The SportsThink Review #120

March 28: The Sports Integrity Ecosystem?

The SportsThink Review highlights my favorite sport-related content. Most things I share are recently published, but some are not; the only rule is that I’ve read or encountered them recently. Some are relevant to my day job as a professor teaching courses on the business, history, and philosophy of sports. Others are just plain interesting, relevant to my lifelong obsession with the games we play. I also occasionally share articles and assorted musings on Twitter.

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Howdy folks, happy Friday. Here’s what got me thinking this week…

The Main Event: One Good Read

How Analytics Marginalized Baseball’s Superstar Pitchers (Bruce Schoenfeld, New York Times Magazine)

Recently, I’ve found myself trying to articulate a theory of sports. Not necessarily a totally new or unique perspective, but something that might be useful. I’ve argued for most of my career that sports are weird. Weird, at least, if we think of sports as an industry and compare to other industries. An example: is a team of professional athletes the firm’s product or labor force? Kinda both, thus, weird. Another example: the rebuilding year. It makes no sense in most market sectors to continue consuming a bad product, but you are the worst kind of human if you bail on your team in a down year. I fancy myself a rational person, yet I support the Raiders. Make it make sense.

I still think sports are weird, but I’ve been trying to extend and model out that idea a bit. The working title here is “The Sports Integrity Ecosystem.” I don’t love this name, but I’ll put it out in the world and I’ll buy mucho Texas BBQ for anyone who gives me something better (use the comment section!). In short, this ecosystem view is an attempt to capture the multiple, interrelated concerns at play in the sports world. For now, let’s call them Organizational, Competitive, and Spirit of the Game.

Organizational: Using this term instead of “business,” but inclusive of business concerns. These concerns include the pursuit of profit (where applicable), but more broadly are the concerns of the organizations whose function is the continued delivery of the sporting endeavor (or product). Teams, leagues, governing bodies, athletic departments, etc. have organizational concerns. (But these concerns can and do impact the competitive endeavor…the model starts to emerge.)

Competitive: The concerns of the games and contests themselves. Rules, regulations, tactics and strategies, playing styles, etc. are competitive concerns. Coaches, athletes, and performance staff encounter these most directly. (But these concerns can and do impact the organizational/business endeavor…you see where the model is going.)

Spirit of the Game: We know it when we see it. Fair play, sportsmanship, meritocracy, uncertainty, collaborative competition, etc. Intangible, yet inescapable. (These concerns impact the organizational and the competitive; they are arguably the concerns that generate the relationship between the organizational and the competitive.)

So how would we draw this? Maybe Spirit of the Game is at the top, with two arrows pointing down to Organizational and Competitive; Organizational and Competitive have arrows pointing at each other. Or Spirit of the Game is a boundary condition, circling the Organizational and Competitive (again with their arrows).

This is getting long, so I’ll include a couple notes at the very bottom for those who want to help me play around. But let’s take just one more moment to consider an example: player safety. Who’s concern is this? I’d argue that in every sporting context, it is both organizational and competitive, governed by the Spirit factor. A successful youth league must maximize player safety to the limit where only inevitable, acceptable injuries occur, but not so far as to compromise the educational, developmental, and hedonic potentials of the game itself. A professional league is afforded more risk, but it is not without limits, seeking some golden mean that considers financial costs, entertainment value, and marketability.

Ok, so what about that article above? Sometimes the universe gives you a little something and Schoenfeld’s piece is a great examination of the above ecosystem at work. On the evolving use of pitchers in the peak analytics era, the article captures the sort of existential sporting questions that the ecosystem generates (and maybe helps unpack). What is point or purpose of Major League Baseball? To make money? To entertain? To preserve players’ bodies? To generate heroes and legends?

Schoenfeld covers a lot of ground and does so elegantly, but it seems to boil down to this: Do we harm the spirit of the game when the numbers tell us to pull a pitcher in the middle of a no-hitter? I think we do, but I’m not the pitcher, the manager, or the team owner.

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See you next time,

Tolga

Some ecosystem notes:

• I am aiming for the simplest useful model here. Both “organizational” and “competitive” could be expanded, or at least layered: there are NFL concerns and team concerns, interrelated of course. There are IOC concerns and national governing body and host city concerns, again interrelated.

• Yes, there are probably multiple ecosystems: professional, amateur, youth. We have to make room for the media in the professional ecosystem. But the fundamental model should (and I think does) apply to sport in the broadest sense.

• The sport academics can and should note that others before me have conceived similar things. Sport philosophers do a lot of this, especially in “internalist” perspectives on sport ethics: I am not trying to ignore or erase folks like Morgan, Simon, Kretchmar, and Lopez Frias. And maybe someone has already put it all together this way. Maybe this is the path toward bringing some of this thinking out of philosophy and into practice.

• Seriously, if you’ve read this far, give me a shout. Post a comment or send me an email by replying to the newsletter in your inbox or tolga@sportsthink.net. All feedback, critique, and compliments are welcome.