Big Election Night for Ex-Athletes

Former Phoenix Suns point guard Kevin Johnson was elected Mayor of Sacramento yesterday. He was one of more than a dozen former athletes who were seeking office last night.

Heath Shuler, a Heisman Trophy runner-up at Tennessee who played quarterback for the Washington Redskins and New Orleans Saints, was re-elected to Congress for his second term. Another former NFL quarterback and head coach, Sam Wyche, won a seat on the Pickens County Council in South Carolina. Peter Boulware ran for state legislature in Florida. The former Ravens linebacker appears headed for a recount.

Among those who were unsuccessful in their election bids last night was Joe Mesi, a top heavyweight boxer from Buffalo. He sat behind me at the Hasim Rahman bout last June and has 36-0 record in the ring, but lost his bid for a New York state Senate seat.

Palin's World

Even if you like Sarah Palin, you have to admit that New Yorker magazine's update of one of their classic cover designs is funny.



Thanks to the great blog Strange Maps for bringing this to my attention.

A Statistician's View of Electoral Politics

I like to think I'm an informed voter. I'm sure most people think they are too. But it's harder and harder to avoid the blatant partisan blather that passes for commentary on the cable news networks. No matter what issue is raised or what question is asked, the panelists spin into an attack on the opposing candidate. Enough already.

There's a great new web site that caught my attention earlier in the year called FiveThirtyEight.com, and I've been recommending it to many of my friends. And here's the twist; after reading it every day for weeks I discovered that it was the brainchild of Nate Silver, a baseball analyst best known for his predictive models to project player performance. Nate has applied his advanced statistical analysis to study political polls, compiling polling data from hundreds of sources and measuring the effectiveness of different polling techniques.

Wikipedia offers this overview:

[The site] compiles polling data through a unique methodology derived from Silver's experience in baseball sabermetrics to "balance out the polls with comparative demographic data" and "weighting each poll based on the pollster's historical track record, sample size, and recentness of the poll."FiveThirtyEight.com also uses computer models to simulate the election 10,000 times per day in order to provide a continually up-to-date assessment of probability for electoral outcomes.

Notably, FiveThirtyEight.com's new polling methodology gained national attention for beating out most pollsters' projections in North Carolina and Indiana in the heavily contested political primary race between Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in 2008.

Nate launched the site in March, and by the end of September it was attracting 2.5 million unique visitors a week.

A lot of folks probably aren't interested in this sort number crunching, but I find it fascinating. It's an injection of science into what has, at least for the general public, been a nebulous process. Maybe Nate will do for politics what Michael Lewis and his book Moneyball did for the game of baseball.

The Real Cost of Stadium Spending

The booming economy of the 1990s spawned a building craze for pro sports. Team owners convinced state and local governments to build new stadiums and arenas for them, with the threat of moving to another city as the alternative. Seventy-two new venues were built between 1990 and 2005, creating a new home for two-thirds of the teams in the NFL, NBA, NHL, and Major League Baseball. The argument team owners made was that having a major league team boosts your city's prestige, creates jobs, and helps stimulate the local economy. It's hard to argue the first point, but it's much tougher to find evidence for the economical claims.

Back in the late-1990s, Indiana University professor Mark Rosentraub studied stadium financing in five cities. In his book Major League Losers, he meticulously demonstrated that pro sports produce very few jobs with little ripple effects in the community, take away business for suburban entertainment and food venues, and often leave municipalities with huge losses.

Now, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist David Cay Johnston takes that argument one step further. In his new book Free Lunch, he argues that stadium subsidies do more than just redirect tax money to wealthy team owners, they force local governments to cut funding for other services. In a recent interview on NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross, Johnston said:

Because governments are spending money on baseball stadiums and football stadiums and other arenas, they don’t have money for youth programs and for parks. And I show in the book that this subsidy...and some others are intimately connected with the rise of youth gangs in America. Because we’ve starved our parks for money and recreation, we have eliminated all sorts of programs.

Regardless of your political views, it's hard to get around the dichotomy this situation creates. Conservatives complain about how much we spend on social programs. Liberals lament the growing numbers of people without health insurance. But as a society, we're willing to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to build sports venues for millionaire team owners. That just doesn't make any sense to me.

How America Lost the War on Drugs

Great piece of journalism in the latest issue of Rolling Stone Magazine about the War on Drugs.

All told, the United States has spent an estimated $500 billion to fight drugs - with very little to show for it. Cocaine is now as cheap as it was when Escobar died and more heavily used. Methamphetamine, barely a presence in 1993, is now used by 1.5 million Americans and may be more addictive than crack. We have nearly 500,000 people behind bars for drug crimes - a twelvefold increase since 1980 - with no discernible effect on the drug traffic. Virtually the only success the government can claim is the decline in the number of Americans who smoke marijuana - and even on that count, it is not clear that federal prevention programs are responsible.

Gerald Ford, Football Star

The news came over the wire late yesterday that former President Gerald Ford has passed away at the age of 93. Many others will write about his career as a public servant, but I wanted to take an opportunity to briefly recount that in his youth, Ford was a great football player.

In the mid 1930s, Ford was one of the stars on a powerhouse team at the University of Michigan. He played center and defensive lineman in an era when every man played both offense and defense. His Wolverines were national champions in 1932 and 1933, and Ford was voted as the team's most valuable player in 1934. Ford played in the annual East-West College All-Star game in San Francisco in January of 1935 and the College All-Star football game at Soldier Field against the Chicago Bears in August of that year. Two different NFL teams offered him a contract -- the Detroit Lions and the Green Bay Packers -- but he spurned them to continue his education. Ford went to Yale University, where he worked as the boxing coach and assistant football coach while pursuing his law degree.

In later years, as people reminded the President of his athletic prowess, he was always humble. While making an appearance at his alma mater in 1976 he said:

In those stories that I was a great all-time center, I found this--the longer you get away from the reality, the bigger those stories get. ... And I can only say that they get better, because the longer you are away from school, the fewer there are of people to tell the truth about what happened.

The Cubans are Coming

On Tuesday, a grand jury in Miami indicted a baseball agent on charges of smuggling Cuban ballplayers into the United States. The indictment alleges that Gus Domiguez brought more than forty defectors across over a series of trips in a 28-foot speedboat. While some of them were not ballplayers, several of the individuals identified have already gone on to play in the minor leagues.

The ballplayers, like all Cubans, are subject to restrictive emigration policies that keeps them from pursuing career opportunities in the United States. The declining health of Cuban President Fidel Castro has led to speculation that this situation could soon be changing. The end of the U.S. trade embargo and the normalization of relations between the two countries could let loose a flood of Cuban baseball players eager to showcase their skills in the major leagues.

If the results of this spring's World Baseball Classic are any indication, there are some great ballplayers in Cuba who would be Major League stars if they were allowed to emigrate.

In the last decade, there has been a nostalgic resurgence of interest in the Negro Leagues, and an acknowledgment that for several decades, some great ballplayers were kept out of the Major Leagues because of their skin color. It's time, though, to also acknowledge that several generations of Cuban players have suffered the same fate.