What separates the top teams in the National Basketball Association from the bottom teams in the league?

If you answered "their scores", you're right. But you might be surprised by how seemingly little difference there is between teams.

The offensive performance of NBA teams can be summarized in a figure known as the offensive rating. This statistic combines several different scoring statistics into a single measure that can be used to rank teams. According to the available data at StatMuse, at this point of the NBA's 2023-2024 season, the Boston Celtics have the highest offensive rating of 122.5, while the Detroit Pistons have the lowest at 111.6. If you've been paying attention to the NBA season, that these teams are in their respective positions should sound about right. The Celtics are recognized as a dominant team while the Pistons would be at high risk of being sent down to a lower league if European-style relegation existed for U.S. sports leagues.

But as we're about to show, the two teams have some very similar statistics. The data below shows their offensive output on several different categories of scoring for the 2023-2024 season through Sunday, March 9, 2024.

Boston Celtics:

• Points per game (PPG): 120.8 points per game, most in the NBA.
• Field Goals Made (FGM): 43.8 field goals per game, fifth overall and 48.5% of their attempts.
• Three-Pointers Made (3PM): 16.2 three-pointers per game, 38.5% of their attempts and best in the NBA.
• Free Throws Made (FTM): 17.0 free-throws per game, 80.8% of their attempts, ranking 17th in the NBA.

Detroit Pistons:

• Points per game (PPG): 112.4 points per game, tied for fifth-lowest in the NBA.
• Field Goals Made (FGM): 41.9 field goals per game, 47.1% of their attempts and ninth-lowest in the league.
• Three-Pointers Made (3PM): 11.3 three-pointers per game, 35.6% of their attempts and second-lowest in the NBA.
• Free Throws Made (FTM): 17.3 free-throws per game, 78.4% of free-throws attempted, tenth-lowest among NBA teams.

Only 8.4 points per game separates the two teams' overall averages. They are within two baskets per game of each other when considering field goals and free-throws, where they even have very similar shooting percentages. Where they differ most is three-point shots. On average, the Boston Celtics successfully make five more three-point shots per game than the Detroit Pistons do.

That single statistic goes a long way to explaining why the Celtics have the highest offensive rating in the NBA and why the Pistons have the lowest, despite the two teams scoring on 38.5% and 35.6% of their respective three-point attempts. With such a similar percentage of successful attempts, that means the Celtics higher number of successful three-point shots per game is based on their ability to attempt more of these shots than the Pistons are able to. That ability is the key to the Celtics offensive dominance during the 2023-2024 season.

If only there were a great way to visualize that respective dominance. Over at Reddit's r/dataisbeautiful, Solid_Example7519 has put together a fantastic heat map graphic to illustrate how every team in the NBA compares to each other in their ability to score from different parts of the court at about the time of the NBA's All Star Game. We've excerpted the following charts for the Boston Celtics and the Detroit Pistons to show them next to each other:

Boston Celtics:

Detroit Pistons:

Here's how Solid_Example7519 describes what the data visualization shows:

Blue is good, red is bad....

I calculated how many points every team got in each position on the court and then normalised it using a Z-score (0 means they got an average number of points, a score of 1 is one standard deviation above meaning top 16%, 2 is two standard deviations and means they are in the top 2.5%)....

I filtered it to be only the coordinates where a team scored at least 5 points, and so if there are no points within a hexagon with more than 5 points then it is blank. This was to make it easier to read and draw meaning from i.e. because these empty spots had teams scoring very few points in them, it meant they got a really really low score, while teams only had to score relatively few points to be seen as disproportionately good there....

It is relative to other teams, so a high z-score on the three-pointer line means that they score more points there relative to other teams.

The individual team charts also emphasize the extent to which the three-point shot affects how professional basketall is played in 2024. The mostly empty hexagonal grids that fall between the key and the three-point line confirm that nearly all teams have bought into the strategy of either going in close to score field goals or shooting from a distance to collect higher points, even though they score less often per attempt.

Comparing Boston to Detroit again, we see the Celtics are highly at the three point line from the left hand side of the court. The Detroit Pistons, on the other hand, are best around the basket itself, but are very weak along the entire arc of the three-point line.

We'll close by pointing again to Solid_Example7519's entire chart, but please do click through to the r/dataisbeautiful post to find out more about how it was generated.

Previously on Political Calculations

• How and When the Three-Point Shot Changed Basketball

Image credits: Brown and Black Basketball photo photo by Kylie Osullivan on Unsplash. NBA 2023-2024 Heat Map by u/Solid_Example7519 on r/dataisbeautiful. Used with permission.

The three point shot has been a fixture of professional basketball in the United States since the 1979-80 season when it was adopted by the National Basketball Association. But for whatever reason, it had little effect on how the game was played in the NBA for a very long time.

That's at odds with perceptions of how the game is played today, as the three point field goal seems to have become an important part of winning teams' game strategy. That change leads to all kinds of questions. Such as:

• Has it really become an important part of winning games in the NBA?
• If it has become important, what is the strategy behind it?
• When exactly did that happen?

These are the kinds of questions that sports-loving statisticians love to take on. Stand-up Math's Matt Parker presents what he learned after analyzing some 4,678,387 shots with help from Davidson College's Tim Chartier and 3Blue1Brown's Grant Sanderson and others in the following almost 24 minute video:

In case you scrolled past the video without watching, the answers are:

• Yes. It has come to affect where players even attempt to take their shots on goal.
• Because the benefit of higher points earned per shot more than compensates for the increased difficulty of making the longer shot.
• During the 2010s, when improved data analytics showed the strategy could be a winning one and was backed up by real game results.

Of course, that leads to all kinds of fascinating "what if" questions, like "How much better would the early 1990s Chicago Bulls or the 'showtime' LA Lakers have been if played the game like they do today?" Or to turn that question around, "how would a typical NBA team today playing today's game fare against these legendary teams playing their era's game?"

We don't know the answer to either question, but suspect the answers would be fascinating.

It used to be that when August ended, Major League Baseball fans had a pretty good idea of which teams were going to contend for the world championship. Those were the days before the number of divisions in each league increased from two to three and MLB also introduced the wild card, which gave a chance to the best teams in baseball that didn't win their division.

Is that still true? And if it is, with sports betting having become so popular, is it worth wagering on the teams with the best odds of winning the World Series at the end of August?

As we write this, we have reached that point in the 2023 season, making these timely questions. Better still, we had no idea what the answer to the questions might be before we took on the challenge of answering them as they had been posed to us.

Here's how we went about answering them. We tracked down the historic odds Las Vegas bookmakers had given each major league baseball team in each season from 2012 through 2022, omitting the coronavirus pandemic-impacted 2020 season that is too different from a regular season to be used for comparison. These years represent what we'll call the modern era for major league baseball's postseason competition.

From 2012 through 2021, that format awarded ten teams in both the American and National Leagues with the opportunity to compete to win the World Series in postseason play, which expanded to twelve teams in 2022. In this format, the three teams from each league that win their divisions get an automatic invitation to post-season play. Then the leagues award several wild card slots to additional teams in each league with the highest regular season winning percentages that didn't win a division title. From 2012 through 2021, that was two extra teams in each league, which expanded to three extra teams in each league starting in 2022.

For our analysis, we only care about the teams Las Vegas bookmakers thought had the best odds of going on to win the World Series as of 1 September during these seasons. In the following table, we've presented the lines for the top three ranked teams in each full season from 2012 through the 2023 season-to-date, only omitting 2020's pandemic-lockdown shortened season that isn't really comparable with the others. We've then indicated which team actually won the World Series and how much money a bettor would have if they wagered $100 on each of the top three teams, who then may or may not have gone on to win the World Series. Here's the table:

The odds in the table represent how much a bettor would win if they placed a simple $100 money line bet on 1 September for the indicated team going on to later win the season's World Series title. If one of these teams win, they would get the $100 they bet on it back plus the payout indicated by the odds. For example, a winning $100 bet on team with a payout line of (+450) would mean our gambler would have $550 (getting their $100 back plus $450 for winning) after the World Series. But since our hypothetical gambler can't predict the future, we've assumed they bet $100 on each of these three teams in each season, so even if one of these teams wins, they would lose the other $200 they bet on the other two teams.

How did our gambler do? First, we found that each of these teams reached the postseason in each full season from 2012 through 2022, so that already gave them a leg up over other teams. But making it into the postseason is only the first hurdle of the challenge. Of these teams, only 4 of Las Vegas' top-ranked teams qualified as wild card contenders, the other 26 were division winners.

Did any of Las Vegas' top-ranked teams go on to win the World Series? Over these 10 full seasons, we find 5 teams managed to hang on and win enough games to claim baseball's world championship. That happened in 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2022. The winning teams in these years were either ranked first or second by Las Vegas' bookmakers. In only one of these seasons, 2017, did any of the top ranked teams by Las Vegas' odds play each other for baseball's crown.

How did betting on Las Vegas' Top 3 ranked teams work out? In the five seasons where one of Las Vegas' Top 3 teams won the World Series, our gambler would have placed bets totaling $1,500, but would recover $500 and gain $1,965, leaving them with $2,465 in their pocket. That gain seems like it would be a good payout, but that requires ignoring the five other seasons where all of their bets were losing ones. Overall, of the $3,000 they wagered in total, they would have $2,465 left after accounting for all their winnings and losses. That's a net loss of $535 over these ten seasons.

Looking at World Series winners, we find 8 of the 10 teams won their respective divisions, even if the odds of their winning the World Series at the end of August put them outside the Top 3. Only two wild card teams, 2014's San Francisco Giants and 2019's Washington Nationals have won a world championship.

Of the ten World Series that took place over this period, only 2014's fall classic featured two teams that won wild card slots for the postseason. Two additional seasons, 2019 and 2022, featured a regular season division winner against a wild card team. The remaining seven other World Series were strictly between teams that won their divisions during the regular season.

Overall, the expansion of baseball's wild card playoffs have made the outcome of baseball championship race much less wild than we might have guessed. But if you think about it, the bookmakers are the only consistent winners when it comes to gambling on who will win the World Series.

Notes

* Lines from BetMGM on 26 August 2023. We assume these will be reasonably close to the odds that will be recorded for 1 September 2023.

Image credit: Photo by Joshua Peacock on Unsplash.

Every martial art shares two characteristics. First, the obvious. They are all based on some form of fighting. Second, they feature rituals unique to each. From boxing to fencing, from karate to MMA and many others, they are as much distinguished by the ceremonies around them as their forms.

That's just as true of the sport that's been called "the miniature golf of martial arts", thumb wrestling, in which each match starts with an official declaration of combat: "1, 2, 3, 4. I declare a thumb war!"

In the following excerpt from U.S Patent 4,998,724, inventor Richard B. Hartman describes how such a combat would take place:

In its simplest form, the game of thumb wrestling has been enjoyed by children and adults for generations. The basic game is played by interlocking the hands of two opponents in such a way that the index, middle, ring and pinky fingers of one player are firmly curled around the corresponding fingers of the opposing player's hand. This leaves each player's thumb unencumbered and creates a naturally stable playing surface comprised of the top edges of the opponents' interlocked index fingers upon which each player attempts to use his or her thumb to trap and hold down the opposing player's thumb for a previously agreed-upon count.

Technically, the brutal combat that follows could happen anywhere. Which might be fine if your unsanctioned thumb war is taking place at a school playground or on the street. But what if you want to elevate the sport to the next level? That's where Hartman's innovative vision really comes into play by adding something more to the state of the martial art, as described in the patent's abstract:

Improved apparatus for playing a game of thumb wrestling includes a stabilizing handle which employs forces generated by firmly interlocking fingers of players' hands to stabilize and anchor a game ring surface. Game ring surface includes holes through which the thumbs of opponents are inserted upwardly, and a solid wrestling region upon which one thumb can forcibly pin another thumb, thereby giving the realistic impression of a pin in wrestling.

Figure 1 from U.S. Patent 4,998,724 illustrates Hartman's vision of a thumb wresting mat apparatus:

The best part about this invention is that it has been successfully brought to market! You can buy your own thumb wresting ring at Amazon! And as you're about to see in the following video, that apparatus featured prominently at the 2019's World Thumb Wrestling Championships:

After a hiatus of several years, the 13th World Thumb Wrestling Championships will be held on 5 August 2023 in "an as yet unconfirmed location" in Norwich, Norfolk in the United Kingdom. If you're looking to take your thumb wrestling skills to the next level, it's time to get your game on!

From the Inventions in Everything Archives

We've assembled this short list of unusual sports-related patents, and of course, the edition of IIE where we previously featured another of Richard Hartman's novel patents:

• Inventions in Everything: Training Device for Beer Pong
• Inventions in Everything: The Imaginary Jump Rope
• Inventions in Everything: The Motorized Ice Cream Cone

Major League Baseball isn't known for daring innovation. But it is considering a radical revamp to how its 2020 season might be played to minimize the risk to players and to fans from coming into contact with the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus infection. Here are the two major options MLB is actively considering:

• Divide teams into two leagues according to where they play spring training, with all league games played in either Florida (for the Grapefruit League) or Arizona (for the Cactus League).
• Have all teams play in their regular National or American leagues in Arizona.
  

There was a third option to consider playing the 2020 baseball season in Japan, but with that nation delaying the 2020 Summer Olympics to 2021 in response to a spike in outbreaks from the coronavirus pandemic, that option is no longer being considered.

Of the two remaining options, with Arizona's governor confirming discussions with MLB's commissioner, having all teams play in Arizona is looking like the leading contender for the 2020 MLB season.

ESPN baseball insider Jeff Passan talked about which plan, if any, was most likely to get baseball started in 2020, in an interview on the network's Get Up! Show with Mike Greenberg on Monday.

He ruled out the Japan plan and said that the Arizona plan was more likely than the Arizona/Florida plan during the interview.

"When it's all said and done, it seems like it's going to be Arizona or bust for Major League Baseball," Passan said. "It may have to get to the point where they say to themselves, OK, this is what we are going to try to do even if we can't ultimately pull it off."

Arizona has the edge because its baseball spring training facilities are all within the Phoenix metropolitan area, greatly reducing the amount of traveling teams would have to do to play each other. In fact, during a regular spring training season, it is possible for dedicated fans to watch parts of all games being played in person at each field on any given day, and for one superathlete, to play in five of them! By contrast, Florida's baseball facilities are spread out all over the southern part of the state, which would reduce the number of games that could be reasonably scheduled in what will be a shortened season.

Arizona also has an edge in climate. Although its summer temperatures periodically top 110°F (43°C), relatively arid Arizona doesn't have southern Florida's average 95°F (35°C) highs coupled with its oppressive humidity levels, which would have a greater negative impact on players.

Regardless of which option MLB chooses, the climate of Arizona or southern Florida will give players a strong incentive to shorten the length of games, the growing length of which has long been a problem for fans, but for MLB's revamped season, having games run long will interfere with other games that would need to be played by other teams at the same field later the same day.

MLB can greatly speed up games in three easy steps:

1. Shorten the break between half-innings when teams change sides to two minutes or less.
2. Set a time limit of 20 seconds or less for pitches to be made after the batter steps into the batter box. If the pitcher delays, a ball is automatically called. If the batter steps out of the batter's box to cause a delay, it's an automatic strike.
3. Require pitchers to face no fewer than three batters through their full at-bats (unless the third out to end a half-inning comes first).

MLB will need to deal with some of its most nagging problems just to have a viable 2020 season. Putting them in the crucible of Arizona's desert heat might compel them to finally address them.

Update 19 April 2020: From the WSJ: Baseball Without Fans Sounded Crazy. It Might Just Work.

Image Credit: Amanda Wolbert

Previously on Political Calculations

• What Is Your Risk Of Exposure To Coronavirus In A Public Outing?
• Fixing the All-Star Game
• Bring Promotion and Relegation to U.S. Professional Sports

How much will the impeachment drama on Capitol Hill cost the U.S. economy?

We're always skeptical whenever we see estimates of how much a particular non-work-related activity costs businesses from lost productivity because workers are too distracted to do their jobs in the news, whether it be related to the Super Bowl, the World Cup, March Madness, or some other broadcast event, but for the first time, we've seen a report that describes how one of these estimates has come about. In this case, the context is the televised impeachment inquiry taking place in the U.S. House of Representatives, which might as well be its own category of sporting event.

Millions of Americans tuned in yesterday to watch the beginning of the impeachment hearings against President Trump — many of them while they were at work. And according to an estimate by outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, that’s costing American businesses roughly $2.1 billion per hour in lost productivity.

The firm arrived at the $2.1 billion number by relying on the following figures: the average hourly wage ($28.18), the number of Americans who use the internet at work (90,130,268), the percentage of employed Americans who work weekdays (89 percent), and the percentage of workers who say they discuss politics at work (94 percent).

That back-of-the-envelope math provides the basis for our latest tool, which is built to calculate both the lost productivity per hour and the total lost productivity to the U.S. economy over a given number of workdays. Best of all, the tool may be adapted to the cost of lost productivity for any given event, not just impeachment proceedings, or in any country, not just the United States, so the tool is not limited to that special case. If you're accessing this article on a site that republishes our RSS news feed, please click through to our site to access a working version of the tool.

For our default analysis, since the broadcast impeachment hearings in the House are relatively new and just getting underway, we've instead used data that applies to the Mueller investigation of alleged Russian collusion with the 2016 Trump presidential campaign to estimate the total cost of lost productivity in American workplaces from that protracted political affair, but you're welcome to substitute data that applies to the similar political event of the Trump impeachment inquiry as it progresses.

Here, 547 work days passed between the time a special counsel named Robert Mueller was appointed to run an investigation into Russia's potential involvement with President Trump's successful 2016 political campaign on 17 May 2017 to the time it fizzled out with his final testimony on the investigation before the U.S. Congress on 24 July 2019. Assuming working Americans spent an average of one hour per workday talking about the Mueller investigation while on the job as it was regularly in the news, the politically-charged probe would have cost the U.S. economy an estimated $1.1 trillion in lost productivity during this period.

Let's say all of that lost productivity would have otherwise added to the U.S. economy's gross domestic product if not for what ultimately amounted to be a long-running sideshow distraction. Using GDP data accessed on 15 November 2019 for the period 2017-Q2 through 2019-Q2, we find the nation's nominal GDP rose from $19.357 trillion to $21.340 trillion over this two year long period approximately coinciding with the duration of the so-called "Russian Collusion" investigation, an average annualized growth rate of 5.0% (or 2.7% if we use the BEA's inflation-adjusted GDP figures for these quarters).

Boosting 2019-Q2's nominal GDP by $1.1 trillion to account for the productivity allegedly lost to workplace discussions about the Mueller investigation to $22.44 trillion increases the average annualized GDP growth rate during this two year period to 7.7% (or 5.4% in 'real' terms).

Is that figure realistic? We would say probably not, because it's simply too much money for serious businesses to tolerate losing without their bosses staging an intervention to refocus employees on doing their jobs by taking corrective action to minimize unproductive politics-related chatter at work.

On the other hand, for businesses with non-serious bosses, it probably has resulted in major losses in both productivity and quality. For example, just consider how much time late night comedy talk shows have spent on politically-related topics during the last several years and how unfunny they've become as a result, and you can see the damage the corrosiveness of political obsessions has caused every weeknight. And that's with Donald Trump as President of the United States, which by all rights has got to be a comedy gold mine!

Then there's the least serious business of all, which goes on in the U.S. Congress, where politicians seem incapable of doing anything else as congressional bosses have chosen to put their political sideshows up front and center, ahead of useful things like passing spending bills to avoid government agency shutdowns, approving trade deals, et cetera. Nearly a year into its tenure, with both the Mueller investigation and now the impeachment inquiry distracting it, the 116th session of Congress is currently at risk of becoming the least productive in history.

We're on the cusp of the Thanksgiving holiday here in the United States, where many Americans can soon expect have to deal with their politically-obsessed family members at their dining table. If this year's dinner is at your house, be the serious boss and put the kibosh on entering the social disaster minefield that you will otherwise find yourself in if you're foolish enough to allow their political obsessions to dominate and ruin the experience of your Thanksgiving feast. If need be, you might consider putting your politically-obsessed guests in their proper place. At the kids' table.

Image Source: New York Post.

If there was one innovation we could see brought to professional sports in the United States, we would propose introducing team relegation and promotion to each of the major leagues.

If you're a fan of the English Premier League, you already know what we mean, but to explain it simply, here's how it goes. Teams are ranked according to how many points they earn during the regular season. The bottom three teams in the rankings are demoted to a lower league, while in their place, the top three teams from that lower league are promoted up to the big leagues.

What relegation does is fix the incentive problems that the owners and players of poorly performing teams often have that run counter to the interests of their team's fans. For example, in a sport like basketball, teams doing poorly will often make their losing seasons even worse for their fans by tanking - deliberately seeking to lose as many games as possible in order to increase their odds of winning a high draft pick to claim highly valued players in the next season's draft of new players. In a sport like baseball, past a certain point of the season, teams with losing records effectively throw in the towel on the idea of competing and hold a fire sale, trading away their star players to lower their payrolls as they attempt to replace them with low-cost prospects who may someday develop into future stars.

We're omitting hockey from this discussion because of the Cinderella story of the 2018-19 St. Louis Blues, who went from last in January to the Stanley Cup finals this season, and also football, where outside of the dynastic success of the New England Patriots in recent years, league rules tend to promote a more equitable distribution of talented players among teams, making the rest of the league more genuinely competitive over its short 16-game regular season.

Relegation could solve the incentive problems losing owners have because they would no longer stand to gain by deliberately adopting losing strategies during a season. Rather, because the big leagues are where the big money in professional sports is to be found, they would stand to lose more financially if they did. Better still, the teams of bad owners who consistently field lackluster teams would find a permanent, out-of-sight home in their sport's cellar. Where they belong.

For suffering fans, the penalty of relegation would motivate their teams, keeping their games both competitive and entertaining as team owners and players would have stronger incentives to avoid tanking their seasons.

On the plus side, teams being promoted from the minor leagues and their fans could benefit greatly from their new major league status. In addition to earning bigger paychecks for better managed teams, turning in winning records in the lower league would be rewarded with the privileges of low draft picks to acquire top talent that currently goes to the worst-performing teams in the major leagues, where a top minor league team can become more capable of competing effectively in their new, more challenging league.

What started us going down this route was considering the possibilities raised by the Numberphile video featured above, where Brady Haran, Tony Padilla, and Adam Moss simulated one million seasons of the English Premier League to answer the question of how many points would it take on average to come in first place, how many points would it take to finish in the Top 4 (which comes with an additional financial reward for these top flight teams), and how many points would a team have to accumulate on average to avoid being relegated. If you'd rather skip the video, the answers to these questions are presented here.

Baseball's All Star Game (also known as the "Midsummer Classic", although nobody outside of the evil influence of Major League Baseball's marketing staff calls it that) is upon us once again, and once again, thanks to many more years of uninteresting execution, we have to recognize that it's kind of a disaster.

Perhaps not as big a disaster as the National Football League's Pro Bowl or the National Basketball League's All-Star Game, but still, for a game that calls itself the "national pastime", fans deserve better.

We have an idea for how to fix baseball's All Star Game that was ahead of its time back in 2009 when we first proposed it, but may now be more relevant given the recent experience of major league baseball players. Let's recap....

Once upon a time, baseball's All Star Game was a competitive event. Joe Sheehan describes the "good old days":

Baseball’s All-Star Game was once a cutthroat battle between two distinct and competitive entities, one of just two times all season that the leagues interacted. The game was played largely by the very best players in baseball, and those players often went the distance. If you wanted to see Babe Ruth face Carl Hubbell, or Bob Feller take on Stan Musial, or Warren Spahn pitch to Ted Williams, the All-Star Game was just about your only hope.

In the modern era, the All-Star Game has been reduced to the final act of a three-day festival, in recent seasons often overshadowed by the previous night’s Home Run Derby. Rather than a grudge match between rivals, it’s an interconference game like the NFL, NBA, and NHL events. The individual matchups, once unique, have been diluted by interleague play.

But that's not the worse part. Sheehan goes on to describe how players and managers used to approach the game, comparing the past to how things are done today:

In the first All-Star Game back in 1933, the starting lineups went the distance. The AL made just one position-player substitition, getting legs in for Babe Ruth late in the game. In the NL, the top six hitters in the lineup took all their at-bats. Each team used three pitchers. A quarter-century later, this was still the general idea: seven of the eight NL position-player starters in the 1958 game went the distance, five AL hitters did, and the teams used just four pitchers each. The best players in baseball showed up trying to win to prove their league’s superiority.

Then it all went awry. Before interleague play or 32-man rosters or All-Star Monday, there were the years of two All-Star Games. From 1959 through 1962, the AL and NL met twice each summer as a means of raising revenues for the players’ fledgling pension fund. In '58, 32 players played in the All-Star Game, 12 of them staying for the entire game. In 1963, the first year after the experiment, 41 players played and just five went the distance. The 1979 game, one of the all-time best contests, saw 49 players used and had just three starters who were around at the end. Fast-forward to 2007—the last nine-inning All-Star Game—and you find 55 players in, 17 pitchers used to get 54 outs, and not a single starter left in the game at its conclusion.

The All-Star Game has lost its luster because the game isn’t taken seriously by the people in uniform. Don’t read what they say—watch what they do. That’s the damning evidence that the participants care less about winning than they do about showing up.

So what to do? In recent years, Major League Baseball has tried to incentivize the players and managers of the teams representing the National League and American League by awarding home field advantage in the World Series to the team from the winning league in the All Star Game. But is that really working?

Given that the managers of each league's all-stars are the managers of the teams that went to the previous year's World Series, who most often by the All-Star Game know that their own teams are unlikely to repeat, what's the point? If they're not in the running by that point of the season, why manage their All-Star team to win for an advantage they themselves won't realize? The same fact holds especially true for the players, with maybe as many as a half-dozen on each side playing for teams with a realistic shot at making it to the World Series in the fall.

Bob Ryan describes how history has played out since league home-field advantage has been made the purpose of the All-Star Game:

Sadly, Bud Selig and his marketing minions don’t get it.

Bud is haunted by the tie game in his own hometown seven years ago. It was second only to the cancellation of the 1994 World Series as the worst event of his tenure as baseball commissioner, and he is determined it will not happen again. He thinks the solution is to expand the rosters for Tuesday night’s game into the absurdly bloated 33 players apiece, 13 of whom will be pitchers. As is almost invariably the case in these matters, more is less.

In order to restore so-called “meaning’’ into the game, Bud declared that, beginning with the 2003 game, the teams would be playing for home-field advantage in the World Series. That hasn’t prevented the American League from winning the first six games played under this policy, nor has it prevented the National League from winning the World Series despite lack of said home-field advantage in 2006 and 2008.

But neither of those are the point. The truth is that Bud wants it both ways. He wants the game to be played for a proper prize, and yet he has allowed the game to evolve into something far less than a real baseball contest.

Ryan argues that the way to make the All-Star Game more meaningful would be to shrink each team's roster back to 25 players and tell the managers to focus on winning, but still, they're having to go out of their way to play a game that offers nothing of real value to either the players or the managers.

If you're a player, why risk injury by playing your heart out? If you're a manager, why not coach by the same rules that apply to T-ball, where everybody getting a turn is more important than winning the game?

Here's our idea: put a real world championship at stake in the All-Star Game. Create two potential teams to represent the United States in the World Baseball Classic, Olympics or other international competition that might apply, one from the National League, the other from the American League. Players for the team that wins the All-Star Game would then be the ones that would literally get to go for the gold for the next year.

That might create a problem in selecting players, given the increasing internationalization of baseball in the United States. Here, at least 25 of the players selected for each team, covering each needed position for international play, would have to be selected to satisfy the eligibility rules to represent the U.S. Additional players, who might not be eligible to represent the United States, could then fill out the remaining slots on each team's roster to bring the total up to 33.

With the opportunity to coach the team in international play, that might make for a real challenge for managers, who would be compelled to put the best players possible out on the field in the All-Star Game, regardless of eligibility, who might then have to face those same additional players on other teams in international play.

And wouldn't that, just by itself, be a lot more interesting than how the All-Star Game is played today.

What's different in 2018 that wasn't the case in 2009 is the positive experience that major league baseball players had in the 2017 World Baseball Classic, which for many, was the first time that they were encouraged to have fun on the field since they played Little League. Baseball's attempted expansion into World Cup-style international play may provide the incentive the sport needs to transform its All-Star Game into something more meaningful.

In case anyone ever wonders why so many cities and states are so willing to borrow billions of dollars to be paid back over decades with taxpayer dollars to build professional sports stadiums, the motive describing the thinking of public officials was captured earlier this year, in the city of Pittsburgh, as the city's professional hockey team was on its way to winning Lord Stanley's Cup in consecutive years, for the second time in the team's history. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette columnist Brian O'Neill got an estimate of how the city's government values the sport.

I called Paul Leger, the city's finance director, to find how much playoff loot the city collected in 2016. That was such a great year, with the Penguins playing 13 of a possible 15 home playoff games in April, May and June. They also won this big silver punch bowl kind of thing that looks way cool when you watch it go by in a parade, but that's not my point here.

Those playoff games brought in more than $1.8 million in amusement taxes, nearly $106,000 in the facility usage fee charged to the hockey players who don't live in the city, another $72,000-plus in payroll taxes and nearly $130,000 in parking taxes on all those fans' cars, according to Mr. Leger.

That comes to more than $2.1 million. Divided by the 13 games, it works out to about $163,000 per contest, and tickets haven't gotten any cheaper since.

That's the benefit of a championship season. Now, as good as the Pittsburgh Penguins have been in recent years, when they've been among the best teams of all time, they've only made it through to the championship finals in six seasons, where they've won the Stanley Cup five times.

They've been playing in the NHL since the league expanded in the 1967-68 season. In the 49 completed seasons since, the Pens have....

• Missed the playoffs altogether 17 times (35%)
• Were eliminated from the playoffs in the first round 13 times (25%)
• Made it as far as the second round of the playoffs 10 times (20%)
• Made it past the second round 8 times (16%)

Making it to the playoffs certainly appears to be nice for the city government's coffers, but the real question is how much of those tax collections came at the expense of other economic activity within the city and adjacent communities that would also have generated tax revenue? Did Pittsburgh's city government struggle badly to balance its books in the long years where the team didn't make it into the NHL playoffs? Will the city or Allegheny County have to raise their taxes if the Penguins go through the same kind of dry spell that characterized over one third of all the seasons they've played in their history?

Or do the Penguins' post-season playoff appearances simply shift where a portion of the economic activity that is occurring within Pittsburgh's metropolitan area is happening? Say from the suburbs down to the neighborhoods surrounding the government-financed $321 million PPG Paints Arena.

Don't get us wrong - business in that part of town can be really good when the Penguins make it into the post-season.

It's not just city hall that makes a windfall from playoff hockey. The Carlton restaurant opened in BNY Mellon Center in 1984, Mario Lemieux's rookie season, and ever since its fortunes have risen and fallen with the Penguins.

Kevin Joyce, The Carlton's owner, will tell you he’s a six-minute walk from the arena, downhill both ways. Really, he says, there's a way to do it and he'll be happy to explain the to-and-from routes to you. He also has a limo shuttle for customers who don’t care to hear about that.

"It means so much," he said of a long post-season run. "I fill my restaurant for every home playoff game. I do big numbers."

All three dining rooms and the lounge fill, and he more than doubles his staff from 14 to 31. White tablecloth restaurants such as his generally don’t do as well in the summer months, so it's ironic that a hockey team can make or break his June.

"And don’t forget the drink tax," Mr. Joyce said.

Mr. Joyce hates the 7 percent Allegheny County tax on alcoholic beverages. If the Penguins go all the way this year, maybe I'll call the county to see if anyone can tally the uptick in the drink tax on hockey nights in Pittsburgh. That there is one, no one should doubt.

We can't speak for specific hockey nights, but we can pull the alcoholic beverage tax revenue date from the Allegheny County Controller's web site.

We looked at the last four years, where the Penguins played in each post-season, but only through the second round in 2014 (playing into May 2014), the first round in 2015 (only playing into April 2015), and into the Stanley Cup finals in both 2016 and 2017 (playing into June in both years).

Following the logic that revenues from the county's alcoholic beverage tax are higher in the months where the Penguins make it farther into the post-season, which typically covers the period from April through June each year, we would predict that the tax collections during these months would see the following patterns:

• Alcohol tax collection shown for May in each year from 2014 through 2017 would be about the same as each other.
  
• Alcohol taxes reported for the month of June in the years 2014, 2016 and 2017 would be about the same, but June 2015 would fall short (since the Penguins were eliminated earlier that year).


• The county's alcohol tax revenues in July 2016 and 2017 would exceed the collections in July 2014 and 2015. (Note: At this writing the data for July 2017 has not yet been reported, so we can only consider 2016).

The chart below reveals what we found for the monthly alcohol tax collections for the four years 2014 through 2017.

The chart above shows nominal tax revenue data, as reported by the county controller's office in each year, which lags one month behind when the alcoholic beverage tax is assessed (for instance, taxes assessed in April would be collected and reported in May). If you want to see the data to be adjusted for inflation, we can accommodate you, but it's not significantly different for the months in question.

Testing our hypothesis for the reported alcohol beverage tax revenue figures, we find that...

• For May, three of the years (2014, 2016 and 2017) are about the same as each other, but 2015 falls surprisingly short. We had hypothesized that the values would be similar for all years for this month.
• Looking at June, we would have expected the data for 2015 to fall short, but we see that 2014 did instead, while 2015, a year where the Penguins last game was in April, had alcoholic beverage tax collections that are directly comparable to what the county collected during the Penguins' Stanley Cup winning years.
• For July, we see that both 2014 and 2015's county alcohol tax revenues are similar and fall below 2016's Stanley Cup year, which is in line with what we would have expected, and is the only month that outcome is the case.

What these results tell us is that other factors likely have a greater influence over the county's alcoholic beverage tax revenues than the Pittsburgh Penguins post-season play, where we suspect that the relative strength of the local economy has a stronger influence. Determining how much influence each factor might have would require much more detailed data, which may not be available. Given the data we have available today, this analysis is about as far as we can take it.

Notes: The title of the version of this article that appears on our site, "The More the Penguins Skate, the More the City Takes", is borrowed from the headline of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article by Brian O'Neill that inspired this analysis!

The University of Kentucky's football team is off to a bad start this year on the heels of two lackluster seasons. With zero wins and two losses, there is a serious discussion underway at the university of whether or not it ought to buy out head coach Mark Stoops' contract, which is guaranteed through 2018, to clear the way for a replacement head coach.

Buying out Stoops' contract would cost the University of Kentucky $12 million, but if the university waits until the end of the season to effectively fire him this way, it would pay a higher price.

Were UK to change its coaching staff following the 2016 season, it could cost far more than $12 million, however.

All of Stoops’ assistant coaches except one have contracts guaranteed through June 30, 2018. Assistant head coach for offense Eddie Gran is the exception; his deal runs through June 30, 2019.

So if Kentucky removed Stoops and assistants following the current season, the university could be on the hook for some $17.898 million in payouts.

UK alumni Tim Haab did some back of the envelope college football economics math to see under what kind of conditions it would make sense for the University of Kentucky to pull the trigger on buying out the rest of Coach Stoops' contract.

Actually, to this alumni, losing doesn't justify paying a coaches $18 million not to coach ... unless the lost gate revenue over the next several years is greater than $18 million. Let's say attendance falls to 30,000, about a 50% reduction. If tickets cost $40 each then each game results in lost revenue of $1.2 million. If there are 6 home games per season the revenue loss is $7.2 million. If there are two seasons left on the coaches' contracts then the total loss is $14.2 million. You'd still want to keep the coaches. The only way an $18 million buyout makes financial sense is if the recovery in ticket revenue begins sooner, rather than later, you'll break even sooner (maybe they should fire the athletic director that set up the $18 million buyout).

That's the kind of math we like to turn into tools here at Political Calculations! Tools where you can swap out the numbers that apply for this scenario with those that apply for other scenarios to be named later!

In this case, we're just going to focus on the considerations that would justify buying out the head coach's contract, but if you want to consider the scenario that applies for the assistant coaches, just increase the cost of buying out the head coach's contract from $12 million to $18 million.

Which you can do in the tool below. If you're accessing this article on a site that republishes our RSS news feed, please click here to access a working version of the tool at our site.

It's not quite as simple as that, because the university would also have to consider the potential performance of a successor head coach, where they would need to at least deliver a "typical" win-loss record that would restore the team's lost attendance revenues.

And since there are quite a lot of head coaching candidates who are currently available in the market for a job, the math in this hypothetical attendance scenario would argue in favor of buying out the coach's contract.

In playing with the default numbers, we find that a projected home game attendance decline of 42% compared to a regular season's attendance would be enough to make it worthwhile to axe the head coach sooner rather than later, but if the decline in attendance is less than that figure, it would seem unlikely that Coach Stoops will be shown the door, unless there are other factors that would influence the University of Kentucky's decision of whether to continue his coaching tenure or not.