Wednesday, July 27, 2011

How a Team Collapses: 2011 Mariners

My Mariners are not really in a death spiral, although it feels like it. My daughter tells me I tend to overdramatize things, but we Mariners’ fans are watching a complete team collapse. Today the team managed to stop their headlong pursuit to set a modern major league record for losses in a row; they had to settle for 17. This is not a choke where the stakes are high and the team has it all on the line and fails to play up to its capability. Now they are simply collapsing.

No one expected much of this team, and yet, for a glorious moment, they produced unexpectedly good baseball. Now they have collapsed into beyond pathetic and it got me wondering what happens when a team collapses?

A team collapses when it suddenly starts to play below its capabilities and enters a spiral of losing and declining competence fed by the losing. To collapse suggests the team has been performing well or at least OK, then it suddenly devolves to a lower, I mean awful, level of play. The Mariners were playing at or above their projected talent+skill+commitment capabilities. Then in a very short time, the team swoons to compete far below its talent+skill+commitment level. This results in a self-reinforcing corkscrew of losses reinforcing each other until the team has played itself out of contention.

A team collapse involves the well-documented psychological phenomenon of contagion. In a collapse, the low level of performance begins somewhere. In the Mariner’s case, the entire batting lineup, but especially the collapse of Sean Figgins and Ichiro who are both hitting about 70 points below their career averages.

Other players begin to feel obligated to up their game. Team members push themselves to try to do more than they are capable of. They try to hit homers when they are live drive hitters; they swing at marginal pitches; they lose patience. This singular response is compounded because team members lose trust in the other players. They believe that other players will not do their part. This lack of trust in the rest of the lineup motivates them to push harder, move beyond their comfort zone and strengths. If they were role players and had defined comfortable positions, they press beyond these and fail.

This pressing beyond talent+skill level leads to disaster. Leaving aside sudden blips, hot games or streaks, most good to average players will decline when they move beyond their comfort or strength zones. Pitchers will magnify the problems once the scouts let them know a batter is now vulnerable to new pitches. So player-by-player individuals fall into patterns of failure and fall below their norms and even below replacement value.  Suddenly you have a team that is last in the major leagues in 7 of 9 offensive categories and that is offensive (ugh!). Yesterday they set a record in Yankee stadium—18 strikeouts  against good but not great pitching. This only occurs when an entire team anxiously presses and swings at balls at bad or marginal pitches.As in the Yankee game, they flail, check swings, watch third strikes; they manifest a collective lack of decisive confidence in their ability to engage or hit.


The offense woes lead managers to play mix and match and call up anyone in the farm system that looks like a hitter. This approach generates chaotic and unreliable patterns in the in field. So precision infield play or outfield fielding efficiency plummets. The trusting communication and internalized sixth senses of trust and anticipation disappears. Fielders overplay and compensate and even ignore scouts. This results in more errors and egregious mistakes that erode trust further. The team brings up minor league “hitters” who are marginal outfielders, so mistakes multiply and bloopers become a sort of expected norm.

The slow collapse of hitting coupled with the gradual wearing down of fielding competence finally infects the pitchers, and this nailed the coffin shut.

The Mariners were held together by superb but young starting pitchers and journeymen relievers enjoying career years. But now the contagion spreads in the same way. Young pitchers like Michael Pineda start to over throw knowing they cannot rely on run support. Doug Fister and Jason Vargas both need control and fine fielding to work. But like Pineda, they are forced to try for more strikeouts because they cannot trust the fielding. The pressure on each pitch goes up because so little run support exists (Fister had 8 runs scored in 6 starts). So “pressure pitches” multiply which increases the stress load and impact on pitchers wearing down their mental focus more quickly.

Pitchers know they cannot afford mistakes because the fielding is no longer reliable and the offense cannot offset errors. The mental and physical strain of every pitch intensifies. Pitchers wear down faster and young pitchers even faster. Now every player's failure feeds their own lack of confidence and also infects every other players eroding competence. The psyche of the team guarantees failure because no one believes they can succeed with this group of team mates.

On top of this the pundits demand trades and heads to fall, everyone now finds himself mentioned in columns and potential trade bait. So every at bat and every pitch now becomes an audition to be traded; this of course fosters even more nervous tension as well as harvesting massive insecurity in a clubhouse.

At this point many teams give up. We see it all the time on the field when a coach loses control of the team. Players not just collapse in skill set but they quit trying or they quit caring which leads to the same result. The talent+skill equation depends upon the commitment level of give it life. The Mariners, unlike the last two years, are still playing as a cohesive unit and have neither given up nor taken to attacking each other. They do not manifest a complete death spiral where the team and the coach have lost control of their destinies. I witnessed this happen at Washington with Tyrone Willingham’s last college team.

17 losses in a row. They are not that bad; but they will never recover this year. Felix Hernandez staunched the record run; but more loss streaks on are the way and a slow agonizing season lies before us. 

Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Why Sports Unions Succeed and Others Fail I & II


The Paradox of Modern Sports Union Success

Unions are dying in the United States. Less than 8 percent of the private sector work force is unionized. So why do unions flourish so successfully in professional sports?

Well it is not because the owners like them. Both professional football and basketball owners are trying to destroy their unions with lockouts. Both will fail, and the owners know it even as the football lockout enters its fourth month and will be resolved soon.

The owners hate the unions; I mean they hate the unions. Many of the owners are self-made wealthy using the teams as forms of ego gratification or extensions of their own Ayn Rand self images as self-made individualists. They will do anything and have tried everything including collusion to destroy the unions, but they fail. Why?

I think the reasons sports unions succeed derive from the very unique shape of the labor market that makes it relatively immune to the global forces that undermine unions all over the world.

The global market enables employers to shift jobs to lower wage countries. Borders mean little, and even technical jobs can be outsources at will an connected via the internet. If owners don’t shift jobs abroad, they can always shift to the south or southwest where government war on unions will ensure lower wages, benefits and working conditions. The shape of the labor market in sports limits these options for owners.

Traditional unions depend upon their ability to organize workers and get workers to perceive that a common good can be achieved by negotiating wages and working conditions together. A common good gets disturbed across all union members. The gain is greater for all workers over the long run than if workers negotiated individually for their contracts. This is the key; if the union stays together, the long term benefits are huge, but if they fall apart, then the benefits fail them.

The benefits of a union revolve around guaranteed wages for work. But the combined power also generates benefits and work rules around safety, none of which individuals on their own could gain. Left on their own,  individual workers would end up with lower benefits, lower wages or job security and less safety over the life of the contract—this is exactly what has happened in the modern American private sector.
So why do sports unions work?

The first and more ironic point is that the owners actually gain an immense legal advantage from having unions to negotiate. This enables owners to get things like salary caps, entry salaries but above all transferrable contracts that can be traded within the league or cartel. The negotiated contract protects the owners and their cartel from potential anti-trust and restraint of trade challenges. The contract protects certain aspects of the game that permit some level playing field and the patterns of player investment and trades that the teams depend upon.

The professional unions move to decertify themselves removed this cover for the superstructure of the sports and their profitability. This enabled the union members to launch a series of law suites that would destroy the profit structure as well as the competitive balance of the leagues upon which the profitability depends. This is doubly important for basketball and football because both depend upon salary caps which could not be sustained without a strong union agreement.

So against their better judgment, the owners need and accept but hate the unions.

Part II will examine the exceptional form that unionization takes in professional sport to adapt principles of unions with the need for compensation for superstarts.


The recent settlement of the NFL lockout simply reminds the owners that they cannot conduct their business without a union of their players. At a deep level, the professional sport unions flourish because the number of elite athletes who can play professional sports is vanishingly small.  A small level of depth exists in the labor markets to permit some reasonable substitution for medium or low range skill players. The baseball statistic of value over replacement (VORP) suggests this.

The replacement level is so high and the number of replacements so limited, however, that the drop off of play would be precipitous. There is no reserve army of the unemployed to take their place and you cannot move place bound teams at will to other countries with lower wage scales.

Second, the players are highly skilled and the skills take a long time to develop. Most of the investment in skills comes from the individuals who forgo other options to achieve that exceptional skill. The player also takes a very high risk because very few people succeed so they have forgone other opportunities. The  players want to get maximum gains in the shortest time because pro careers especially in football and basketball average 3-4 years. So players have a very strong incentive to maximize their gains in a very short time of professional play and to band together to achieve this.

Third, only a small number of owners compete for the players; this permits cartel like behavior that can escape court scrutiny with legal contracts with unions.

This small group and limited substitution pool makes the value of the workers very high, doubly so because on the margins the addition of a couple players can profoundly impact the success of a team. So the union involves relatively little cost day-to-day cost to the players, and workers are socialized into the union at a very early age. The unions focus upon limiting entry, early salary scales, common mobile benefit pools and retirement benefits works well for players. The contracts also enable owners to have reserve clauses and trades and salary caps that game or owners needs to create some form of parity.

This common gain involves two major sacrifices by the players: the need to contribute money to a common strike fund and, second, the requirement to go on strike or endure a lockout if necessary to protect the common goods.
Sports unions, then, have a huge advantage over traditional unions. The members possess incredibly rare talents that take huge personal investment to develop over time. This means that they cannot easily be replaced by workers or technology. Despite the myth of movies like The Replacements, elite professional athletes cannot be substituted en masse and still provide a powerful, skilled and entertaining sport and spectacle. The inability to outsource, replace or move to a different venue means the owners are stuck with an ultra small elite and irreplaceable group of highly skilled elite employees.

Now two huge revisions have been made to traditional union values that promote egalitarian and limited wage differentials. First, athletes sign contracts that permit the teams/owners to trade the contract and trade them. This is incredibly rare; imagine Google trading an employee to Facebook!! The closest to this might be noncompeting contracts that some highly skilled employees sign. This enables a mini-market to occur across teams but players benefit from the loss of control of place of employment with strong portable pensions and benefits that build a substratum under all players. It also benefits everyone by creating strong minimum salaries and step increases.
The second major change from traditional unions is the free agency. Traditionally unions have been hostile to merit based compensation arguing that it undercuts solidarity and sets members against one another. This has been an Achilles heal for unions.

Professional sports unions solves this dilemma by permitting individuals to become free agents after set periods of time. The initial apprentice years have tracked salaries after bonuses, then after having served this time, free agency releases a player from the team and permits the player to sign with any other team. Now some restrictions exists in football, hockey and basketball about how many and levels of agency signing, but the point is that this permits players to have the advantages of unions—solidarity, portable benefits, strong control of entry salaries—with the advantages of strong merit based or market payments to players after they have served an apprentice period.

Another lingering aspect that makes unions strong by increasing the value of the players is that modern sports teams market themselves largely through star power or faces of the team. Teams invest immense money in their brands but they depend heavily upon a few hyped players with their faces and names splattered all over the city or nation to create a unique brand and bridge the emotional range from corporate team shells to fan association with the team.

One final point seals their stature. In economics many goods are vulnerable to competition because they can be substituted for. So if you take away my house, I can move to an apartment or condo. In professional sports, there are no easy substitute goods. It is interesting that many football fans will not find basketball a suitable substitute for football. Likewise baseball and hockey core fans will not regard the other sports as substitutes. So along with the limited labor market and difficulty to replace skills, lies the other problem that most sports cannot be substituted for by other sports. When a sports team leaves a town, people who watched that sport don't migrate to others; they might follow the sport on TV, find another team to root for, or simply lose interest. This cements the unique bargaining power of the elite athletes.

The success of modern sport unions depends upon player possessing a unique set of skills that counteract the anti-union pressures of a global market. I can’t think of anywhere else it would work.

Saturday, July 23, 2011

Why Sports Unions Succeed when others Fail I

The Paradox of Modern Sports Union Success

Unions are dying in the United States. Less than 8 percent of the private sector work force is unionized. So why do unions flourish so successfully in professional sports?

Well it is not because the owners like them. Both professional football and basketball owners are trying to destroy their unions with lockouts. Both will fail, and the owners know it even as the football lockout enters its fourth month and will be resolved soon.

The owners hate the unions; I mean they hate the unions. Many of the owners are self-made wealthy using the teams as forms of ego gratification or extensions of their own Ayn Rand self images as self-made individualists. They will do anything and have tried everything including collusion to destroy the unions, but they fail. Why?

I think the reasons sports unions succeed derive from the very unique shape of the labor market that makes it relatively immune to the global forces that undermine unions all over the world.

The global market enables employers to shift jobs to lower wage countries. Borders mean little, and even technical jobs can be outsources at will an connected via the internet. If owners don’t shift jobs abroad, they can always shift to the south or southwest where government war on unions will ensure lower wages, benefits and working conditions. The shape of the labor market in sports limits these options for owners.

Traditional unions depend upon their ability to organize workers and get workers to perceive that a common good can be achieved by negotiating wages and working conditions together. A common good gets disturbed across all union members. The gain is greater for all workers over the long run than if workers negotiated individually for their contracts. This is the key; if the union stays together, the long term benefits are huge, but if they fall apart, then the benefits fail them.

The benefits of a union revolve around guaranteed wages for work. But the combined power also generates benefits and work rules around safety, none of which individuals on their own could gain. Left on their own,  individual workers would end up with lower benefits, lower wages or job security and less safety over the life of the contract—this is exactly what has happened in the modern American private sector.
So why do sports unions work?

The first and more ironic point is that the owners actually gain an immense legal advantage from having unions to negotiate. This enables owners to get things like salary caps, entry salaries but above all transferrable contracts that can be traded within the league or cartel. The negotiated contract protects the owners and their cartel from potential anti-trust and restraint of trade challenges. The contract protects certain aspects of the game that permit some level playing field and the patterns of player investment and trades that the teams depend upon.

The professional unions move to decertify themselves removed this cover for the superstructure of the sports and their profitability. This enabled the union members to launch a series of law suites that would destroy the profit structure as well as the competitive balance of the leagues upon which the profitability depends. This is doubly important for basketball and football because both depend upon salary caps which could not be sustained without a strong union agreement.

So against their better judgment, the owners need and accept but hate the unions.

Part II will examine the exceptional form that unionization takes in professional sport to adapt principles of unions with the need for compensation for superstarts.

Thursday, July 21, 2011

The World Cup Demonstrates the Importance of Referees


As I watched the women’s soccer world cup final unfold, I noticed that I had not noticed the refereeing for the game. The sheer pacing and beauty and power of the game unfolded with remarkable fluidity. No major mistakes, no second-guessing, a fair number of no calls on both sides and a remarkably degree of sportsmanship from both teams.

Both teams smiled and laughed with the referee Bibiana Steinhaus, a professional referee and police officer from Saxony.  She ran a taut game with constant reminders, clear looks and clear hand signals, but within that game she kept it loose and flowing. This game was not dominated by the referee nor determined by the ref, nor marred by the referee.

She made two calls, one yellow and a red,on an obvious denial of shot at the very end. But what struck me the most was how vital and central a good referee is to the skill, beauty and fairness of athletic competition.
Ms Steinhaus earned the players respect, and her demeanor and calls discouraged Brazil-like faking and play-acting. The game proceeded with very little wasted time or effort. The play unfolded clean, hard and precise, much like the tone of the referee. The game was decided by players, their mistakes and successes, not the referee.

I have pointed out how fundamental rules and good referees are to the “game” of sports. If the referees are bad or corrupted, the entire moral and athletic purpose of the game gets subverted. European soccer, like American basketball, has had its recent experience of dishonest referees destroying the integrity of the game.

Athletic competition depends upon rules to define its excellence and to create the predictable domain of action. That predictability permits individuals to practice and perfect their skills and play, not focus upon cheating and faking. Good referees legitimize the outcome and a commitment to high quality play; they make sports real with unpredictable, not ordained outcomes.

The attitude and commitment of the players takes their cues from good referees who provide consistent and transparent calls as well as hold the emotional tone and respect of the game in hand. This helps athletes stay focused upon the game and devote their energy to the game and play.

The women’s soccer world cup demonstrated many fine aspects, one of them was the moral centrality of good referees.

Monday, July 18, 2011

Mariners Midseason

Well the Mariners have now scored 2 runs in 43 innings. They are eleven games out of first and 9 games and counting under five hundred. The pitching still rocks and the hitting has transcended suckiness into depths that I cannot speak of. Now have a chance to win a game the pitchers have to give up less than 1.9 runs per game and even then they lose over fifty percent of the time.

The only upside is that the pundits no longer scream about trading everyone or Bedard to get the "big bat" that would make us contenders. Bedard took himself out of trade talk when the latest zombie attack sidelined him. We could trade our wonderful closer; I mean he hardly gets to close a game with a team that has  lost nine in a row and has a 80 percent chance of losing if the other team scores 3 runs or more. But nothing really makes sense right now except to play on.

No real trades make sense since the Mariners have nothing to give that teams would give real prospects for, so let me reiterate despite the shrill cries to now "unload" for prospects. I mean, guys, we have nothing to unload. So let's enjoy the pitching and watch the prospects carefully, although it is hard to watch Mike Carp, the world's hottest hitting Triple A player.

I am not worried about next year. It takes too much away from watching the moment. The blog sphere can plan two years in advance, but who predicted the Pirates. Let's just take this one game and one prospect at a time.

Friday, July 15, 2011

Mariners Midseason: Baseball is not Football


Baseball is not football.
Baseball is not football.

I keep reminding myself this. 160 games, not 16 games. Swings and rhythms and sine curves, not black swans every other week. Each game is not the end of the world.

More importantly baseball involves investing and developing players, none of whom come ready to play into the major leagues even after four years of college or five years in the minors. Unless you buy teams by plucking the best from the rest like the Yankees, baseball involves patience; football does not.

So I look at my Mariners on the tipping point of free fall into another miserable season and am amazed at the clamor and hue and cry from the blog sphere and fans and reporters for the team to “save” the lost season by making a trade for a hitter or two or three; heck we would settle from someone who can hit over 250 at this point.

The paradox lies with the Mariners. Up to this point, they revealed remarkable pitching, the second or third best in the majors depending upon your indicators. Five very good starters including rookie Michael Pineda and resurrected zombie Eric Bedard plus a stunning bullpen made up of guys from no where having superb years and Brandon League finally figuring out how to match his speed with his sinker skills to become an all star closer. By sheer talent and skill, they have kept the Mariners in game after game and up to ten days ago above five hundred.

This is a team everyone predicted, correctly it looks like, would only win 72 games. It possesses the worst, I mean utter miserable atrocious puking bad offense in the entire universe, let alone the major leagues. A starter knows if he gives up 3.4 runs, the game is lost. That is hard on starters and just as hard on fans.

The team had become interesting and enjoyable to watch as pitchers unfolded their contrasting styles and reeled off wonderful pitching masterery from Jason Vargas pinpoint control to Pineda’s power on power to Eric Bedard’s beautiful control, wonderful curve and increasing fast ball. Now and then the offense actually got a hit despite Ichiro having the worst career of his life and worries over his own tipping point at the age of 37.

This surprising start coupled with a horrible division kept the Mariners in a “race,” at least understood loosely for six weeks. This resulted in the pundits (everyone who disagrees with me) clamoring for the team to trade Bedard or trade anyone, actually, to get a hitter to be competitive.

The point of the game is that this is not and will not be a competitive team. But it is a fun and interesting team that is giving regular playing time to six first and second year players. The team is learning if their own system players can grow into major leaguers. The team must learn if Justin Smoak can develop consistency or Carlos Peguero can hit anything beyond mean foul balls. I could go on, but this team is playing out its destiny, which is two years away at least.

Not football. We cannot become a winning team in one free agent year and one trade will not make us a competitor. Relax, enjoy what they are giving us and evaluate closely.

I think we need to enjoy the weirdness. The free fall may come; but the players are growing and stumbling, and the team is learning whether the system has produced major league capable talent. If not, then it is time to trade, not now. Right now let me watch Bedard; he’s not Lee, but he is a joy to watch, a pitcher's pitcher and let’s give up the illusion of competing and settle for the reality of interesting play; hard earned victories and seeing if we have a future.