Making the Majors: The Transformation of Team Sports in America. - book reviews

Administrative Science Quarterly,  Dec, 1997  by Robert N. Stern

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For those of us who have examined sport as a serious object of social and organizational research, Making the Majors brings the excitement of fresh ideas, the kind of information that keeps us engaged in the examination of sports as social structure and the serious understanding of one of the prominent social institutions of popular culture. For those who simply enjoy sport but focus their social science in other directions, here is an enjoyable, even intriguing tale along with all the empirical social science needed to justify reading about major league baseball, football, basketball, and hockey. The story moves forward in historical time from the pick-up baseball game, through the beginnings of organized leagues to the multibillion-dollar, institutionalized structure and practice of professional, major league sports. The objective is to understand the social and economic system underlying the production of competitive outcomes and the organizational structures required to produce loyal publics supporting the professional sports leagues dominating four major sports in the U.S.

Leifer's argument is that major league professional sports derive from strategies, often created by chance as much as planning, that developed within leagues to manage the tension between league interests, competitive outcomes, and the enthusiasts, termed publics, who watch the competition. Though the viewer wishes on the surface for a continually winning team, maintaining long-term support and interest requires a balance in competitive outcomes, The strategic contingency is developing competition in which losing does not drive away public interest in a team, as it did in the early days of baseball. Winning, losing, and crowning champions must become so routine and acceptable that enthusiasts continue to hunger for more games to watch and will always "wait 'til next season." The result is a long-run business strategy by league organizations for balancing competition, though such balance works against the short-run interests of any given team's supporters.

Once baseball was established as popular recreation, the complex relationship between professional and amateur players began to alter the nature of competition. For example, the development of professional baseball players became a resource utilized in the development of major league baseball, whereas the strength of amateur basketball and hockey, which developed partially in response to the professionalization of baseball, delayed the development of major league competition in these two sports. The emergence of baseball as the first professional major league sport is attributed to achieving the attachment of teams to cities. As the analysis unfolds, Leifer gives us data on most of the questions intriguing sports enthusiasts: What role did the great personalities of baseball play? What about the reserve clause, revenue sharing, recruiting players from colleges, and player-owner labor relations?

The advent of televised sports altered the environment sufficiently that the model exemplified by baseball no longer suited market conditions. The second prototype of the successful professional league developed in football; the attachment of teams to cities was broken, revenue sharing and player drafting by worst-team-first served to balance competition, and league governance became central to success. The early dominance of large cities with large audiences, evident in baseball, faded in the football model. Leifer finally speculates that the prototype of the coming third stage of major league development must be international. Teams cannot be attached to cities or even nations. They must be mobile, playing everywhere in the world, and in effect will be geographically homeless. Corporate identities are projected as possible attachments. Leifer's future may hold the McDonald's Macs, the Sony Sounders or the Philips Lightnings.

The real achievement of Leifer's work, however, lies in its quantifying and demonstrating the compelling story line through comprehensive data analysis. Each league as it appeared and fled the scene is characterized in terms of average team population base, average travel distance between teams, year-to-year performance ordering of teams, performance inequality over time, stability of league membership, and the number of locations in which two major leagues in the same sport directly competed for public audience. In other analyses, he adds the number of interteam trade transactions and the outcomes of direct competition between teams based on their previous performance and home field advantage. Leifer has taken both sports interests and organizational issues and provided a convincing sophisticated analysis, weaving the tale and the data into fine analytic material.

Despite these strengths, some concerns remain in considering this work. In Making the Majors, Leifer is most focused on the history, the interplay of seemingly unconnected events, emerging strategy, and outcomes characterizing the interaction between organized professional sports leagues and public supporters. Though he identifies demographics, performance ordering, and league organization as key variables, the organizational theory that applies is left to the reader to discover, often buried in the tale. For example, the triumph of league competition and economic strategy is inextricably tied to tension between central administration and the drive for local autonomy by teams and owners. In baseball, the power of owners kept the league tied to the early city-team union, making baseball unable to benefit fully from the revenue potential of television. The power of the central administration in football produces curbs on local team autonomy and an immense profit from joint sale of television rights. Though other organizational theory issues abound, they disappear into the enticing stories of Pete Rozelle, Judge Kennesaw Mountain Landis, or Charlie Finley.