(This article was prepared to be part of a presentation in the Panel “Improving the Game—The Future of Professional Sports” at the MIT Sloan Sports Business Conference, February 9, 2008.   Inside the room, I made the decision not to read the entire paper at that time.)

          Think for a moment about the term Game Theory.   When I first heard the term “Game Theory” as an undergraduate 40 years ago, I had been having a discussion the previous day with a friend about the issue of “What are the characteristics of successful games?” or “What are the characteristics of a good game?”  An athletic contest, for example. . .what is it that makes one sport succeed and the other not succeed?

            My friend’s argument was that that which defines a good sport is the regularity by which an expert in the sport could defeat a novice—an answer which seemed reasonable at the time, but which I now realize is almost diametrically incorrect; in fact, one of the most obvious defining characteristics of a successful sport is that you just never know who will win.   Successful team sports don’t allow the best teams to win all the time; they prevent it.   That’s what causes athletes to push so hard to excel—the fact that they don’t necessarily win, even if they’re better than the other guy or better than the other team, and therefore they have to keep pushing themselves harder and harder in order to sustain success.    No sport could succeed if the coach could say to his team before the game that “we’re better than these guys, so we’ll win.”

            Anyway, when I first heard the term “Game Theory”, then, I assumed that this was about. . the theory of games:  what is it that makes a good game?   In fact, of course, that’s not what Game Theory is about, at all.  So then let me ask the question:  what is that branch of knowledge?   If you study what are the characteristics of successful sports or of successful leagues, what do you call that?

            That, it seems to me, could perhaps be the Next Big Thing in the world of sports research: the development of a field of actual knowledge about what it is that makes a sport work.   Let me give you three examples of what I mean.

            In baseball in the National League there are 16 teams, and there are four teams that make the playoffs.   Sixteen is divisible by four.   The obvious thing to have done would have been to set up the league so that there were four four-team divisions, and each division champion would make the playoffs.   Instead of that, they set it up with two five-team divisions, a six-team division, and a wild card.

            If you ask somebody why it was done this way, they’ll say something like, “Well, I guess they thought with the wild card they would get the four best teams in the championship, whereas with a division setup you might get somebody winning a weak division”, or “I guess they thought that the wild card would give more teams a chance to be in the race in September.” 

            Well, OK, but. . .shouldn’t somebody have studied that before the decision was made?   Does anyone really know whether you get more meaningful contests with more teams having a chance to make the playoffs in September with four four-team divisions, or three and a Wild Card?    Or are we just guessing?

            The truth is, it was done the way it was done because it simply never occurred to the people who made the decision that one could actually study the issue.  You can, of course; you can build a model, determine within the model what is a critical game or an important game, simulate the season a few million times each way and figure out whether you get more meaningful games one way or the other.   It is knowledge that could exist; it just doesn’t.

            Another example. . .I don’t know how many of you know this, but in baseball in the 1860s, the championship was determined by a model not unlike boxing and chess—you held the title until you played somebody else and they beat you.   What happened, in the three or four-year period where that was how the championship was determined, was that baseball started to exhibit many of the same problems which have proven so disastrous in boxing and in chess.  Somebody would claim the title and then would dodge contests against people who could beat them, and multiple claimants emerged for the championship title.   As great a game as baseball is, I would predict that, had the game not stumbled onto the format of a league championship with a centralized schedule, baseball as a commercial venture would never have truly succeeded; it would have wandered off into chaos.   Instead, baseball sort of accidentally discovered the league format, which has since been successfully copied by basketball, football, hockey and almost every other team sport around the world. 

            Two points:

            1)  There is a field of knowledge, somewhere, as to what works and what doesn’t work in organizing a team competition, and

            2)  Somebody some day is going to make a lot of money by acquiring and taking advantage of that knowledge.  

            This also applies to, for example, NCAA football’s long-running argument about the bowl system vs. a national playoff.   Somewhere, somehow, there has to be a way to think this issue through, to work it through, and reach a convincing answer.   There has to be a right way to do this.

            Third example, and then I’ll shut up and take questions and listen to the other panelists.   There are essentially four models of schedules that sports teams use:  there is a tournament-based schedule, there is a “completely open” system, in which each team is responsible for setting up its own games, as is commonly used in amateur and semi-pro sports, there is a “completely closed” system in which all games are scheduled by the league, as is used in all professional sports, and there is a “blended” system as is used in NCAA basketball and NCAA football.

            People tend to assume, without thinking about it, that professional sports HAVE to use a completely closed schedule, simply because all of them do.   But when you think about it, you realize that there are huge advantages to the blended scheduling of the NCAA sports, tremendous advantages.   So let me ask this question:  why couldn’t a professional sport adopt a system, like college basketball, in which half or two-thirds of the schedule was controlled by the league, but the other part was subject to negotiation?   Wouldn’t that be neat?   What if the Red Sox, for example, had to play eight games against each of the other 13 American League teams—104 games total--but then the rest of the schedule was up to us.   We could play Pawtucket if we wanted to. 

            One of the many advantages of blended scheduling is that it tends, over time, to increase the number of highly competitive teams—thus tends to help the sport as a whole to thrive.   I’ll leave it at that.  

            (Since time is not an issue in this format, I will attach another thought here.)

            Did you ever think about the issue of who should own and provide equipment in a sporting contest?

            When I was young, pole vaulters used to vault with bamboo poles.   When I was about ten or twelve somebody invented a fiberglass pole.  The world record for the pole vault shot upward, broken repeatedly over the next several years, not because the pole vaulters were dramatically better but because the fiberlass poles were helping to bounce them up into the air. 

            The thing was, the sport’s organizers and professionals had not foreseen this development, and therefore it had not occurred to them to ban the use of the plastic poles.  The new poles had become a part of the sport before the sport collected its wits, and, in a sense, history dodged the question of whether this was a good thing or a bad thing. 

            Something very similar has happened in baseball over the last fifteen years, in the design of bats.   Bats have been evolving in their design since baseball was invented, but there has been more evolution in bat design in the last fifteen years than in the previous hundred years.

            Think about it:  When was the last time you heard about a corked bat?   Nobody uses corked bats anymore, because the legal bats now are much better for the hitter than the corked bats of bygone years.  There have been at least three large changes in bat design since the early 1990s:

            1)  The bat wood is kiln-dried to increase the strength-to-weight ratio.

            2)  The bat, once made, is compressed—systematically crushed—to make the surface of the wood harder.

            3)  The bat is covered with multiple layers of lacquer, to make the surface even harder.  

            I do not know how much this revolution in bat design has contributed to the hitting explosion that began in the early 1990s.   I don’t think anyone knows.   My guess is that the inflated hitting numbers of the last fifteen years are MORE attributable to bat design than they are to steroids.   I understand that this is not the common opinion, but. ..experience teaches us to be wary of the common opinion.

            Anyway, not assuming that this is a large effect, let us discuss instead:  is this a good change?   I would argue that it is not a good change.   It is not a good change, for four reasons. 

            1)  The removal of the game from its historically normal batting standards was disruptive of baseball history, and interfered with many fans’ ability to enjoy the game.

            2)  The new bats splinter and fracture at contact in ways that are very dangerous, and which might well cause an on-field fatality in the coming years.

            3)  The new bats are so expensive that they are entirely unlike the bats that are or can be used by young and amateur players, and thus put an emotional distance between the major leaguers and their potential fans.  

            4)  I don’t have a fourth; I just didn’t want to give you another 1-2-3 list, so soon after the other one.

            My essential concern about the new bats is this:  this caused a significant change in the way baseball was played at the major league level, without the active consent of major league baseball, its owners or its fans.   Is that a good thing, or is that a bad thing?

            I certainly don’t mean to assume that it is a bad thing.   Baseball needs change; it needs constant change.   It always has.   Life is change; that’s how it differs from the rocks.   If the game doesn’t change, people get bored with it very quickly.   We certainly do not want to take over baseball and prevent it from ever changing any more, because that would kill it in one generation. 

            At the same time, anyone can see that it is dangerous to the health of the sport to allow the sport to be re-invented by bat manufacturers or any other sort of hooligans for their own reasons.    It is dangerous to the sport to allow changes over which we have no control.   And. . .is that really fair, or sporting?   Isn’t allowing some players to gain an edge by bringing in harder bats very much like allowing a field goal kicker to bring out his own football?  

            This, then, poses a question:  to what extent should the sport control its own equipment?  Would baseball be better off if it controlled all of its own equipment?  Or is the game better off to allow innovation which it does not control?

            I don’t know.   Nobody knows.   My intuition is that the game would be better off to control its own equipment, but my point is that it is an unknown.  The first step in gaining a better understanding of the world is to focus clearly on the things that you don’t understand.