Scorecasting: The Hidden Influences Behind How Sports Are Played and Games Are Won

by L. Jon Wertheim

  For kindred spirits in the coaching ranks who are tempted to topple conventional sports wisdom, Kelley has the same advice he gives his teams on fourth down: Go for it. Until they do, at least players have a response at the ready the next time their coaches accuse them of being soft or making boneheaded decisions or failing to do everything they can to help the team win. “Sorry, Coach, but I’m just following the example you set with your play-calling.”

  * The exception: if little time remains and a field goal would decide the game.

  * Research even shows that the brain processes losses differently from gains. In experiments offering individuals different gambles with the same payoff, but with one framed in terms of gains and the other in terms of losses, researchers at UCLA—Sabrina M. Tom, Craig R. Fox, Christopher Trepel, and Russell Poldrack—found that a number of areas in the brain showed increasing activity as potential gains increased, whereas potential losses showed decreasing activity in these same areas, even though the actual dollars won and lost were the same.

  * Stars are defined as players receiving votes for MVP that season or All-Star players.

  * These numbers are based on league averages for the probability of scoring a touchdown from a specific field position and the probability of converting a fourth and two. It turns out the Patriots are much more likely than the average team to convert fourth and two (70 percent versus 60 percent) and the Colts, with Peyton Manning, are much more likely to score a touchdown than the average team from most positions on the field. But these two effects probably cancel each other out. One other thing to consider, however, that would also favor going for it over punting is the fact that the Patriots probably would adopt a more conservative defensive strategy or “prevent” defense to guard against the deep ball if the Colts started on their own end of the field. This probably would allow Peyton Manning to march quickly down to the Patriots’ end of the field in less time than usual, making the decision to punt even less valuable.

  HOW COMPETITIVE ARE COMPETITIVE SPORTS?

  Why are the Pittsburgh Steelers so successful and the Pittsburgh Pirates so unsuccessful?

  The noise level and the sun rose in tandem. A couple of nights earlier the New York Yankees had won the 2009 World Series, and now, on this chilly November morning, it was time for their parade. Fans had been lining the streets of lower Manhattan since the infomercial hours. By 7:00 A.M. the crowd was five deep. An hour later the inevitable “Let’s go Yankees, tap-tap-taptaptap” cheers began. Kids pulled from school sat regally on their parents’ shoulders. The New York cops, their spirits buoyed by the overtime they were racking up, were uncommonly friendly. Wall Street traders and analysts and bankers peered from their offices overhead and smiled for one of the few times all year. The motorcade wouldn’t crawl past until noon, but in a congenitally impatient city where no self-respecting pedestrian waits for the light to change, this was the rare occasion when millions of New Yorkers stood happily along Broadway for hours.

  The 2009 World Series parade attracted more than 3 million fans—a greater mass of humanity than the entire market of some MLB teams. Among the crowd: former mayor Rudy Giuliani, Spike Lee, and Jay-Z, who performed the civic anthem at the time, “Empire State of Mind.” There were the obligatory keys to the city, mayoral proclamations, and a forest’s worth of confetti. It was a tidy snapshot of why the Yankees might be the most polarizing team in all of sports. While the rest of the country seethed and cursed the arrogance and excess, Yankee Nation gloated over still another World Series triumph, the twenty-seventh in the franchise’s storied history. Mocking, of course, the milk ad campaign, one T-shirt sold at the parade tauntingly asked of other teams’ fans: “Got Rings?”

  The answer was probably “no,” or at least “not many.” The World Series has been held since the early years of the twentieth century, yet only a few franchises have won a significant number of titles. Eight current organizations have never won a World Series, and nine others have won fewer than three. The Texas Rangers have been around in one form or another since 1961, and prior to 2010 they had never even been to the Fall Classic, much less won it. In contrast, since 1923, the Yankees have won on average once every three years.

  As a rule, we’re offended by oligopolies and monopolies. We much prefer competition; it’s healthier, it’s better for consumers, it encourages innovation, it just feels fundamentally fairer. We have antitrust laws to promote competition. We’re careful to crack down on cartels and regulate industries—yes, some more than others. In the heavily regulated airline industry, the largest carriers in the domestic market, American and Southwest, each have less than 14 percent of the market share. Banks, too, are heavily regulated, so much so that under the so-called Volcker Rule, no institution may exceed a 10 percent market share. Citigroup may have been deemed “too big to fail,” but its market share is only 3 percent. Walmart might be the American company most maligned as a monopoly, but in 2009 its share of the $3 trillion U.S. retail market was 11.3 percent.

  The Yankees? Inasmuch as World Series rings constitute a market, their market share is 25 percent.

  How can one team dominate like this while other teams are barely competitive? The quick and easy answer is money, especially in the absence of a salary cap. Fans of 29 other teams will note that when the Yankees can spend north of $200 million on players, as they did in 2009, and most other teams spend less than $100 million, they’re naturally going to have a heavy concentration of titles. They’ll handily beat the Phillies—their opponents in that World Series—who spent “only” $113 million on payroll. Just as in the previous year, the Phillies ($98 million) beat the Tampa Bay Rays ($44 million), and the year before that the Boston Red Sox ($143 million) beat the Colorado Rockies ($54 million). No wonder the small-market Pittsburgh Pirates—2010 payroll, $39.1 million—haven’t had a winning season since 1992.

  However, the reason for the Yankees’ extraordinary success is more complex than that. Just about everything in baseball’s structure militates against parity. Start with the 162-game season. In the same way an opinion poll sampling 100 subjects will be a more precise reflection of the way the public thinks than a poll sampling 10 subjects, baseball’s long season lends itself to an accurate reflection of talent. If two teams play one game, anything can happen, but if they play a good many games, the better team will win the majority of the time.

  Then consider the playoffs. Only the eight best teams make it to the playoffs, so 22 are out of the running. Teams play a best-of-five-game series followed by a best-of-seven League Championship Series followed by a best-of-seven World Series. As with the regular season, the sample size is large enough that the best team ought to win the series, especially with a home field advantage. The Yankees may be the best team in baseball because they buy the best players, but the imbalance is allowed to flourish because of baseball itself.

  Contrast this with the NFL, the league that openly strives for parity and democracy. The season spans only 16 games, hardly a robust sample size. A few breaks or injuries could represent the difference between a 7–9 season and a 9–7 season. Not only do 12 teams qualify for the playoffs, but there is no “series format.” It’s single elimination, “one and done,” a format much more conducive to upsets, much more likely to generate randomness. One unlucky game, one untimely injury to a star player, and it’s easy for a lesser team to win and move on. Plus, until 2010 there was a salary cap that prevented the wealthy teams or the teams blessed with cavernously pocketed owners from outspending their rivals by factors of three and four. And with the bulk of team revenue coming from leaguewide television contracts, the schism between the economic haves and have-nots is much narrower than in baseball.

  The result? As you’d expect, the concentration of champions is lowest in football, the “market share” remarkably balanced. The NFL has been holding the Super Bowl only since 1967, but already 18 of the 32 franchises have won the Lombardi Trophy and all but 4 have appeared in the Super Bowl at least once
. (That’s almost the same number of teams that have never been to the World Series—and they’ve been holding that since 1903.) Market size doesn’t matter much, either. Most Super Bowls? The Steelers, with six, hailing from … Pittsburgh, the same town that hasn’t fielded a competitive baseball team in almost 20 years. The Packers from Green Bay, Wisconsin, the smallest market in major U.S. professional sports, have won three titles.

  There are far more than 16 games in the NBA and NHL regular seasons, and the playoffs are seven-game series. That cuts against randomness and in favor of the monopolies. In contrast, unlike in baseball, more than half the teams make the postseason. And the NBA and NHL both have a salary cap. So we shouldn’t be surprised to learn that the concentration of champions in pro basketball and hockey is significantly greater than in the NFL and significantly less than in Major League Baseball.

  Three months after the World Series parade in New York there was a similar processional for the Super Bowl champs in small-market New Orleans. The city sported a few hundred thousand fans rather than a few million. And this wasn’t the franchise’s twenty-seventh title; it was the first. But it was just as jubilant. A week before Fat Tuesday, players rode around on floats, wearing masks and tossing beads. Lombardi Gras, they called it.

  Trying to predict who will win the next Super Bowl is a fool’s errand, but trying to predict who will win the next World Series is far easier. Though you might not be right, you can limit your potential candidates to a handful of teams even before the season begins. Funny thing about sports: Distilled to their essence, they’re all about competition. But as an industry, some are more competitive than others.

  TIGER WOODS IS HUMAN

  (AND NOT FOR THE REASON YOU THINK)

  How Tiger Woods is just like the rest of us, even when it comes to playing golf

  It started with his father. In one of the great money quotes in the annals of sports, Earl Woods confided to Sports Illustrated that his son, Tiger, not merely would transcend golf, or sports, or even race but would transcend civilization. “Tiger will do more than any man in history to change the course of humanity,” Earl said without a trace of irony. “He’s qualified … to accomplish miracles. He’s the bridge between the East and the West. There is no limit because he has the guidance. I don’t know yet exactly what form this will take. But he is the Chosen One. He’ll have the power to impact nations. Not people. Nations. The world is just getting a taste of his power.” The year was 1996, and Tiger, age 20 at the time, had yet to win his first Major title.

  Instead of dismissing these claims as the messianic ranting of another crazily ambitious sports parent—if Tiger was Jesus, what did that make Earl?—many actually stopped to consider the prophecy. Could it be that Old Man Woods had it right? In the years that followed, Tiger did little to discredit his father’s prediction. By his mid-twenties, Tiger had single-handedly hijacked professional golf and, with the retirement of Michael Jordan, was on his way to becoming the brightest star in the entire sports cosmos.

  When Tiger played, he usually won. When he didn’t play, events had the thrill of Christmas without Santa. At this writing, he’s won 14 Major titles for his gilded career and, despite a recent slide, still is a good bet to eclipse Jack Nicklaus’s record of 18. Through 2009, Tiger had won roughly 30 percent of the events he’d entered. For the sake of comparison, Nicklaus won 73 titles in 594 events, or 12.3 percent.

  It’s not just the relentless winning that has perpetuated the Tiger-as-Chosen-One mythology. It’s how he has won. His game was unparalleled. His physical gifts were matched by his neurological gifts. He was the best at driving and the best at putting. He blew the field away; he trailed and then rallied on Sunday. He won with wise and conservative play; he won with brazen, you-must-be-kidding-me shot-making. He prevailed at the 2008 U.S. Open playing on what we later learned was a shredded knee. He performed miracles such as the famous chip shot on the sixteenth hole at the 2005 Masters, an absurd piece of handiwork that defied all prevailing laws of geometry and physics.

  Though Earl Woods passed away in 2006, over the years others joined his “Messiah chorus.” Esquire magazine described Tiger as “Yahweh with a short game.” The commentator Johnny Miller once declared, “Like Moses, [Tiger] parted the Red Sea and everyone else just drowned.” Even Woods’s mother, Kultida, seemed to buy in, at one point remarking: “He can hold everyone together. He is the Universal Child.” Inevitably perhaps, a website, tigerwoodsisgod.com, “celebrating the emergence of the true messiah,” came into being. (The site’s “Ten Tiger Commandments” include the directive “Thou shalt not covet Tiger’s game.”)

  Charles Barkley, always good for the unvarnished truth, declared that other PGA Tour players “are afraid of black Jesus.” Perhaps because it’s easier to rationalize the ritual butt kickings, check out how other golfers characterize Woods. “He is something supernatural,” declared Tom Watson. “He is superhuman,” asserted Paul Azinger. The apotheosis, so to speak, of Tiger deification came a few years ago when EA Sports made a golf video game. On one of the holes, Woods removes his Nikes, rolls up his slacks, and walks into a pond to hit a shot that naturally lands in the cup. It’s known as the Tiger Woods Jesus Shot.

  On Thanksgiving night in 2009, Woods was injured in what was first described as a “car accident.” The car accident quickly morphed into a train wreck, a sensational sex scandal that, perhaps you’ve heard, linked Woods to an unceasing string of women—porn stars, diner hostesses, reality show rejects—none of them his wife. Apart from the sheer tawdriness, the scandal had “legs” because of Tiger’s starring role. Headlines the likes of “Tiger’s Harem Grows” were jarringly at odds with a figure perceived as immortal. As Woods sought to assure us in his first public statement: “I’m human and I’m not perfect.”*

  But even before the scandal there existed conclusive proof that Tiger Woods is in fact mortal. What’s more, this proof comes from the way he golfs. Tiger putts the same way you and I do. He’s immeasurably more accurate, fluid, and poised, and his scores are much lower. But at least Tiger is subject to the same faulty thought process as we are.

  Recall loss aversion, the principle that we dislike losing a dollar more than we enjoy earning a dollar. As a result of loss aversion, we change our behavior—sometimes irrationally—paying too much attention to purchase price and avoiding short-term loss at the expense of long-term gain. In theory, tax purposes notwithstanding, what we paid for something is irrelevant. All that should matter is what it’s worth today and what it will be worth in the future. But we don’t behave that way. Investors routinely sell winning stocks too early and hold on to the dogs for too long. Home owners often do everything in their power to avoid selling their property for less than the purchase price. Texas hold ’em players depart from their strategy when their stacks of chips diminish. And golfers, even the pros, neglect their overall score to avoid a loss on a single hole.

  How do we know this? A few years ago, two professors, then at Wharton, Devin Pope and Maurice Schweitzer, began looking at the putting tendencies among 421 golfers on the PGA Tour in more than 230 tournaments. Using over 2.5 million laser-measured putts from tour events held between 2004 and 2009, they measured the success rate of nearly identical putts for birdie, par, and bogey. The idea was simple. Each hole on a golf course has a “par” score—the number of strokes you’re expected to take before depositing the ball in the hole. A shot in excess of par is, of course, a bogey. One shot less than par is a birdie. Put another way: A bogey is a “loss” and a birdie is a “gain” on that hole.

  In golf, however, the only measurement of true significance is the total score at the end of all 18 holes, so a player shouldn’t care whether he is putting for a birdie or par or a bogey on a hole. The idea is to maneuver the ball into the hole in as few strokes as possible on every hole, no matter what. Analogize this to your retirement portfolio. You simply want the most favorable total at the end. It shouldn’t matter how you got there.
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br />   The study, however, found something peculiar. When a golfer on the PGA Tour tries to make a birdie, he is less successful than when he lines up the exact same putt for par. The researchers were careful to measure the exact same distance (accurate to within a centimeter) of each putt, from the exact same location on the green, and from the exact same hole. In other words, they were looking at literally the same putt for birdie versus par from the same location on the green on the same hole. Even Tiger Woods—so unflappable, so mentally impregnable—changes his behavior based on the situation and putts appreciably better for par than he does for a birdie, evaluating decisions in the short term rather than in the aggregate.

  The explanation? The same loss aversion that affects Wall Street investors, home sellers, and consumers informs putting on the PGA Tour. Professional golfers are so concerned with a loss that they are more aggressive in avoiding a bogey than they are in scoring a birdie. Remember the dieters who weren’t motivated to lose weight until they faced the possibility of paying a $1,000 fine? Golfers operate the same way. Dangle the “bonus” of a birdie—the gain of a stroke—and it’s all well and good. Says Pope, “It’s as if they say, Let’s get this close to the hole and see what happens.” But threatened with the “deduction” of a bogey—the loss of a stroke—they summon their best effort. “They’re telling themselves,” says Pope, “This one I gotta make.”

  The professors also found something interesting to confirm the more aggressive behavior on par versus birdie putts. When professional golfers missed their putts for a birdie, they tended to leave the ball disproportionately short rather than long. This was evidence of their conservative approach. They were content to set up an easy par by leaving it short and not risk overshooting, which might leave a more difficult putt for par. When the same putts for par were missed, it wasn’t because they fell short.