Game theory

WHEN Yogi Berra, the famously quotable Yankees catcher of the 1950s, mused that a familiar situation was “like déjà vu all over again”, America’s Major League Baseball (MLB) had never employed a Japanese player. Yet Mr Berra’s turn of phrase seems more apt than ever following the announcement on January 18th that the Texas Rangers had signed Yu Darvish, a highly touted 25-year-old Japanese-Iranian starting pitcher, to a six-year, $60m contract—one month after they paid a further $51.7m for the right to deal with him to the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters, his Japanese club, which is named for the meatpacking company that owns it.

Just five years ago Daisuke Matsuzaka was 26 years old, recognised by common consent as the best pitcher in Japan, and had delivered a dominating performance in leading Japan to victory in the first-ever World Baseball Classic (WBC) tournament. Mr Matsuzaka was lured by the tougher competition and higher salaries available on the game’s biggest stage. In order to cross the Pacific and join MLB, he had to use the posting system, a mechanism agreed to between MLB and Japan’s Nippon Professional Baseball in 1998, which aims to protect Japanese clubs from losing their players to American teams without compensation.

If a Japanese player under contract to an NPB team wants to join MLB before finishing his mandatory nine years of service to his current employer, he must request and receive permission from his club to be “posted” to MLB. All 30 American teams can then submit sealed bids for the exclusive right to negotiate with the player. The winner then offers the promised amount to the NPB club. If the bid is accepted, the MLB team gets 30 days to sign the player to a contract. If the two sides cannot come to terms, the posting fee is refunded and the player returns to NPB, where he must stay until he can be posted again the following year.

Mr Matsuzaka was the biggest star to be posted since Ichiro Suzuki, a speedy outfielder who was voted the American League’s Most Valuable Player during his first season in the United States. The Boston Red Sox, locked in a fierce rivalry with the New York Yankees at the time, bid a massive $51.1m for the right to talk to Mr Matsuzaka—nearly four times Mr Suzuki’s previous record posting fee. They inked him to a six-year, $52m deal one month later, bringing his total price tag to $103m—then the third-biggest commitment to a pitcher in MLB history.

Boston fans had plenty of reason to celebrate the following season, as the team won its second World Series in four years. But Mr Matsuzaka was seen as a mild disappointment, pitching only moderately better than a league-average starter. The next year his results improved, but his poor control led him to tire and leave games too early. And since then it has been all downhill. Over the past three years Mr Matsuzaka has pitched infrequently and poorly, and he is currently recovering from reconstructive elbow surgery. According to Fangraphs.com, a statistical website, his performance has been worth just $45m to the Red Sox, far short of the $93m they have invested in him.

Virtually everything that was said about Mr Matsuzaka when he was posted can also be said of Mr Darvish. He is in his mid-20s. He is universally recognised as the best pitcher in Japan. He led his country to another title in the 2009 WBC. His fastball, just like Mr Matsuzaka’s, usually comes in at 91-94 miles (146-151km) per hour and tops out at 97. And he throws a dizzying array of secondary pitches—an arsenal whose breadth may only have been matched in recent times by Mr Matsuzaka’s. Are the Rangers forgetting history and thus bound to repeat it?

The Rangers have good reason to believe that Mr Matsuzaka is not a good comparison. First, Mr Darvish’s Japanese statistics are significantly better than Mr Matsuzaka’s were. He has allowed just 47% as many earned runs over the last five years as an average NPB pitcher would have in the same number of innings. In contrast, Mr Matsuzaka gave up earned runs at 61% of the league-average rate during his final four years in NPB.

Moreover, Mr Darvish has much more of a classic pitcher’s build than does Mr Matsuzaka. At six feet, five inches (1.96m) and 216 pounds (98kg), he throws on a sharp downward plane, forcing batters to hit the ball on the ground—a particularly valuable asset in the Rangers’ stadium, where the hot, humid air transforms harmless fly balls into towering home runs. His size may also help his body hold up to the wear and tear of pitching every five days in MLB, rather than the six that is customary in Japan. Mr Matsuzaka, who stands a comparatively modest six feet and weighs 185 pounds, induced far too few ground balls and broke down in just his third season in Boston.

Finally, Mr Darvish is likely to find the transition to America easier than Mr Matsuzaka did. He comes from a multicultural family: his Iranian father attended high school and university in the United States, where he met Mr Darvish’s mother. The family spoke English at home until their son was three, and Nolan Ryan, the Rangers’ CEO and an iconic pitcher of the 1970s and 80s, reported that Mr Darvish “understands a lot of English” after meeting him earlier this month. And Mr Darvish is already comfortable in the spotlight. Thanks both to his success on the field and his marriage to Saeko, a famous Japanese actress (which ended on January 19th), he has been a celebrity in his home country for years, and frequently poses for magazine covers.

None of this makes Mr Matsuzaka’s travails irrelevant. Some Japanese pitchers have made the transition to America better than others, and throwing $112m at a player who has never thrown a MLB pitch can only be seen as a big gamble. But after the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, the Rangers’ rivals in the American League’s highly competitive western division, signed Albert Pujols, the sport’s best player, to a ten-year contract last month, rolling the dice on Mr Darvish was probably the only hope Texas had of keeping pace.

FOR decades professional sports franchises have sat idly by while scalpers—ahem, resellers—have made hefty profits off their mispricing of tickets. Although demand varies wildly from game to game depending on factors like the home team’s success, the opponent and the weather, most clubs have set a single price for each seat at the start of the season, and maintained it throughout the year. For particularly desirable matchups, that leaves millions on the table for resellers to appropriate. In contrast, for less attractive games, it causes thousands of seats to remain unsold.

Teams have accepted these inefficiencies for fear of alienating their customers by increasing prices sharply with little advance notice, and because reliable data on the secondary market was hard to come by. With the advent of the internet and resale sites like StubHub, however, ever-greater numbers of fans are now buying previously purchased tickets for prices other than face value. And the going rate for any given seat has become available instantly to anyone with a mouse. As a result, franchises are learning to price their tickets dynamically, just as airlines and hotels have long done.

Rather than developing proprietary pricing models, clubs in the United States, where the trend has been the most pronounced, have mainly opted to outsource their pricing. So far, the market leader has been Qcue, founded by Barry Kahn, an economist, which says it sells 85% of dynamically priced tickets. Digonex, which also offers pricing services to hotels and car parks, has also secured a number of high-profile clients.

Of the big North American sports, the fastest to adapt has been Major League Baseball (MLB), mainly because it has the highest game-to-game variation in demand. Baseball teams rotate their starting pitchers every five days, causing fans to choose specific matchups in order to see a particularly interesting hurler. And since they play outdoors almost every day, the weather and day of the week can lead to big swings in interest. Demand can also change dramatically over the course of the season. Since less than a quarter of MLB teams enter the post-season tournament in October, the stakes for games in late September that determine which clubs will make it are extremely high.

Moreover, season-ticket holders make up a small share of total seats. And sellouts in baseball are comparatively rare, because all of its stadiums can accommodate over 40,000 fans and its season is 162 games long. In the most extreme case, the Oakland Athletics have given up on selling their upper-deck seats entirely, and covered them with a tarp (pictured). This means teams usually have seats available right up to the first pitch, providing more opportunities for last-second pricing changes.

As a result, just three years after the San Francisco Giants became the first MLB team to offer seats with no set face value, over half the game’s clubs are using dynamic pricing. According to Mr Kahn, the impact on teams’ bottom lines has been substantial. By adjusting the price of a given seat by as much as five or six times over, they have been able to raise full-price attendance by 15% and total ticket revenue by 30%.

The other big sports in the United States have been slower to move to flexible pricing. It has proved of little use to the National Football League, which plays just 16 games a year (almost all on Sundays); relies heavily on season tickets; and shares big percentages of ticket revenue evenly among all clubs. As for the National Basketball Association (NBA), its regular season is a much lower-pressure affair than MLB’s, since over half its clubs make the playoffs. Its arenas are indoors and can only hold 20,000 people. And many people who attend—particularly those who buy high-priced courtside seats—are more interested in the broad experience of watching an NBA game than they are in any specific opponent. Despite these hurdles, a third of the league’s teams are still using dynamic pricing in some form.

The next step for dynamic pricing will be globalisation. English football clubs have already tried to follow baseball’s lead in using statistical analysis to make better decisions about which players to pursue. They could surely do the same with baseball’s innovations off the pitch: in fact, some research has already been done on how they might make use of dynamic pricing. In the Premier League’s cutthroat economic environment, whichever club figures out how to apply it best the soonest will enjoy an enviable advantage.

NEW YORK TIMES writer on his reporting of the health risks related to concussions in professional and high-school American football

SPORTS and television usually go together like cheese and wine. But one sport has always been difficult to beam into fans’ living rooms: sailing. This week the two pastimes clashed at the World Sailing Championships in Perth, Australia, when Ben Ainslie, Britain’s most successful sailor with three Olympic gold medals to his name, was disqualified from the event. His crime was jumping off his boat after finishing second in a race, swimming over to a press boat whose wake he believes slowed his, boarding it and reprimanding its crew. “On the final downwind leg of the race,” he said, “I was hindered by a media boat, the actions of which I felt were seriously impeding my race.”

Mr Ainslie’s track record makes him a magnet for press coverage from the water. But whether his outburst was truly justified by intrusive cameras or simply a reaction to losing the race is hard to say. Some observers were sympathetic to his complaints. Sailing “seems to be fumbling its way into trying to make the sport more appealing for television,” says Stephen Park, the Olympic manager of Britain’s Royal Yachting Association, “but surely there is a better way than trialing new media initiatives at the World Championship.” Regardless, Mr Ainslie may face further penalties up to a maximum two-year ban—which would severely damage Britain’s medal hopes at the 2012 Olympics, which it will host.

The difficulty with filming yacht racing for television is that it relies on the wind. Races can be postponed if the wind fails to arrive or abandoned if there is too much, making scheduling difficult. While some race courses are fixed (round an island or to a destination), meaning press boats know where the sailors will be in advance, in competitions like the World Championships or Olympics the course of movable marks are set on the day to suit the wind angle and strength. This makes the route a sailor may choose to complete the course difficult to predict and thus harder to film.

In addition to the logistical problems, sailing has one golden rule: no outside assistance. This means no coaches shouting instructions from the sidelines and no sacrificial pacemaker easing the way ahead, as is common in cycling or distance running. When your playing field is water and your power source is the wind, sharing them with press boats creating wash or blocking the wind could be an advantage to some but a hindrance to others.

WHEN an Indian poultry company called Venky’s announced a £43m ($67m) takeover of Blackburn Rovers in November 2010, fans hoped the change in ownership and an injection of funds would help lift the English football club from the bottom half of the Premiership table. Venky’s even talked boldly of attracting big-name players to the team, and of finishing in the top five. One year later, relations between owners and fans are among the worst the Premier League has ever known. Having scooped just 10 points over the first half of the season, Blackburn needs a dramatic revival to escape relegation next May. Demotion to a lower league could mark the demise of one of the oldest clubs in the country, and one of just four that have won the Premiership since it launched in 1992.

Blackburn’s recent disappointments have been all too predictable. Venky’s is a seemingly well-run company, generating profits of about £90m on revenues of £1.05 billion in the last financial year. But it clearly lacks the spending power of either the Abu Dhabi United Group or Roman Abramovich, the respective owners of Manchester City and Chelsea, two other clubs trying to buy Premier League success. This became starkly evident after the takeover was completed, when Venky’s said it would spend £5m on new players in the January transfer window. At the time, Manchester City’s most expensive signing alone, of Robinho, had cost its owners some £32.5m, while Chelsea’s, of Fernando Torres, had set Mr Abramovich back a reported £50m. With other rich clubs like Manchester United and Liverpool also in the mix, Venky’s top-five target seemed hopeful from the outset.

The experience of Venky’s is enough to dissuade almost any profit-seeking owner from venturing into the Premiership. Both the Abu Dhabi United Group and Roman Abramovich are widely assumed to be in it for the prestige. Their inordinate wealth means they can run Manchester United City and Chelsea at a substantial loss, if need be, in their quest for sporting glory. Most other investors, including Venky’s, have no such luxury. Without any regulation of what the richest clubs can spend or sufficient revenue sharing, the Premiership has become a two-tier contest: a handful of clubs compete for the title and most others just try to survive.

Some investors may see brand benefits in owning a Premiership team. Yet bar the likes of Manchester United and Liverpool, few clubs are recognised internationally. Players with the marketability of David Beckham are also in short supply. For those reasons, television commercials featuring little-known Blackburn footballers munching on Venky’s products seem unlikely to boost sales in India, where they were screened. The company tried to address one shortcoming in January, when it made a bid for Ronaldinho, a Brazilian former World Footballer of the Year now well past his prime. But venerated players are picky about where to end their careers, preferring to avoid lower-profile clubs, and he rejected the offer. Besides embarrassing Venky’s, the failed bid appeared to contradict an aim of rejuvenating the team.

Owners of clubs that slip into the so-called “relegation zone” (comprising the bottom three clubs in the Premiership table) inevitably risk a backlash from fans, unless they have distanced themselves from day-to-day affairs. Venky’s has exacerbated this reaction by making some decisions that probably accelerated Blackburn’s collapse. One of its first moves after taking over was to fire Sam Allardyce, the manager, and replace him with Steve Kean, the former first-team coach. While Mr Allardyce is one of the most experienced “mid-table” managers in English football, seen as capable of keeping his clubs well clear of the relegation zone, Venky’s wanted to see a more aesthetically pleasing game. Yet a transfer budget of just £5m is unlikely to produce the artistry of Arsenal, no matter who is in charge. What’s more, Mr Kean was originally hired by Mr Allardyce, and so choosing him to instil a different style of football seemed counter-intuitive. With no previous management experience, he has now presided over 18 defeats in 36 matches, drawing 11 and winning just seven.

Relegation from the Premiership deprives clubs of commercial arrangements worth millions of pounds, and would cost Venky’s dearly. Blackburn has been there before, suffering the ignominy of demotion in 1999, just four years after winning the title. It returned to the league two years later. But its executive team and financial position looked stronger then than now. In the meantime, the gulf in value between the Premiership and the Championship, the next division down, has widened dramatically. Venky’s may be thinking about offloading its investment. But unless it can attract a buyer with the resources of today's wealthiest owners, it could struggle to give Blackburn away.

JUST six weeks ago the St Louis Cardinals won their tenth 11th World Series title. They were led by Albert Pujols, the superstar first baseman who is by common consent the best player in baseball, who hit three home runs in the contest’s third game. The club’s 2011 championship flag should probably start flying at half-mast now that Mr Pujols has signed a ten-year, $254m contract with the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, which will expire when he is 41. The deal is the second-biggest in the game’s history, eclipsed only by the ten-year, $275m pact the New York Yankees gave to Alex Rodríguez in 2007. Mr Rodríguez’s contract is now seen as an ill-advised excess taken by the game’s richest club. Can the Angels, who generate barely half the revenues that the Yankees do, possibly afford to take such a costly risk?

The decision by Jerry DiPoto, the Angels’ new general manager, and Arte Moreno, their big-spending owner, may not be as rash as it first appears. First, baseball players are worth more now than they were when the Yankees handed over the family jewels to Mr Rodríguez. The game’s revenues have increased from $6 billion to $7 billion during the last four years, making all players roughly 17% more valuable. Second, Mr Pujols is a year younger than Mr Rodríguez was when he signed his last deal. And Mr Rodríguez’s performance has deteriorated a bit more precipitously in recent years than could reasonably have been expected following his phenomenal 2007 campaign. Mr Pujols’s best years are surely behind him. But he is just as likely to age as gracefully as did, say, Stan Musial, another Cardinals icon, as he is to fall hard and fast like Mr Rodríguez has.

Back in February I calculated that Mr Pujols would be worth some $220m to the Cardinals from 2011-20. The Angels will be getting Mr Pujols a year later, which would reduce his value to just under $200m. On the other hand, they also play in a far bigger market than the Cardinals do, and must compete for fans with the crosstown Los Angeles Dodgers, increasing the importance of fielding a winning team. All told, the Angels will probably be paying Mr Pujols a few million dollars per season more than his play will be worth. But if suiting up the game’s best player offers them any significant off-field value by strengthening their brand—a variable that is extremely hard to measure—then they stand a decent chance of breaking even.

Where does this leave the Cardinals? Getting their fans to forgive them for letting the hometown hero go—although Mr Pujols spent his early years in the Dominican Republic, he attended high school in Missouri—will take some masterful public-relations work. (Bill DeWitt, the club’s owner, said he was “disappointed” and said the team “tried our best to make Albert a lifetime Cardinal”.) But provided they spend the money they had set aside for Mr Pujols wisely, they stand a decent chance of defending their crown. The club managed to win the title last year even though Adam Wainwright, one of its top pitchers, missed the season while recovering from Tommy John surgery. He is expected back next year. Mr Pujols’s departure will allow the team to move Lance Berkman, an aging power hitter, to the newly vacant first-base position, where his defensive shortcomings will be minimised. And there are plenty of free agents, such as Jimmy Rollins and Carlos Beltrán, remaining on the market who could jointly replace Mr Pujols’s production, if not his sizzle.

If Mr DeWitt wants to placate St Louis fans with a flashier signing, he has one further intriguing option. If Mr Pujols had not revealed his decision today, the biggest headline in baseball would have been the announcement on the blog of Yu Darvish, the Japanese-Iranian star pitcher for Japan’s Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters, that he plans to play in the United States in 2012. American scouts have long drooled over the 25-year-old Mr Darvish, who has dominated hitters both in Japan and in international competition. He has long maintained that he preferred to stay at home. However, now that he is getting divorced from Saeko, a Japanese actress, he has shown a newfound enthusiasm to compete on the game’s biggest stage.

There is no guarantee that the Cardinals can sign Mr Darvish. They would first have to win a sealed-bid auction for the exclusive rights to negotiate with him, and then offer him enough money to pry him away from his current employer. And most highly touted Japanese starting pitchers have either flamed out after early success in America or failed to make an impact at all. Daisuke Matsuzaka, whose combined $51m auction fee and $52m contract were a record for a Japanese import in 2007, is now reviled by Boston Red Sox fans as a bust. But Mr Darvish’s record in Japan is better than those of any of his predecessors. And he offers greater star power than just about any baseball player this side of, well, Albert Pujols.

(Photo credit: AFP)

WHEN the National Basketball Association’s (NBA) players’ union rejected the owners’ “final” take-it-or-leave-it proposal to end their lockout on November 14th, David Stern (pictured), the league’s commissioner, deemed the impasse a “nuclear winter” for the league. As such deep freezes go, the 12 days that passed before the two sides announced on November 26th that they had reached a deal to save the 2011-12 season were downright balmy. The details of the new collective-bargaining agreement (CBA) are still being finalised. But an abbreviated 66-game season will start on Christmas Day, and the pact ensures labour peace for at least the next six years.

Compared with the status quo, the new CBA is far more favourable to the owners. Their guaranteed share of the league’s basketball-related income will increase from 43% in 2010-11 to 49% next season, and then move to a range of 49-51%, depending on the league’s overall revenues. The maximum individual contract length will be shortened from six years to five. The “luxury tax” imposed on teams that exceed the formal maximum payroll by a given amount will become far more punitive, and a number of exceptions that allow clubs to spend over the cap will be curtailed.

Yet the players extracted some significant concessions that were not included in the November 14th offer. If their share of the league’s income exceeds the agreed-upon limit, the owners cannot reduce their salaries in subsequent years, as the league had previously demanded. The owners also wanted to prevent clubs that pay the luxury tax from using salary-cap loopholes and from receiving players in “sign-and-trade” deals. Sign-and-trades will now continue unfettered for two years, and will subsequently remain available to teams whose payrolls are within $4m of the luxury-tax threshold, as will one frequently used cap exception. The players also got an increase in the minimum team payroll, a higher salary limit for young stars and an increase in the amount of revenue that big-market clubs will share with their rivals in smaller cities—a means of bridging the gap between the league’s haves and have-nots without further reducing salaries.

The parties took just five days to hammer out the agreement, after the lockout was 144 days old. Neither side has said what changed in such a short time. The owners may have decided to give a bit more ground once the players showed they were willing to take their chances with an antitrust suit, even if it meant a prolonged work stoppage. Or they may have felt extra pressure after Major League Baseball announced its new CBA, which was reached without any public acrimony, on November 22nd. In hindsight, the contours of the eventual deal were already evident when Mr Stern first cancelled games on October 10th. But the loss of a mere 20% of the season falls far short of the pessimistic forecasts made earlier this month. The lockout will probably be all but forgotten by playoff time.

(Photo credit: AFP)

SINCE the death last month of Dan Wheldon (pictured), a British driver who perished in a terrifying 15-car pile-up at the Las Vegas 300 IndyCar series finale, the world of motor sport has been agonising over safety. Was the new chief executive of IndyCar, Randy Bernard, who offered Wheldon $5m to split with a fan if he could get from the very last place at the start to win, partly to blame for the accident? Is Europe’s Formula One, whose open-wheel, open-cockpit cars broadly resemble those of IndyCar racing, much safer than the American championship? For Michael Schumacher, a star Formula One driver, Wheldon’s death was simply “fate”. Other drivers blamed the characteristics of IndyCar racing, such as its short, banked ovals, packed grids and rookie drivers.

When a driver dies, no one in the sport talks about anything except designing safer tracks, more protective cars and better equipment. IndyCar will now spend months investigating the reasons for Wheldon’s death, with the help of the Paris-based Federation Internationale de l’Automobile, the world governing body for motor sports.

But racing’s relationship with safety is in fact more complicated. Many of its overseers believe that danger, collisions and spectacular crashes are an essential part of what keeps spectators flocking to the tracks and viewers glued to screens. They worry that audiences will decline if racing becomes an orderly procession around a roomy track.

To be sure, there is no statistically significant evidence showing a clear link between crashes and motor-racing’s popularity. After the death in 1994 of Ayrton Senna, a Brazilian driver featured in a recent film, Formula One launched a safety revolution, and nonetheless grew massively as an industry. NASCAR followed suit after Dale Earnhardt, one of its biggest stars, crashed and died on national live television in 2001. Drivers have pushed for more safety, and sponsors have shied away from blood on the track.

Even so, this trend led Mr Bernard, who took over in 2010, to see a business opportunity. Following a damaging schism with its governing body in 1996, IndyCar had steadily lost sponsorship and viewing figures. Mr Bernard sought to revitalise it by making danger its unique selling point. Earlier this year he boasted to Forbes magazine that no Formula One driver and hardly any NASCAR drivers would accept to race in it, no matter how much money was on the table.

NASCAR has faced widespread criticism in the last few years that it has become too safe and boring. Since 2001 it has not had a single death, compared with ten fatalities in the decade before Earnhardt’s death, according to the Charlotte Observer, a newspaper which claims to be the only source of complete statistics on injury and death in motor-racing. NASCAR brought in a head-restraint system, impact-absorbing walls, and a new, safer “Car of Tomorrow”, which was introduced in 2008. Fans disliked the new car. The series has lately tried to emphasise its risky side, and in 2010 introduced a campaign called “Boys, have at it” to encourage drivers to get aggressive with each other on the track.

The next debate over safety will come in Formula One, which is considering introducing closed cockpits to protect drivers. In 2009, a flying spring badly injured a driver, and another was killed by a flying wheel in a Formula Two race. Earlier this year, on the other hand, two drivers in Le Mans prototype cars, the most modern of which have closed cockpits, escaped entirely unhurt from big crashes. But closing the cockpit would radically change the shape of Formula One cars and put up a barrier between the driver and viewers. Fans would likely hate it. Getting safety right, in short, is like cornering at 300km (186 miles) an hour between someone else’s wheels and a hard place.

SOME men, it is said, have greatness thrust upon them. So it was for Basil D’Oliveira, an English cricketer widely cited as instrumental in the downfall of apartheid, who died on November 19th.

How a humble cricketer became a focal point not only of the evils of racist South Africa, but also of the English establishment’s willingness to bow to it, is one of the most compelling stories in the sport. Certainly, he was not born into greatness. Growing up in Cape Town in the 1930s, he was designated a “Cape Coloured” (his heritage was probably Madeiran). Despite his obvious talent, this meant he was barred from playing for, or against, the country’s established sides.

Instead, he honed his technique batting on the perilous, unpredictable matted wickets of the non-white leagues. He scored prolifically—including some 80 centuries. But that should have been that. As he approached 30, he made plans to give up the game, seemingly destined to be the sad story of a good batsmen who was never allowed to test his talents at the highest level—a forgotten victim of a racist country.

Yet the story that defined him still lay ahead. Instead of turning his back on the game, he took a chance. He wrote a letter to John Arlott, a British cricket commentator, asking for help in finding a club in England. Eventually, Middleton, an amateur club in the Central Lancashire league, was persuaded to take a chance. They offered him a contract as the club’s professional player.

So it was that in 1960, probably aged over 30 (although officially 28, he admitted to lying about his age so as not to scupper his chances), and with money scraped together by proud neighbours on the Cape, he turned up in dank northern England. He left behind a country in a state of emergency, following the Sharpeville massacre of 69 black protesters. Yet Mr D’Oliveira cut a lonely figure in his new home, bemused at country in which white people waited upon him in restaurants and trains were unsegregated.

Unsurprisingly, he took time to settle. The adjustment wasn’t only cultural. Learning to play in England, with its grass wickets, where the ball swung and seamed more than he was used to, took time. Yet, it wasn’t long before he was making runs. In 1964, Worcestershire, a first-class county, signed him. In the same year, he became a British citizen.

Then, in 1966, he was selected for England. Incredibly, he later revealed to Pat Murphy, his biographer, that he was 38 when he made his debut at the highest level of the game, long past the age that most great batsmen retire. Yet still he made runs.

Soon attention was focused on England’s scheduled tour of South Africa in 1968-69. Mr D’Oliveira was desperate to return to his homeland. He was a hero among the country’s blacks and coloureds and wanted to prove that he rightfully belonged on the cricket grounds from which he had been banned. As if to dispel any doubt, in the last game before the squad was announced, he scored a wonderful 158 to help England beat Australia.

Ian Wooldridge, a sportswriter, called it the most important innings in history. Less impressed was the South African government. BJ Vorster, the country’s prime minister, refused to countenance the Coloured’s return. No one knows the full pressure that the authorities brought to bear on the English cricketing establishment. At the very least, they made it clear that the tour would be cancelled if he were picked. But for two days the MCC—the private club running the English game—sat in a committee room at Lord’s cricket ground and deliberated. Finally, emerging from behind its closed doors, they announced that Mr D’Oliveira had been dropped.

The MCC insisted that the decision had been made purely on cricketing grounds. No one believed them. Rather it was seen for what it was; a cowardly act, one of the most shameful in the game’s history. The English public was outraged. The post office had to employ staff just to deal with the letters of support sent to Mr D’Oliveira.

Stunned by the reaction, the MCC were presented with a chance for redemption. With amazing good fortune, one of the squad, Tom Cartwright, withdrew because of an injury. The MCC had little choice but to announce Mr D’Oliveira as his replacement. South Africa’s prime minister promptly called the tour off.

It was this action which led to the sporting isolation of apartheid South Africa for the next two decades. Ostracism, for such a sports-mad nation, was hard to bear. Many see it as a significant factor in the dismantling of apartheid in 1994.

Through it all, one sensed that Mr D’Oliveira was a reluctant hero. Some likened his impact to Jesse Owens in 1936 and Jackie Robinson in 1947. In 1996 Nelson Mandela invited him to lunch. In 2005 Queen Elizabeth II awarded him a CBE. Yet he remained modest.

He played his last Test match in 1972, finishing with an impressive average of 40.02 over 44 matches, also taking 47 wickets with his medium pacers. One can only speculate on how those figures would have read if he’d been allowed to play in his prime.

Read on: How The Economist reported the D’Oliveira affair in 1968

FC UNION BERLIN, the German capital’s second football team, is solidly second-division, and its fans seem to like it that way. Holding Fortuna Düsseldorf, the league’s current leader, to a nil-nil draw, as Union did on November 19th, was reckoned to be a good result. And the men in red played nobly—at least when measuring their passion by yellow cards, in which they beat Fortuna four to two, rather than by goals. Jan Glinker, Union’s goalkeeper, staved off embarrassment time and again with heroic saves. In the 90th minute the Berliners earned a trio of corner kicks from which they very nearly scored. As the home team did their lap of honour, the brimming stadium roared.

“Unsere liebe” (our beloved), the first words of the team a popular supporters’ song, show the depth of the affection for this club which has long been the underdog. In communist times it played second fiddle to TSC Berlin BFC Dynamo, which was seen as close to Erich Honecker’s regime. Non-conformists were drawn to FC Union then. Now, as Hertha Berlin plays to first-league crowds in the Olympiastadion, which seats 77,000, non-conformists still flock to Köpenick, to the Alte Försterei (Old Foresters Lodge), whose capacity is just over 8,000 18,000.

This month these loyal fans have been invited to dip into their pockets to buy shares, not in the club but in the stadium—a cunning plan to part-finance a new €15m ($20m) stand. Any club member can buy up to ten shares at €500 each, with a maximum 10,000 shares for sale. “They’re not meant to be tradable,” says Christian Arbeit, FC Union’s spokesman. “They’re something to hang on the wall.” Subscription starts in December, and at least €3.6m must be raised to give floating shareholders a majority of the votes. After the initial float, shareholders can sell their stock to anyone they want. But no single investor will be allowed to amass more than ten shares without getting approval at an annual general meeting. The club has not announced any plans to pay dividends.

“We’re selling our soul,” says the advertising literature, “but not to everyone.” To underline the point Union has printed posters bearing this message, and featuring some characters who are not likely to become shareholders: Silvio Berlusconi (until recently prime minister of Italy), Sepp Blatter (president of FIFA, the international football federation) and a crushed Red Bull can. Sources close to Dietrich Mateschitz, who owns Red Bull and sponsors several football clubs including RB Leipzig, have threatened to sue. But with luck FC Union and its stadium will weather the latest storm and stay on its non-conformist course.

THIS week's issue of The Economist includes an obituary of Joe Frazier. Read it here.

DAVID STERN (pictured) did his best to up the ante. The commissioner of the National Basketball Association (NBA) warned the league’s players, who have been locked out by its owners for over four months, that the clubs’ latest proposal for a new collective-bargaining agreement (CBA) would be their best and last. Moreover, if the union rejected it, he said, the owners would revert to a previous and much less favourable offer. The league then launched a publicity blitz to try to get public opinion on its side.

The players did not blink. On November 14th Billy Hunter, the head of the National Basketball Players Association, declared that the union would leave the owners’ take-it-or-leave-it proposal, and try its luck in court. It will attempt to disband and have its members file an antitrust suit against the owners, setting the stage for months or even years of legal wrangling. Of the six months of the 2011-12 season, one has already been lost. Mr Stern called the situation a “nuclear winter” for the league.

The owners made great fanfare of the concessions they had made to the players over months of bargaining. Compared with their original proposal, they have dramatically increased the share of the league’s income players would be allowed to keep. They also dropped demands for a hard cap on individual team payrolls and the right to wriggle out of contracts with unproductive players.

However, the offer they are using as a baseline was essentially a management wish list, which had no chance of being accepted. Relative to the CBA that expired after last season, the league’s latest proposal would still impose big losses on the players. Their share of revenues would drop from 57% to 50%, a gap worth $280m. And although a few loopholes in the current salary-cap system would remain, they would be sharply curtailed. Teams whose payrolls exceed a given threshold would be subject to a punitive tax and prevented from taking advantage of most exceptions to the cap, making it all but equivalent to a firm ceiling. The union has vowed never to accept such restrictions.

Mr Stern, for his part, cannot offer much more without risking a revolt among club owners. The players seem willing to accept a 50-50 split of revenue, enough to make the teams profitable as a group even by the clubs’ own contested figures. But that would do nothing to narrow the gap between the league’s rich and poor teams. The have-nots would lose less money than they have in the past. But they would still probably remain in the red, and would have little hope of winning a championship over their better-heeled rivals.

The other big North American sports leagues have addressed such inequalities through revenue sharing. But rich teams like the New York Knicks and Los Angeles Lakers fiercely oppose expanding the NBA’s modest sharing scheme, which would reduce their franchise values. The owners note that their proposal would triple the amount of money the league currently shares between teams. But the resulting system would still be far smaller as a proportion of total league turnover than that of the National Football League (NFL), National Hockey League or Major League Baseball. Barring even more revenue sharing, the only way to improve competitive balance is a de facto limit on team payrolls with real teeth. That is anathema to the union.

With the parties at an impasse, the lockout will now be contested in court. Taking a page from the NFL Players Association (NFLPA), which also faced a lockout earlier this year, the union will attempt to dissolve itself and become a mere trade association, freeing the players to negotiate with clubs individually. They will then accuse the owners of violating antitrust law by colluding to prevent them from working, seeking an injunction to force the resumption of play and damages worth three times their losses, as the law permits. In response, the league will call the union’s disbandment a sham. The owners also warn that currently guaranteed contracts might no longer be valid if it is upheld.

The outcome of such a suit is difficult to predict. The NFLPA has prevailed in such cases in the past, and won one antitrust claim against the owners earlier this year. However, that victory was overturned on appeal. The two sides then reached an agreement, rendering the case moot. The Supreme Court has not addressed the matter directly since 1972. And that case involved baseball, which unlike basketball is legally exempt from federal antitrust law.

It will be months before a district court issues a ruling. Once it does, appeals can take years to exhaust. The two sides will have to find a solution at the bargaining table before then. The union’s strategy is simply to gain extra leverage by filing suit, and perhaps by scoring some preliminary legal victories. Now that the parties have broadly agreed on a 50/50 revenue split, they differ only on the flexibility of restrictions on team payrolls and player movement between clubs. That might not sound like much. But it seems to be sufficient to put the entire 2011-12 season in jeopardy.

(Photo credit: AFP)