Category: Sports

Kirkwood Jumps the Shark?

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Kathryn Reed:

Those who skied Kirkwood 20 or more years ago found a typical day lodge with a cafeteria and slow lifts. It was the mountain people came for. They still come for it, only now they don’t have to make the 40-mile trek into South Lake Tahoe to spend the night.

Off Highway 88 where Alpine, Amador and El Dorado counties meet, the Kirkwood Valley is growing up. Whether it grows with grace will be decided in the next few years.

Even with all the hammering and sawing, Kirkwood remains laid-back — and growth has come relatively slowly. Ten years ago, the first phase of the village opened with 19 condominiums. The resort installed its first high-speed quad chairlift in 2001, with its second in operation last ski season. Dining choices are still sparse, but more diverse. Pretentiousness is unheard of. The 2000 Census tallies Kirkwood’s population at 96 and Tim Cohee, president of Kirkwood Mountain Realty, says full-time residents still number fewer than 100.

I was one of those people who skied Kirkwood years ago. A Squaw Valley ski visit always included Jaguars and Mercedes-Benz (Oh Lord, Won’t you buy me a Mercedes-Benz), while a fun outing to Kirkwood found the Jeep / 4-Runner crowd enjoying the mountain. It is nice to stay on the mountain, but miles of condos in the valley certainly changes the alpine views.

Michael Lewis on the Hidden Economics of Baseball and Football

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Russ Roberts:

Michael Lewis talks about the economics of sports–the financial and decision-making side of baseball and football–using the insights from his bestselling books on baseball and football: Moneyball and The Blind Side. Along the way he discusses the implications of Moneyball for the movie business and other industries, the peculiar ways that Moneyball influenced the strategies of baseball teams, the corruption of college football, and the challenge and tragedy of kids who live on the streets with little education or prospects for success.

audio.

Surfer Survives Two Shark Attacks

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Jim Doyle:

Royce Fraley has surfed the unforgiving, storm-swelled waves of Northern California for three decades, and also — by chance — explored the hunting habits and appetites of great white sharks.


But this holiday season he’s spending time ashore in Guerneville with his wife and their two young children. He hasn’t been surfing since his latest brush with fate. Two weeks ago, he became one of the world’s few surfers to have survived two separate shark attacks — the latest incident involving a shark that pulled him at least 15 feet below the surface.


“I’m not chomping at the bit to get back into the water,” Fraley, 43, told The Chronicle. “I had an offer to go surfing with a buddy last Sunday, and I declined. I’m definitely taking a break and enjoying my family. … If my feet were dangling down, I might not even have a leg or be here today. It’s made me more respectful of my life and my family.”

Baseball & Innovation

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Bob Sutton:

Jeff Angus over at Management by Baseball sent me an intriguing update about Billy Bean’s approach to Moneyball. Bean is famous in the baseball world for developing quantitative techniques to help identify players that are underpaid by market standards and for developing a system that enables such “bargain” players to contribute to overall team performance. There are many signs that the system works, for example, Oakland’s cost per win in 2005 was $450,000 in salary, while the New York Yankees paid 1.4 million. The 2006 payrolls (when Oakland had a better season than the Yankees) were about 60 million for the A’s and about 200 million for the Yankees. Bean and his staff do impressive analysis to make decisions that gain them cost advantages and increase their odds of success. For example, they stay away for star players that are coming out of high school and prefer college graduates because only 5% of baseball players drafted straight out of high school are in the major leagues in three years, while 17% of college graduates that are drafted make it to the majors.

Beane watching is worthwhile…

NCAA: Rein in Sports Spending

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Howard Fendrich:

In a task-force report released Monday by NCAA president Myles Brand, Division I schools were encouraged to rein in spending on sports – but there aren’t any requirements everyone must adhere to or punishments if they don’t.

“In the case of academic reform, we had a hammer – namely, by teams not conforming, we could take away scholarships and, if that failed, we could keep them out of the Final Four and postseason. That’s heavy duty. That’s a sledgehammer,” Brand said after speaking at the National Press Club. “The fact is, we don’t have that for fiscal responsibility in intercollegiate athletics.”

The task force of about 50 school presidents and chancellors was formed in January 2005, and the report’s release comes as the NCAA is preparing its response to an Oct. 3 letter from Rep. Bill Thomas, R-Calif., chairman of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee. Thomas asked the NCAA to justify its tax-exempt status and sought a reply by the end of October; the NCAA received a two-week extension.

I’ve gone to a variety of sporting events around the country over the past 25 years. It is interesting to observe the explosion in sponsorships, luxury boxes and facilities around college athletics.

Miller Park Economics, or Your Tax Dollars at Work

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Tom Haudricourt and Don Walker:

In the three years after moving into Miller Park in 2001, the Milwaukee Brewers made a yearly economic impact of $327.3 million on the five-county area that was taxed to build the ballpark, according to a study by the Institute for Survey and Policy Research at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

The director of the UWM Center for Economic Development offered a different view, saying the study was a “standard nonsensical sports study that inflates the impact of spending on baseball.”

The study, which local public relations firm Mueller Communications Inc. commissioned on behalf of Major League Baseball and the Brewers, was completed in January 2005. It is to be made public for the first time Monday, when baseball Commissioner Bud Selig addresses a meeting of the Greater Milwaukee Committee at Miller Park.

Much more on Miller Park and Bud Selig here. The mosting interesting link is a June, 2004 article in the Washington Post of all places where Bud Selig’s hardball tactics were discussed and we learned that former Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson won’t set foot in the place. Clearly, the opportunity to place the park downtown was a major miss.