OK, you've gone and bundled up two topics that will take seperate screeds to address: The question of what to make of Howard Dean, and the thorny issue of contemporary "liberal" racial politics. I've been thinking about the latter lately, thanks to that incendiary
anti-hiphop article by the seemingly omnipresent John McWhorter, and because I'm presently in Chicago, and visiting this city always gets me thinking about race.
I'm going to sit for another day or two on the full-length exposition I've been mulling over, and instead go off on a tangent based on one of your quips: if I saw a particularly white NBA team, I wouldn't think "Hey, those guys are racist;" instead, I'd think "hey, those guys are the Dallas Mavericks."
Since the Mavericks had the best record in the NBA last season, I'm inclined to think there's more than racial bias at work, there. It's no secret that a great deal of the new talent in the NBA for the past few years has been coming from Europe. These French and German and Former Yugoslavian players might not be selling a whole lot of sneakers, but they're certainly winning games.
The distinction between making money and winning games, incidentally, is my problem with that Michael Lewis book,
Moneyball. In a book that supposedly delves into the economics and particularly the management of professional baseball, I am baffled by the almost total absence of any analysis of the
profits made by baseball teams.
There is a brief platitude in the opening chapters, along the lines of "winning teams draw more fans, and thus make more money," and from that point forward, Lewis operates under the assumption that the goal of a baseball franchise is not
making money, but rather
winning games. With that said, I did enjoy the book immensely, and found it to be an excellent summary of Bill James' ideas, but it certainly isn't what it's been billed as in the press; that is, it isn't a discussion of the
business of baseball. I mean, he doesn't even
mention "revenue sharing."
Has anyone written a book about what makes one sports "market" more lucrative than another? Or is it just a simple matter of population?
PS: Haven't the surviving memebers of NWA
already been
reunited? I mean, how else could a group that only put out three records have a catalog of some dozen titles?
