Zimbalist, Andrew S. 1947–

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Zimbalist, Andrew S. 1947–

PERSONAL: Born October 16, 1947, in New York, NY; son of Samuel Zimbalist and Dorothy Zimbalist; married; children: Jeffrey, Michael. Education: University of Wisconsin—Madison, B.A., 1969; Harvard University, M.A., 1972, Ph.D., 1974. Politics: Democrat. Hobbies and other interests: Music, dance, travel, tennis, baseball, reading, investing, politics.

ADDRESSES: Home—66 Washington Ave., Northampton, MA 01060. Office—Smith College, Wright Hall 114, Northampton, MA 01063. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Writer, educator, economist, public speaker, commentator, and economics consultant. Smith College, Northampton, MA, professor of economics, 1974–, Robert A. Woods Professor of Economics, 1991–. Visiting professor at Doshisha University, Kyoto, Japan, 1974, and the University of Geneva, 2003; visiting research fellow, Harvard University, 1980. Member, Five Colleges Graduate Faculty. Consultant in Latin America for the United Nations Development Program and the United States Agency for International Development. Has testified before the United States Senate and New York State Senate in hearings involving baseball matters; consultant for a nine-part documentary film on baseball prepared by Florentine Films and Ken Burns; consultant on sports economics to numerous law firms and companies. Guest on television and radio programs; commentator, Marketplace, National Public Radio, 2002–04. Chair of local cable board.

MEMBER: Association for Comparative Economic Studies, Latin American Scholars Association, American Economics Association, Society for American Baseball Research, New England Council of Latin American Studies.

AWARDS, HONORS: Baseball and Billions was named one of the top eight business books of 1992 by Business Week, one of the best business books of 1992 by Baseball Weekly, one of the best sports books of 1992 by Sporting News, one of the best books of 1992 by the San Francisco Chronicle, and a Feature Selection of the Diamond Baseball Book Club, 1993; named sports journalist of the year, Village Voice, 1998; Sports, Jobs, and Taxes was named a Breakthrough Book by Lingua Franca; National Pastime was named an Outstanding Academic Title by Choice; recipient of grants and fellowships from organizations, including the Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, and National Science Foundation.

WRITINGS:

(Editor) Case Studies on the Labor Process, Monthly Review Press (New York, NY), 1981.

(With others) Comparing Economic Systems, Dryden (Ft. Worth, TX), 1988.

(Editor) Cuban Political Economy: Controversies in Cubanology (part of "The Political Economy and Economic Development in Latin America" series), Westview (Boulder, CO), 1988.

(With Claes Brundenius) The Cuban Economy: Measurement and Analysis of Socialist Performance, Johns Hopkins University Press (Baltimore, MD), 1989.

(With John Weeks) Panama at the Crossroads: Economic and Political Development in the Twentieth Century, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 1991.

(Coeditor) Cuba in Transition, Westview (Boulder, CO), 1992.

Baseball and Billions: A Probing Look Inside the Big Business of Our National Pastime, Basic Books (New York, NY), 1992.

(Editor, with Roger G. Noll) Sports, Jobs, and Taxes: The Economic Impact of Sports Teams and Stadiums, Brookings Institution Press (Washington, DC), 1997.

Unpaid Professionals: Commercialism and Conflict in Big-Time College Sports, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 1999.

(Editor) The Economics of Sport, E. Elgar (Northampton, MA), 2001.

May the Best Team Win: Baseball Economics and Public Policy, Brookings Institution Press (Washington, DC), 2003.

(With Stefan Szymanski) National Pastime: How Americans Play Baseball and the Rest of the World Plays Soccer, Brookings Institution Press (Washington, DC), 2005.

The Bottom Line: Observations and Arguments on the Sports Business, Temple University Press (Philadelphia, PA), 2006.

In the Best Interests of Baseball?: The Revolutionary Reign of Bud Selig, Wiley (New York, NY), 2006.

Contributor to Diamonds Are Forever: The Economics of Professional Baseball, Brookings Institution, 1992. Contributor of articles to periodicals, including The Journal of Latin American Studies, Foreign Policy, Seton Hall Journal of Sport Law, New York Times, Boston Globe, New Republic, Nation, USA Today, Foreign Policy, World Development, Brill's Content, Chronicle of Higher Education, Le Monde Diplomatique, Latin American Research Review, Journal of Sports Economics, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Forbes, Wall Street Journal, and New York Times Magazine.

Member of editorial board, Comparative Economic Studies, 1987–90, Latin American Perspectives, 1988–, and Journal of Sports Economics. Author of column for Sports Business Journal.

SIDELIGHTS: Economics professor Andrew S. Zimbalist has written a number of books on various aspects of Latin American fiscal policy. Zimbalist is especially well known as a sports economist whose works focus on the complex economics of baseball in America. The 1992 publication of Baseball and Billions: A Probing Look Inside the Big Business of Our National Pastime brought Zimbalist attention from outside scholarly circles. The work elicited generous media attention for its analysis of the tightly controlled and highly profitable sport that Americans revere as a cultural legacy.

Major League Baseball today is not quite the same loose federation it began as in the nineteenth century. The twenty-eight teams that are divided among the National and American Leagues are overseen by a commission, whose chief is elected by the wealthy franchise owners. The players, whose starting salaries hover around one hundred thousand dollars, have also organized themselves, and media contracts, advertising revenues, and licensing agreements complete the picture to give evidence of a large and well-oiled industry of the sport.

Zimbalist begins Baseball and Billions with an examination of the unusual legal decision that continues to govern American Major League Baseball today. In 1922 U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes ruled in favor of exempting the baseball team owners from federal antitrust laws, which were designed to prevent businesses from holding a monopoly in a particular enterprise. The exemption was based upon the fact that, in 1922, the sport of baseball did not engage in interstate commerce. Holmes later admitted his judgment was in error, but the courts have consistently upheld it through the years. Zimbalist points out in his book how this ruling has crippled the sport, allowing owners to limit the number of teams, relegating the minor leagues to mere feeder status, and classically pitting players against management and fans against athletes.

The owners, according to Zimbalist, continue to perpetuate the claim that the teams are losing money and may no longer be viable, due to the high costs of maintaining player salaries. Baseball and Billions exposes how the team owners and the self-appointed regulatory body are not in fact losing money, but rather coming out substantially ahead fiscally. Zimbalist details the questionable accounting procedures that easily bury a yearly profit for a franchise into a distinct loss on the annual report. Advertising revenues, higher ticket prices, and licensing agreements all appear to be shrewd and lucrative moves, yet management pits the extremely loyal and nostalgic American public against the perceived greediness of the players who, the owners charge, demand unfairly high compensation for their athletic prowess. Zimbalist offers a remedy for this fiasco: throwing out the antitrust exemption, which is today beneficial only to the owners, and expanding the number of teams, a move which will shift the pool of talent currently stuck in the minors to publicly or municipally held teams.

Baseball and Billions was widely reviewed in the press upon its publication. The noted scientist and popular writer Stephen Jay Gould, reviewing the work for the New York Review of Books, was one of the few dissenters not heralding Zimbalist's proposals for reform. Gould theorized that baseball, with its commercialization and huge profitability hiding behind classic labormanagement antagonism, is merely a reflection of what American society is today. While Gould conceded that the thesis of Baseball and Billions is "particularly well organized and clearly presented," he maintained that the rampant public nostalgia inherent in the game will impede any alteration. Warren Goldstein maintained in a Nation review that Zimbalist's book "will help fans and politicians make sense of the tremendous tangle of baseball economics," noting that the "careful analysis" is "written with clarity, calm and a wry skepticism." Charles P. Pierce, commenting on Baseball and Billions for the Atlantic Monthly, praised the volume for being "clear-eyed and coldhearted … [offering] blessed relief from the gooey coalescence of romantic pomp and statistical circumstance that so afflicts the vast parade of baseball books."

Zimbalist's ideas about sports economics frequently tend to be controversial, and a number of them demolish cherished beliefs held by fans, team owners, and the cities that host sports teams. In an interview with Michael J. Bandler in U.S. Society and Values, Zimbalist remarked on the misconceptions surrounding the economic benefits that sports teams provide to the cities that claim them. "The independent economic research that's been done on the question of whether sports teams and sports facilities have an economic impact on an area has uniformly found that there is no positive impact," Zimbalist stated. He expands on this idea in Sports, Jobs, and Taxes: The Economic Impact of Sports Teams and Stadiums, edited with Roger G. Noll, in which he "begins with the assumption that these facilities are poor economic investments and proceeds to prove this point," according to reviewer Tim Chapin in the Journal of the American Planning Association. "This superb book provides a behind-the-scenes look at decisions to build and fund sports stadiums and attract teams to play in them," observed Paul D. Staudohar in Industrial and Labor Relations Review.

Zimbalist and the contributors to Sports, Jobs, and Taxes document instances of city populations deceasing in the areas around stadiums. Zimbalist notes that people spending their discretionary funds to attend sporting events invariably reduce the amount they spend on other recreation, including movies, meals in restaurants, and other activities that bolster a local economy. Jobs created by the presence of stadiums and teams often come at an extraordinary cost, despite contrary arguments by teams and municipalities. A new stadium for the Arizona Diamondbacks baseball team, for example, generated 340 new full-time equivalent jobs, but the jobs ultimately cost Arizona taxpayers more than 705,000 dollars each, noted Staudohar. "That same money applied to other forms of economic development will almost always produce more jobs, and do so more fairly, because sports team revenues mostly go to pay the astronomical salaries of athletes and coaches, many of whom do not even live in the area," commented Harold Henderson in Planning. "One can easily explain the interest in having professional sports teams as primarily social and cultural in nature," Zimbalist commented to Bandler. "I don't think sports contribute to economic viability in a community," he continued; however: "They do provide a form of entertainment, engagement, and community identity, and that can be very positive."

Zimbalist also finds problems at the collegiate sports level. Unpaid Professionals: Commercialism and Conflict in Big-Time College Sports is a "scathing indictment of the current state of intercollegiate athletics played at the highest level in the United States," commented Brad R. Humphreys in the Southern Economic Journal. Furthermore, Humphreys noted, the author explains the "detrimental impact of college athletics on the intellectual standards and educational process at American universities." Zimbalist elaborates on the conflicted behavior of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) in attempting to reform college athletics, its role as a cartel in control of college sports, and its seemingly hypocritical stance with regard to the economic distinctions between collegiate athletics and professional sports. He also thoroughly explores the forces of commercialism and the immense pressures they exert on college sports. The "brunt of his book constitutes a stunning catalog of excess and exploitation," observed Booklist reviewer Wes Lukowsky. Zimbalist offers solutions to the problems he sees, however, including a ten-point program for reforming and recasting the NCAA. He "provides a compelling case for the need to reform college athletics," noted a Publishers Weekly reviewer. Zimbalist "has produced a fine piece of scholarship on a complex topic," Humphreys stated, in a book that is "entertaining, informative, and well written."

In National Pastime: How Americans Play Baseball and the Rest of the World Plays Soccer Zimbalist and coauthor Stefan Szymanski explore the similarities and differences in the American sport of baseball and the global sport of football, better known in America as soccer. The authors provide a history of the two sports and how each grew to reflect the tastes and characteristics of the countries that created and nourished them. They explain how football is a fiercely competitive business, organized into hierarchical national leagues, in which teams can organize and play largely at will. Good football teams, no matter their origin, will invariably rise to the top of their domestic leagues, at which point they can begin competing internationally. Good teams quickly win fan support and economic benefits; bad teams just as quickly lose their fans and funds. In comparison, American baseball is highly restricted to a limited number of teams, is controlled by a monopolistic cartel that is exempt from U.S. antitrust laws, and is structured so that teams will generate considerable revenue, win or lose. Zimbalist and Szymanski also relate how broadcasting, at first resisted, eventually came to be a significant source of revenue for both football and baseball teams. Library Journal reviewer Morey Berger called National Pastime a "worthy sports business book."

Zimbalist once told CA: "The reception of Baseball and Billions has been very gratifying. Even several owners have told me it was on the mark. One point often misinterpreted in my argument is my attitude toward the owners. I do not think that any group of individuals should be entrusted with monopoly control over any industry with no public regulation over trade practices. Good men and women will take advantage of the circumstance and the outcome will not be in the consumers' best interest. The absence of competition in Major League Baseball has replaced Darwin's survival of the fittest with survival of everyone. The path to solution involves lifting baseball's unique exemption from the country's antitrust laws."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Zimbalist, Andrew, Baseball and Billions: A Probing Look Inside the Big Business of Our National Pastime, Basic Books, 1992.

PERIODICALS

Atlantic Monthly, October, 1992, Charles P. Pierce, review of Baseball and Billions, p. 112; June, 2003, David Kipen, review of May the Best Team Win: Baseball Economics and Public Policy, p. 92.

Booklist, September 1, 1999, Wes Lukowsky, review of Unpaid Professionals: Commercialism and Conflict in Big-Time College Sports, p. 63.

Economist, April 30, 2005, "Bat and Ball; Sport," review of National Pastime: How Americans Play Baseball and the Rest of the World Plays Soccer, p. 81.

Houston Chronicle, April 18, 2003, Allen Barra, "Monopoly Called Cause of Baseball's Woes," review of May the Best Team Win.

Industrial and Labor Relations Review, July, 1998, Paul D. Staudohar, review of Sports, Jobs, and Taxes: The Economic Impact of Sports Teams and Stadiums, p. 712.

Journal of the American Planning Association, summer, 1999, Tim Chapin, review of Sports, Jobs, and Taxes, p. 339.

Library Journal, February 1, 2003, Paul Kaplan and Robert C. Cottrell, review of May the Best Team Win, p. 89; May 1, 2005, Morey Berger, review of National Pastime, p. 96.

Nation, March 1, 1993, Warren Goldstein, review of Baseball and Billions, p. 273.

New York Review of Books, November 5, 1992, Stephen Jay Gould, review of Baseball and Billions, p. 41.

New York Times, May 25, 2003, Lawrence S. Ritter, "Show Me the Money," review of May the Best Team Win, Section 7, p. 7.

Planning, April, 1998, Harold Henderson, review of Sports, Jobs, and Taxes, p. 31.

Public Manager: The New Bureaucrat, winter, 1998, Jennifer Mayer, review of Sports, Jobs, and Taxes, p. 60.

Publishers Weekly, July 12, 1999, review of Unpaid Professionals, p. 82; February 24, 2003, review of May the Best Team Win, p. 64.

Southern Economic Journal, October, 2000, Brad R. Humphreys, review of Unpaid Professionals, p. 488.

U.S. Society and Values, December, 2003, Michael J. Bandler, "Sports and Economics," interview with Andrew Zimbalist.