My family left Detroit when I was eleven years old and I have only returned once in my life. Still, I remain a loyal fan of the Detroit Lions. When you follow a team that has only won one playoff game in your lifetime, the annual NFL draft tends to …
The team of Schmidt and Berri – or Berri and Schmidt – has written a dozen academic papers thus far. Our latest to be published is entitled “What Takes Them Out to the Ballgame” and it appears in the May, 2006 issue of the Journal of Sports Economics. This work …
One of the themes we return to again and again is the idea that teams can buy a championship. The story is that those who spend the most have the best players, and those with the best players will win the championship. We talk about how payroll and wins are …
In Friday’s Boston Globe one sees a good deal of hand wringing by Bob Ryan about the Red Sox’s lack of run production. Ryan’s column is but one more example of Boston writers worrying of impending doom in Red Sox nation. According to these writers, doom is upon Red Sox …
The NHL justified the forfeit of the 2004-2005 season in order to achieve two goals: cost certainty and competitive balance. Within the subsequent collective bargaining agreement (CBA) the league was able to negotiate cost certainty in the form of a salary cap tied to NHL revenues. The league and the …
The ever insightful Bill Simmons of ESPN.com has announced his choice for NBA MVP. Generally what Simmons says is golden, but choosing Kobe Bryant as MVP is but one more example of an NBA analyst focusing on totals rather than efficiency. Clearly Kobe heads to the top of the class …
One of the major themes in our book is that decision-makers in sports do not always process information efficiently. Such work falls under the umbrella of Behavioral Economics, a field led by Richard Thaler. Now that the NFL draft season is upon us – a favorite time of year for …
The Baseball Analysts have posted a column I wrote entitled "Can Money Buy Love in Baseball?" One of the topics examined in the Wages of Wins is the supposed link between pay and wins in baseball, football, and basketball. In this column, additional details of the relationship between pay and …
Welcome to Wagesofwins.com. The book is now finished. Stanford University Press tells us it will ship on May 8. Soon after that, everyone should be able to place an order. If you can't wait, you can pre-order today from a variety of places. While we all wait we have the …