American Needle Decision 9-0

Week 1 NFL Predictions: Cowboys Flop & Raiders Surprise

I’m giddy like a little school girl. I can already smell the cold beer and hot wings as we sit with small groups of friends at our favorite local watering holes or our living room, watching the games and cheesing on each other over our fantasy leagues and bad beats.

"Yankee Premium" Updates

In 2005 I explored the "Yankee Premium, how much of the Yankee payroll reflected a revenue advantage relative to the rest of baseball and how much reflected the ability of NYY players to negotiate away the revenue advantage into their own pockets. Here's an update for 2009 salary data where I match Yankee players with players from other teams whose productivity are "in the neighborhood" of the Yankee. The question is, what is the pay rate of a comparable players in terms of production and freedom of movement. I'm not using any sophisticated matching technique, so there's plenty of room […]

Animation Videos – The Right Marketing Tools

We all love a good blockbuster movie. Live-action videos seem to be the real deal, but not in every situation. I

Thinking About Getting Back To Normal

It’s definitely been a rough year for sports.

The Immortal Debt of Some "Public" Stadiums

I had planned to post on this article by Ken Belson of the New York Times, but ol' Quick Trigger (Skip) beat me to the punch.  In any case, I wanted to comment on the following passage: Paying for arenas and stadiums that are now gone or empty is a result of a trend that stretches back decades. Until the 1960s, public works were often defined as bridges, roads, sewers and so on: basic infrastructure that was used by all and was unlikely to be built by the private sector. With few exceptions, like County Stadium in Milwaukee, teams constructed […]

Olympic post-mortem

Personally, less viewing was more fun. It was a shame though, to see "home-cooking" in the Men's 500m short-track race, where a Canadian judge made a marginal call to disqualify my countryman and elevate his onto the podium. If that's what "own the podium" means, the podium's not worth owning. So I'll join England's temporarily pro-American Simon Barnes in sending a somewhat sardonic "Well done, Canada" to our neighbors up North. But why wasn't there an English judge available? Here at TSE in the past few weeks, we've been riffing on the psychological impact of athletic competition. At the Montreal […]