Economics, Technology and Culture
It’s easy to see how events like the World Cup and the Super Bowl, together with the sports media, have become incredibly powerful. Once derided as the “toy department” of the newspaper, the sports media now command worldwide attention, respect and money. Money is a key factor, because as sports has grown in economic power and importance, so, too, have the sports media. According to sports media researcher Paul Pedersen, “The key facilitator of sport, not only as an economic force and pervasive sociological and cultural presence, but also as an influential commercial institution, is sport communication.” In some ways it is a chicken-and-egg argument: Are sports powerful and popular because of the media, or are media powerful and popular because of sports? The answer is probably: both. “How did baseball develop from the sandlots to the huge stadiums—from a few hundred spectators to the millions in attendance today?” asked Hall of Fame manager Connie Mack. “My answer is: through the gigantic force of publicity. The professional sports world was created and is being kept alive by the services extended the press.”
Mack’s point is that the media play an essential role in the economic, technological and cultural growth of American sports.
It’s best to understand today’s sports media as the intersection of money, technology and culture, with each element influencing the other two (see Figure 1-1). Culture is really the public demand for sports content, which has been growing since the 19th century. By the late 1800s, professional sports leagues and college sports programs had succeeded to the point that they had created a high level of interest among the general public. In 1893, Joseph Pulitzer created the first separate sports page at the New York World, and he was quickly followed by William Randolph Hearst at the New York Journal. In addition, newspapers began running special weekend sports sections, which helped increase the popularity of sports like college football.
Figure 1-1 Sports media seen as the interconnection of economics, technology and culture.
Demand escalated in the 1920s, as a nation weary of war returned home and found escape in the exploits of Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey, Red Grange and a host of other Jazz Age heroes. The sports media, including newspapers and the new medium of radio, played an essential role in delivering content and increasing public demand. “When a sportswriter stops making heroes out of athletes, it’s time to get out of the business,” sportswriter Grantland Rice once said, and along with other writers like Damon Runyan and Ring Lardner, he created plenty of heroes. Ruth received perhaps more adulation from the media than any other sports figure, before or since. He was not only the “Babe,” but “the Bambino,” “the Sultan of Swat” and “the Colossus of Clout.” Former teammate Harry Hooper observed of Ruth,
I saw it all from beginning to end, and sometimes I can’t believe what I saw: this kid, crude, poorly educated … gradually transformed into the idol of American youth and a symbol of baseball the world over. I saw a man transformed from a human being into something pretty close to a god.
Up to this time, professional sports were still considered gentlemanly pastimes, best described by baseball’s National League founder, William Hulbert. “You cannot afford to bid for the patronage of the degraded,” Hulbert said in 1881. “The sole purpose of the League, outside the business aspect, is to make it worthy of the patronage, support and respect of the best class of people.” But the success of Ruth and the Yankees, a team that in the Babe’s first year of 1920 shattered attendance records with 1.3 million fans, showed the tremendous money that could be made. Ruth himself became rich from his salary and many endorsements, with estimated lifetime earnings of more than two million dollars (around $32 million today). In the Depression years of 1930 and 1931, his base salary of $80,000 was more than that of President Herbert Hoover. “What’s Hoover got to do with it?” said Ruth. “Besides, I had a better year than he did.” When Grange turned professional with the Chicago Bears in 1925, he and the team embarked on a 17-game, cross-country barnstorming tour that reportedly netted Grange $200,000. Grange’s popularity was such that his appearances were credited with saving several shaky pro franchises, including the Giants, who drew a crowd of 73,000 when Grange played in New York.
Table 1-2 Highest Paid Players in Major League Baseball
It’s not hard to see the dramatic escalation of salaries, especially after the arrival of free agency in 1976. Ruth and DiMaggio are really anomalies in that other good players of their eras were not making the same kind of salaries. After DiMaggio became the first$100,000 player in 1949, it took until 1963 for another player (Willie Mays) to reach that level. Adjusted for inflation, the $1,800 Cap Anson made in 1880 comes out to just more than $42,000 in 2013—a far cry from the $29 million made by Alex Rodriguez.
| Year | Player(s) | Salary |
| 1880 | Cap Anson | $1,800 |
| 1910 | Ty Cobb, Nap Lajoie | $9,000 |
| 1931 | Babe Ruth | $80,000 |
| 1950 | Joe DiMaggio | $100,000 |
| 1972 | Carl Yastrzemski | $167,000 |
| 1980 | Nolan Ryan | $1,000,000 |
| 1997 | Albert Belle | $10,000,000 |
| 2013 | Alex Rodriguez | $29,000,000 |
In the early 20th century, sports ownership was still defined by the “gentlemen sportsmen” who owned teams as sidelights to their main businesses. But as demand and interest in sports grew, owners soon became rich. Along with brewer Jacob Ruppert, Tillinghast L’Hommedieu Huston bought the New York Yankees in 1915 for less than half a million dollars. In 1923, he sold his half of the franchise to Ruppert for $1.5 million.
It took longer for such windfalls to trickle down to the players, primarily because owners had legal advantages that restricted player freedom. The rise of sports unionism in the 1960s, and the corresponding birth of free agency and open markets in the 1970s, has turned the players into multimillionaires. Consider the average salary in Major League Baseball, which has risen from $1,200 in 1914, to $4,800 in 1920, $29,000 in 1970, and increased to $3.44 million in 2013 (see Table 1-2).
The sports media have certainly contributed to the financial growth of sports. At first, team owners feared radio and television because they worried it would hurt live attendance. In fact, in the early 1930s all three Major League Baseball teams in New York refused to put their games on the radio for that reason. Eventually, the owners found out that live broadcasting increased interest and attendance, and today broadcasting rights fees are an integral part of sports. Consider the rights fees to the Olympic Games. In 1960, CBS paid $50,000 to televise the Winter Games from Squaw Valley, California. NBC now owns the broadcast rights, and will pay around $1.275 billion for each of the Summer and Winter Games until 2032. “There is a white-hot market for major sports rights in the U.S. these days,” said the Wall Street Journal when the NBC deal was announced in 2014. “Nearly every major league or sports association has announced new, long-term media rights agreements that roughly double their current fees.”
Those rights fees only make sense because of the incredible growth of sports media technology, especially in terms of television and the Internet. Up through the 1970s technology was still fairly limited and could not really meet consumer demand. But the last four decades have seen breakthroughs in cable and satellite distribution, high-definition resolution, digital delivery and the Internet and social media. It has all combined to provide consumers with unprecedented options and experiences, and has changed the very nature of the sports media dynamic. Once, all power was invested in media outlets such as newspapers and television stations. They determined what content would be delivered, when it would go out and how it would be shaped and presented. Today, the consumer is no longer passive in this process, but an active participant who can determine:
- What to watch. The explosion of cable and satellite channels is only part of this. Technology now allows for pay-per-view experiences such as the NFL Sunday Ticket and the NHL’s Center Ice, which give fans the opportunity to purchase the games they want to watch. Sunday Ticket has more than 20 million subscribers in the United States and DirecTV pays the NFL more than a billion dollars to offer the service to its customers.
- When to watch. Sports fans who historically had to wait for the morning newspaper or nightly news program to get the scores obviously have more options today. The Internet is updated continuously, breaking down time zone barriers and shrinking the traditional news cycle from 24 hours to mere seconds. It has also created the idea of citizen journalists, where sports fans become active contributors and participants in the creation and delivery of sports content (see Chapter 2).
- How and where to watch. Given the dire financial situation of the newspaper industry, reading the evening paper at home is becoming increasingly rare, as is sitting around the living room for the late-night sports report on television. The Internet has introduced the concept of streaming—watching sports content on laptops, desktops and even mobile phones. In 2014, both the World Cup and the Super Bowl set records for streaming viewership, and industry experts say that sports video streaming is growing at a rate of 640% per year.
Interestingly, the fears of those major league owners in the 1930s may eventually come to pass. As the at-h...
