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My dad sent me a link to this article by a professor of economics at the University of Chicago about his experience watching the World Cup Final about a month ago:

Bend It Like (Yogi) Berra

It's an interesting piece, not to mention funny, and, in a lot of ways, spot on. There's little doubt that they've got to come up with a better way to decide the World Cup Final than a penalty shootout. But it made me think of two things: A qualification and a re-framing of the argument (and I swear this is going to come around to music in its own way).

Firstly, judging the sport of soccer based mostly on that game isn't really fair--it's a little bit like judging the sport of football on the Bucaneers/Raiders Super Bowl from 2003. That was a blowout that the Raiders were never really in, and say what you want about soccer, there are rarely blowouts, and when there are, they're way more entertaining than in any other sport I can think of. Argentina's 6-0 drubbing of Serbia was one of the better games of this World Cup, featuring the probably the tournament's best goal in Maxi Rodriguez's stunning volley.

And while watching the Red Sox sweep the Cards out of the World Series in 2004 was fun for me as a Red Sox fan, it probably wasn't much fun for anyone unfamiliar with the history there or the game of baseball in general. Point being, there are good and bad championships in every sport and this year's World Cup Final was quite a letdown.

But there's a bigger issue this made me think of, and that's asking just what the point of sport is. No one would deny that the goal of playing a game is winning, but that's a little like saying the point of having a job is making money, the point of playing is music is being techincally facile, the point of living is having kids. It's a question of focus, I think, so when Sanderson says, "In the United States we structure most competitive contests to ensure that talent and performance are the main determinants of outcomes," he's completely correct. But that very emphasis on performance is what leads to athletes like Barry Bonds, athletes who in all probability are using performance enhancing drugs to ensure their place in the record books, with or without asterisks.

Sanderson talks about how sports have historically adopted and changed to bring in new audiences, and this has certainly been the case with the NHL, which has looked way better recently than it did before the strike thanks to rule changes. But changes in baseball have brought batters who wear armor and juiced balls. You might denigrate soccer for not changing with the times, but I think there's something to be said for the way it's basically stayed unchanged.

But whatever: here's what I'm on about. John Lennon said that life is what happens while you're busy making other plans, and I think that what you get from sports is what happens while you're busy trying to win.

The notion of fair play is at heart a romantic notion--it's the idea that equality across the board can be ensured, when in reality this doesn't happen. And when you start talking about romance, ideas about nostalgia, the past and memory come into play, and this is, to me, the essential crux of the debate over everything from lists of the 100 Best Albums of All Time to the All-Time Home Run Leaders. How many of the albums that have made my Top Ten Lists for the past couple years will end up being in my Top Twenty or even Top Fifty of All Time? Time keeps restlessly moving on, sweeping the past under the rug even as we seek to codify it and give it meaning that endures.

And therein lies an essential difference between music and sports. Sports are measured with yardsticks and statistics, making them subject to changes in the way the games are played or in the way statistics are kept. Music, and for our purposes that essentially means recorded music, is subject to technological changes, but we don't measure the worth of an album on its technical perfection. Sure, sound quality is a part of the equation, but there are plenty of albums that are fantastic, despite not measuring up sonically. It's an art, obviously, and what sportswriters are appealing to when they talk about someone being better than their numbers is the artistry of sport. That's what makes sports so darn fascinating, at least to me: moment-to-moment, your witnessing creativity within a predefined space, aka art. But as we look back, we can measure performances with numbers, aka science. Weird, huh?

It seems to me like we need a kind of particle-wave theory of sports. Measuring the stats makes sport look like a conglomeration of particles--I mean, how can you have .2 of a rebound? You take a book like The Wages of Wins, which basically applies Freakonmics to sports, and you learn that if you take all these numbers from the 2003 season for indivudal players and evaluate them with these regression algorithms or whatever (sorry, not an economist), you can see that the number of wins a team had is predicted by the individual players' stats. Crazy, huh? So how many games are they going to win next year? Sadly, the book doesn't really seem to be able to tell you that any better than most sportswriters because who knows?

That's up to the artists out on the court or the field or the diamond. Or the pitch.