker. I presume this guy, former chair of the Fed, who survived both a Democrat and Republican president would be acceptable to both sides. He seems to be a guy with no appearance of impropriety. But, so did Arthur Levitt, chair of the SEC. The NHL hired him, ahead of their negotiating with the union, to provide a “super audit” (a claim since retracted by the NHL seeing that accountants said what Levitt provided would not even qualify for a regular audit, never mind the super duper audit Bettman was claiming). That report, which I dissected, was not unbiased. When you get to do 100% of the hiring, the guy being hired is automatically biased, no matter how good and honest that human is. Remember, all our failings go back to the fact that we are human.
The fourth guy on the panel was Richard Levin. Eh? That’s the Canadian in me. Wiki tells us he’s a professor of economics and Yale president. Sounds like a good guy. If the deck was stacked, one would hope that professor Levin is the one who would at least provide the necessary balance.
Anyway, I have never read this report, and I’ll read it now. Let’s see if it’s bullsh!t, or it has some honest-to-goodness good stuff in there. I’ll be back, I dunno, this afternoon, maybe tomorrow.
(By the way, I was tempted to say it was “time to look at this” report. This gets written alot about other things. It’s time to do this, it’s time to do that. Well, maybe it’s time for the writer to do this, but this hardly means it’s time to do it. Indeed, if the writer never did it, no one else would have done it. It’s not time to do anything. All it is is that it’s time to do SOMETHING other than whatever else you wanted to do.)
Sigh.
I find it hard to believe an economist would say this:
“In a majority of MLB markets, the cost to clubs of trying to be competitive is causing escalation of ticket and concession prices, jeopardizing MLB’s traditional position as the affordable family spectator sport.”
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“With the exception of 1998, even the World Series loser has been from payroll Quartile I. (The 1998 loser, San Diego, was from Quartile II and lost in four games.)”
Wow. We’re quoting things where the Padres lost in 4 games? Really? How horrible.
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They’re talking about recommendations now… I’ll be back.