Bloomberg has a nice little piece about Cubs ticket prices going up after the game starts. This obviously goes a little bit against conventional wisdom as they demonstrate in the article. Well worth a read and of course, if conventional wisdom was going to break down, we know it would be the Cubs that make it so.
I was on the radio with Jarrod Thomas again today and the early topic was baseball. One of the aspects we discussed was when Manager Dave Roberts should pitch Clayton Kershaw. There was speculation Kershaw could be moved up to pitch tonight in game 5, and the betting lines fluctuated based on what people thought would happen.
I enjoy baseball and the statistical aspects of the game. In the past I played fantasy baseball, football, and basketball with friends and family. We played for bragging rights mostly. I never played one of these daily fantasy leagues or the money games currently out there. It seems like gambling to me, and I am not a big gambler. So I am watching with a bit of interest how the investigations proceed against these companies. At the very least I think they will be in for some regulation or scrutiny of some kind in the future.
That does not mean they actually mean anything. My dad sent me a Chicago news station story about the Cubs game tonight. The story explained that the start time of the game in military format was 19:08, and 1908 was the last year the Cubs won the World Series. By the way did you know the Ottoman Empire still existed the last time the Cubs won the World Series? We can go on with that all night.
There are few things I care about less than the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame now. On a personal level I am bitter about the way the voters treated Ron Santo. Also, I am just flabbergasted at the treatment of the steroid-era players. The voters are embarrassed, pure and simple. It is a really personal issue for them and as a result I lack much of the respect I had for them in my youth. The amazing thing is if they remembered how to be journalists at any point in the 1980s or 1990s maybe they would have discovered information about the situation in a timely manner. But they didn’t. Instead they were too busy thumbing their nose at the football writers telling them that baseball did not have a P.E.D. problem like their sport. They also have a ridiculously convoluted voting system that creates a separate standard as well. It is not good enough to just be in the Hall, it is now important to be a first-ballot selection. This creates a completely different set of standards that matters mostly to the voters and few others. So let’s be clear about this, at a very real level I do not care if Pete Rose gets into the Hall of Fame or not.
Continue reading Incentive Alignment: Pete Rose and Public Policy