Hard Ball: The Abuse of Power in Pro Team Sports

Hardball is the most enlightening sports book I have read in a long time. Die-hard team-sports fans are traditionally opinionated, knowledgeable, and frustrated that "it ain't what it used to be". Quirk and Forth, both economists, re-describe the world of pro sports in a manner that can affect even the most opinionated. Their rhetoric and logic are compelling and appealing. They even have a solution to bring a Why-didn't-I think-of-that? smile to your face. And, if you care, the book is packed with statistics.

In HARD BALL, economists James Quirk and Rodney Fort document and persuasively blame the monopoly power and authoritarianism of professional sports leagues for exorbitant ticket prices, high and escalating player salaries, growing revenue disparities between small- and large-market teams, and the leverage owners use to blackmail cities to finance new facilities with taxpayer subsidies. To eliminate these problems, Quirk and Fort advise that "the Justice Department should file suit and break up the existing monopoly leagues into several independent leagues with the antitrust laws applied to the industry created" (see page 177). To be sure, their proposed solution to dismantle leagues will stimulate discussion and research to improve the economic conduct and social performance of the industry. But in RELOCATING TEAMS AND EXPANDING LEAGUES IN PROFESSIONAL SPORTS: HOW THE MAJOR LEAGUES RESPOND TO MARKET CONDITIONS (Quorum Books, 1999), John Guthrie and I argue that between 1950 and 1995 leagues and franchise owners made rational decisions to approve team movements and expand league membership. We concluded that market participants-owners, players, sports fans, and communities-together are best equipped to determine the growth and development of professional sports in America. An alternative proposal to mainstream economists, we oppose any bureaucratic role for government in allocating the number and location of teams in professional sports. In our view, innovation and reform of the sports industry should be initiated and implemented by the market and not by regulation.

Finally! I've been waiting for an entire book devoted to the monopoly power in pro sports ever since reading Stephen Ross's chapter in "The Business of Professional Sports" advocating the breakup of these monopolies. Quirk and Fort's Hard Ball fits the bill nicely and advances many of the same views as Ross, namely that multiple, competitive leagues would result in lower ticket prices, fewer public subsidies for stadiums, and the penetration of professional sports into all markets that demand and can sustain it.The authors of Hard Ball are certainly well-qualified to discuss this subject, having earlier published Pay Dirt, the so-called bible of sports economics. Hard Ball is much easier to read than Pay Dirt and seems to be aimed more at the non-academically-inclined sports fan, being much lighter on economic theory and a little more narrowly focused. Although Hard Ball doesn't have the detailed historical discussion that Pay Dirt has, it still gives a good overview of the problems caused by the monopolies and how they came to be. It discusses in detail how the owners, players, leagues, TV networks, and politicians are affected by the monopoly power and why these groups have little, if any, financial motivation to fight it.Perhaps Hard Ball has a couple of minor shortcomings. First, there is very little discussion of whether pro sports leagues are a "natural" monopoly, a view that is held by experts who oppose the position advanced by Hard Ball. The second is that, while the authors demonstrate clearly and throughout the book the potential economic benefits of their theory as public policy, their final chapter offers a rather feeble attempt at persuading the reader of the benefits to the sports fan in the form of increased competition and availability of big-time pro sports. But overall, Quirk and Fort embark on a very interesting and convincing discussion of the topic.Continuing their trend from Pay Dirt, the data tables at end of Hard Ball serve as a comprehensive and invaluable reference. The Hard Ball data concentrates on financial numbers during the 1990s in all four major pro sports leagues. While some of the data is pretty basic stuff (media income, salary averages, etc.) other charts are quite amazing (for example, one showing that the correlation in the 1990s between payroll and winning percentage in MLB is so small that it is statistically insignificant). As with Pay Dirt, even if the text doesn't inspire you, the data supplement alone is worth the purchase price of the book.