Pro Athletes Forego Millions . . .

Pro athletes, I know your secret. Julio Franco told me.

He didn't tell me directly. I haven't interviewed him since 2003 and at the time we only talked about baseball in Puerto Rico. No, a Memorial Day spent watching him hit cleanup for the Fort Worth Cats gave it away.

I long considered Franco one of my favorite hitters to watch. It seemed impossible that the man's exaggerated stance could produce sufficient timing and bat speed to turn big-league fastballs into doubles. Franco did it remarkably well into his forties.

 With the exception of short detours to Japan, Korea, and Mexico, he spent most of his baseball=playing years drawing a major league paycheck. Baseball Reference estimates he made more than $25 million over the course of his career.⁽¹⁾ But here's the secret : he would have done it for less - a lot less.

I know this because I watched him play for the Cats. No independent league pays entourage-worthy salaries, but at age 55, he decided he wanted to take some swings in one. He'll do some coaching, too, but I can't imagine he would have taken the deal without the at-bats. He wanted to hit. And when he looked visibly upset after popping out with men on base, you knew he still truly cared about hitting.

Another giveaway? I also care about hitting. Okay, not enough to actually take lessons or go to the cages. But I do pay money every year to hit (or, more specifically, to ground out) in a recreational softball league. Admittedly, I haven't paid up yet this season, but I swear I will bring my checkbook to that last game next week. Really.

The point is that every athlete except those in the pros and on full scholarships doesn’t just take a low salary to play. We pay to participate in sports. We do it because we like it. Sports are fun.

As a kid, my main complaint about my YMCA baseball league was that we didn't get to play enough games. I would have happily played doubleheaders every day and then gone and played basketball, soccer, and table tennis after the 18 innings. Admittedly, I had an underdeveloped appreciation for what my parents would have had to do to drive me to all these games, but kids focus on the fun.

And I didn't even love it enough to put in the off-field work I would have needed to squeeze another level out of any talent I might have had. So it stands to reason that the pros must love it at least as much as those of us who have paid to play.

We even willingly hazard injury, an outcome whose likelihood increases with age. Professional players assume injury risks, too. Certainly any team or league that knowingly provides players false information about injury exposure deserves severe rebuke, but what makes such deception extra frustrating is that many players would have likely continued to play even with full knowledge of the consequences.⁽²⁾ They love it that much.

So we know players would play for less money because Julio Franco does, and because we all do. Players have insightfully set up unions that help them resist such impulses, and willingly accept their shares of the industry's subsidies from politicians and oligarchs. But before the last forty-some years, athletes mostly played for whatever the owners would pay them. They did so because the alternative was to go into a career that wasn't sports. The alternative was to play less. If sports makes you happy, and your choice comes down to money or happiness, a lot of people choose the latter.

We see similar outlooks toward psychological, as opposed to monetary, compensation in other professions that inspire passion. I can tell you from first-hand experience that list includes writing, music, and the business side of sport.

Certainly as long as big-league athletes’ performances continue to entertain millions of people, they will have the clout to earn sizable salaries in the marketplace. But if sports ever did exist in a truly free market, it would be interesting to see how low those minimum salaries would drop. That they would, in fact, find a lower floor is no secret. I know - Julio Franco told me.

Rush Olson has spent two decades directing creative efforts for sports teams and broadcasters. He currently creates ad campaigns and related creative projects for sports entities through his company, Rush Olson Creative & Sports.

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Footnotes

⁽¹⁾ “Julio Franco,” Baseball-Reference. http://www.baseball-reference.com/players/f/francju01.shtml (accessed May 26, 2014)

⁽²⁾ Brooke De Lench “Athletes' Resistance To Self-Reporting of Concussion Continues Despite Increased Education,” MomsTeam.

http://www.momsteam.com/health-safety/athletes-resistance-to-self-reporting-concussion-continues-despite-increased-education (accessed May 26, 2014)

Honesty Comes in Slow Motion

This evening while watching baseball, I took notice of the catcher’s demeanor after a close play. Though a call at the plate had just gone in his team’s favor, his body language seemed anything but celebratory. We could attribute his subdued nature to the six-run deficit his team still faced, but we might also give credit to the game’s new replay rules.

Indeed, the opposing manager challenged the call, and Major League Baseball overturned it after viewing the video replay. That replay, which we also saw on television, clearly showed the backstop’s sweep tag not making contact with the baserunner at all.

The catcher had to have known he never touched the runner, even as his body somewhat screened the home plate umpire from seeing it properly. The player could have saved everyone some time and effort, then, had he simply told the ump what the replay would show.

Players watch replays, too.

Some sports would consider such an admission the norm. Tennis players overrule a linesperson who incorrectly judges an opponent’s ball to have landed out. Even more stringently, the game of golf expects its participants to sign for the fact that they have played the game honestly and punishes those who have not.

Most sports have not developed such a culture of self-reporting. A fielder generally tries to convince an umpire he caught a ball he trapped. Association football and basketball have struggled to eliminate diving. Hockey players tend to hate the other team’s pest’s extralegal stickwork, but embrace their teammate who does the same as a “hard-nosed competitor” who “does what it takes to win.”

For those of us who would prefer to see honesty become the norm in the games we watch or play, replay could create some positive vibes.

We’ll start with the play that began this post. What if the initial call at the plate had gone the runner’s way and the catcher’s manager had emerged from the dugout to discuss it and possibly call for a review? The catcher now has every incentive to inform both the official and the manager about what really happened. The player still makes a self-serving decision, in this case to allow his manager to save a challenge for a later inning, but at least he must make the honest one.

The most encouraging scenario, however, comes when the deception requires some risk. If an outfielder traps a ball with two outs and a runner on base, for instance, he has a choice. He can attempt to convince the umpire that he most certainly caught the ball and begin jogging off the field. However, if he feels pretty sure that a replay will overturn the erroneous call, he has a greater incentive to attempt to throw out the baserunner and not waste his time on fooling the base umpire. The replay rule has thus occasioned a more honest game.

The same could certainly hold true in other sports. For instance, if replay could reveal that a defender never touched a forward, it incents the latter to not go down so easily in the box and risk a yellow card for diving. One must use care in delaying games for replay, of course, but if such use encourages participants to play on, instead of jockeying for false calls, it may eliminate other situations that cause a contest to lag.

Of course, meaningful progress toward honesty in gameplay will require changes of culture. Replay can’t implement those by itself. Ingrained behaviors take a long time to rework. If a trend toward honorable on-field conduct does emerge, it will almost certainly do so in slow motion.

Rush Olson has spent two decades directing creative efforts for sports teams and broadcasters. He currently creates ad campaigns and related creative projects for sports entities through his company, Rush Olson Creative & Sports.

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Bigotry is Bad. Sport is Good.

As of this writing, an NBA investigation has not conclusively proven that a voice message from Clippers owner Donald Sterling revealed a blatantly racist outlook. Whether fabricated by a vengeful acquaintance or coming straight from Sterling’s heart, someone uttered the reprehensible, irredeemable remarks.

The preponderance of the evidence indicates at this point that a prominent owner in one of the world’s most prominent sports leagues did, in fact, utter the statements in question. That anyone would hold such attitudes is horrific. The fact we consider it as such speaks to the nature of sport.

Sportsmen and women tend to have a passion for winning. It often trumps every other consideration related to gameplay, including fitness, business, and appreciation of athleticism. Sometimes an unswerving quest to win can have negative consequences. In the case of racism, however, it becomes a positive.

The need to win requires one to evaluate people based on their individual abilities to help achieve that goal. It has little tolerance for bunching individuals into arbitrary groups based on criteria other than helping you win. In a competitive environment, you get to indulge your irrational biases or you get to win. Whether you’re football-playing southern colleges in the 1960s and 1970s or a modern-day pro team owner, you don’t get to do both.

Teams tend to care more about winning a ring than about what color finger it goes on.

 If Sterling is an inveterate racist (which he has denied in a statement), sport has forced him not to implement policies based on his outlook, at least not openly and to the extent he might have preferred. He has had to hire African-Americans into the most prominent and highly-paid positions in his organization, including management (q.v. Elgin Baylor, Doc Rivers). He has had to pay them the market rate of millions of dollars a year because they give him the best chance to win.

In turn, when competitive pressures force franchise management to evaluate players as individuals, others connected to the arena must do the same. Sterling apparently managed to ignore how color-blind hiring helped his team. Most in the business prove more perceptive. When Jackie Robinson first joined the Dodgers, some of his teammates felt racial animosity toward him. Once they recognized how his skin color indicated nothing about his character or ability to help them to their goals, they changed their thinking.⁽¹⁾  While sport will always reflect society’s prejudices to a certain extent, it moves them in a more tolerant direction by its essential essence.

If Jack Johnson boxed today, 99.9% of the discussion about him would revolve around his punching prowess. The mainstream media certainly wouldn’t tout the desperate possibility of a “Great White Hope” to defeat him.⁽²⁾ Indeed, we expect no pundits to rush to defend the Clippers owner’s alleged remarks. We also anticipate every official governing body connected with the incident will roundly condemn the bigotry they expressed.

We see such condemnation because a competitive spirit doesn’t just suppress racism on the court. It is unimaginable that NBA Commissioner Adam Silver would share Sterling’s presumed views on race. But even if he and his senior staff did, they could not rationally indulge their biases. They would risk losing enormous market share in the short and long terms to leagues that instead chose hiring and marketing methodologies that maximized their potential talent and customer pools. In fact, while there is still progress needed in minority business-side opportunities, the sports world’s necessary on-court race neutrality has often given athletes the exposure necessary to demonstrate that they possessed traits that could also help sporting businesses succeed off the court.

Racism, like all irrational worldviews, may never disappear completely. A competitive environment, however, forces it to its deserved fringes. How far to the fringes? Alleged racist Donald Sterling apparently had to hide his hate sufficiently thoroughly that the NAACP had planned to give him an award, and not for the first time. ⁽³⁾  

As Charles Barkley said, the NBA is a “Black League.” ⁽⁴⁾ He’s right. It’s also an international league, a tattooed league, an inner-city league, a Midwest farm boy league, and, most importantly, a merit-based league. Its very nature prevents it from being anything else.

UPDATE : The league apparently has conclusively determined that the statements attributed to Sterling did, in fact, come from him. They decided the remarks and their speaker have no place in the sport.

Rush Olson has spent two decades directing creative efforts for sports teams and broadcasters. He currently creates ad campaigns and related creative projects for sports entities through his company, Rush Olson Creative & Sports.

RushOlson.com

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Footnotes

⁽¹⁾ “Bobby Bragan and Jackie Robinson,” Bobby Bragan Youth Foundation. http://www.bobbybragan.org/component/content/article/1-latest-news/141-bobby-bragan-and-jackie-robinson (accessed April 27, 2014)

⁽²⁾ Christopher Lisee, “Black Boxers in the American Media,” Christopher Lisee. http://eportfolios.ithaca.edu/clisee1/essays/boxing/ (accessed April 27, 2014)

⁽³⁾ “Donald Sterling To Receive NAACP Lifetime Achievement Award” Huffington Post. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/26/donald-sterling-naacp_n_5219708.html (accessed April 27, 2014)

⁽⁴⁾ Richard Deitsch, “Barkley and the TNT halftime crew react to Sterling's comments,” Sports Illustrated. http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/nba/news/20140426/donald-sterling-shaquille-o-neal/ (accessed April 27, 2014)