What makes the competition in sports leagues more unbalanced -- runaway cajillion-dollar salaries, or runaway nationalist communism? University of Washington ecomonist Kate Baird compared the baseball economics of Cuba and the United States, and came up with some interesting findings:
Despite complaints about New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner's domineering deals, Baird found that the Cuban League is less balanced than the National and American leagues.
Over the last quarter-century, she found, the Cuban League teams were 22 percent less evenly balanced in their win-loss records than those in the Major Leagues. In other words, cellar-dwellers were more likely to stay on the bottom, and vice-versa.
Link via Science Blog. In June 2002, I profiled one of Cuban baseball's many martyrs, the historian and statistician Severo Nieto, whose dozen or so books on the island's professional past have gone unpublished since the Revolution. Nieto, I'm very happy to note, is a new candidate to join the great, offbeat Baseball Reliquary's Shrine of the Eternals.
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|3.28.05 @ 1:09PM|#
A cartoon I remember from some years back showed nine presidents of the United States and what they were saying when they were in office:
Ike: Don't
JFK: Worry
LBJ: Fidel
Nixon: Castro
Ford: Will
Carter: Fall
Reagan: Any
GHW Bush: Day
Clinton: Now
|3.28.05 @ 1:34PM|#
Non-sequitor: 8.2 quake off Indonesia - http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7316846/
|3.28.05 @ 1:38PM|#
The Havana Industriales are widely described as the Yankees of Cuba, though my understanding is that they are even more dominant. I was there two weeks ago, during the Cuban playoffs.
Thanks to El Duque, Cuba is full of Yankee fans. In all other respects, Cubans are great people.
Matt Welch|3.28.05 @ 1:53PM|#
mccleary -- El Duque certainly helped, but Cubans have *always* been Yankee fans, since the Ruth days. I once had the opportunity to leaf through the back-issues of 1920s Cuban newspapers, and on the *front page* in 1923 there were daily updates on Ruth's quest to hit .400....
|3.28.05 @ 2:27PM|#
I worry about the Great DiMaggio and his bone spurs.
|3.28.05 @ 2:34PM|#
Matt,
Did you read the current ESPN article by Jason Stark. It's the most rational, interesting major media article on steroids I've read in a while.
Matt Welch|3.28.05 @ 2:55PM|#
That's a good article, thanks for the tip. The one thing he didn't mention that he might have is the role of expansion, which *always* inflates HR numbers.
|3.28.05 @ 3:29PM|#
Castro would take Steinbrenner deep, but at this point in his career, the old fraud only has "warning track power."
|3.28.05 @ 10:32PM|#
Joe--which one is the "old fraud"?...