Prospectus Hit List: T... (07/27)
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July 27, 2007 Lies, Damned LiesFixing It
Baseball must be toasting this week’s sports pages over glasses of vodka and schadenfreude. Last Friday, NBA referee Tim Donaghy was implicated in a betting scandal. On Wednesday, Tour de France leader Michael Rasmussen, under heavy suspicion of doping, was kicked out of the race by his own team. And on Thursday, Michael Vick was scrambling away from reporters in a federal courthouse, rather than opposing linebackers on the field. Of these scandals–and for that matter, Barry Bonds’ “scandalous” pursuit of the home run record–it's the NBA's that will have the farthest-reaching impact. Vick’s problems are strictly off the field, and the average NFL fan is probably more concerned about how he’ll impact their fantasy draft than what he did to those poor animals. Rasmussen (apparently) and Bonds (allegedly) cheated, but at least they did so in an effort to help themselves win. Only in the NBA is the integrity of the games themselves threatened. Could something similar happen in baseball? It’s no accident that the betting scandal happened in basketball, a sport in which the referees have a relatively large discretionary impact on the outcome of the contest (about one-quarter of all points in the NBA are scored on free throws). A gambling expert interviewed by ESPN estimated that an NBA official could influence the outcome in his favor as often as 75 percent of the time. At that figure, the incentives to cheat become compelling. The good news is that this number is surely much lower in baseball. If we located baseball on a continuum of sports relative to the impact that judges or officials have on the outcome of the contest, it would place closer to golf than to figure skating on the spectrum. Nevertheless, it is intriguing to figure out exactly what the relevant percentage is. If you bribed the home plate umpire to ensure that the Dodgers beat the Padres, how often could he facilitate that outcome? Would it be often enough to make corruption attractive?
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