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Baseball Broadcasts Introduce Advanced Statistics, but With Caution

April 2, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Now this piece of Americana — one-sided conversations that create a cozy intimacy between fans and announcers — is colliding with the cold calculations known as sabermetrics.

Statistical analysis has swept through baseball over the past decade, becoming part of the fabric of the game and an object of growing fascination to its fans. As players, managers and front office executives embrace the esoteric statistics, teams increasingly want their radio announcers just as fluent in the language of WAR, VORP and B.A.B.I.P. (Those stand for wins above replacement, value over replacement player and batting average on balls in play, for those of you dusting off your radios as the season begins.)

“They wanted a broadcaster who is at least comfortable with exploring the idea of discussing advanced statistics and what they mean,” said Robert Ford, 33, who was hired by the Houston Astros in the off-season, along with Steve Sparks, 48, a former pitcher, to call the team’s games. The advent of advanced statistical analysis, Mr. Ford said, has “changed the way we think about baseball.”

Now, as the two settle into the Astros’ broadcast booth, they and their colleagues across the country face a balancing act. How much do listeners want to know about these advanced numbers? How much is informative? And how much would prompt the audience, a group that spans all generations, to tune out?

Listeners and announcers alike say that striking the right balance will be a challenge.

When the Astros interviewed Mr. Sparks, a journeyman knuckleball pitcher, and Mr. Ford, a Bronx native who previously called minor league games, the topic of advanced statistics came up repeatedly. The Astros, who have eagerly embraced analytics, wanted to know if the broadcasters could grasp the data being used, in part, to build the team.

“We need them to tell the story of how we are making decisions and putting the organization together,” said George Postolos, the Astros’ president and chief executive, who added that the team would not want a broadcaster who was uncomfortable explaining the front office’s strategy.

To prepare for the season, Mr. Sparks prepared a stack of handwritten notes on opposing teams. Each page is crammed with statistics.

For Father’s Day last year, his 19-year-old daughter bought him a copy of “The Book,” a statistical exploration of the game. “I’m trying to learn as much about sabermetrics as I can,” he said.

Mark Patterson, a 27-year-old fan sitting in the stands for a recent Tampa Bay Rays spring training game, said he would like to hear more advanced statistical analysis but said it should be a “slow introduction process.”

“It takes a while to get everything down,” Mr. Patterson said as he and a friend, Warren Allen, 28, waited for the game to start.

In the Rays’ lineup that afternoon was Ben Zobrist, who may not be a staple of the highlight shows but who has become a well-known figure for fans of sabermetrics, a word derived from the abbreviation for the Society for American Baseball Research. Over the past four years, Mr. Zobrist has led baseball in WAR, ahead of stars like Albert Pujols, Ryan Braun and Robinson Cano.

Mr. Zobrist’s achievement in the WAR category — a measure of a player’s offensive and defensive contributions relative to others who play his position and could replace him — was noted in the Rays pregame notes given to members of the news media.

Mr. Patterson and Mr. Allen seemed to appreciate the recognition for Mr. Zobrist, who has also led the American League in a more traditional category over the past four years: walks.

The advanced numbers, Mr. Allen said, are “how you become aware of players like Zobrist who aren’t in commercials but still are great players.”

To fans like these two, the metrics have become crucial to how they view the game, study it, enjoy it — and how they pick players in their fantasy leagues.

David Waldstein and Andrew Keh contributed reporting.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/02/sports/baseball/baseball-broadcasts-introduce-advanced-statistics-but-with-caution.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Media Business Tagged With: , ,

SiriusXM’s Alt Nation Becomes a Proving Ground for New Bands

January 15, 2013 by Leave a Comment

“Radio has traditionally been that game where you say: ‘What’s on the charts? That’s what we play,’ ” he said. “And: ‘What do you play? What’s on the charts!’ ”

But Sirius is satellite radio, which relies on subscriptions rather than advertising, and that gives programmers like Mr. Regan more freedom to take chances on obscure bands than their counterparts in FM radio. SiriusXM has labored in recent years to position itself as a leader in presenting new music.

“We can try things,” Mr. Regan said. “We swing and miss, and that’s fine. At least we were given the opportunity to swing.”

These days Mr. Regan’s batting average is pretty high, several label executives and band managers said. He has played a critical role in the rise of alt-rock success stories like Foster the People and Grouplove; more recently, he jump-started the careers of several groups, among them Atlas Genius, Blondfire and Capital Cities.

“Jeff Regan has had an incredible knack of picking talent and songs and bands for the last few years,” Daniel Glass, the founder of Glassnote Records, said.

As SiriusXM approaches 24 million subscribers, this once-minor player in promoting songs has become a proving ground for new bands, a steppingstone between the Internet and breaking into the rotation at big FM radio stations.

Broadcast radio is still king when it comes to creating stars who can fill arenas and sell 500,000 records or more. Alternative-rock stations like KROQ in Los Angeles and WRFF in Philadelphia continue to have immense sway. There are also a few influential noncommercial stations, like WFUV in New York, with the power to anoint bands.

Some radio analysts say it remains to be seen if Sirius, even with its expanding audience, will ever rival FM radio’s ability to drive music sales.

“It’s not really about how many bands you break,” Fred Jacobs, a media consultant, said. “There are a lot of broadcast stations in small markets that break a lot of bands too, but they don’t reach lots of listeners. You have to look at it in terms of overall reach and impact.”

Still, Sirius appears to be staking a claim to being a tastemaker, especially on channels like Alt Nation and XMU that try to offer the programming of a small noncommercial or college station to a national audience. Some bands say airplay on those channels leads to significantly increased sales and can attract interest from major labels.

Programmers at FM stations have become more conservative about playing unfamiliar bands or new tunes over the last five years, as the tracking systems that determine ratings have become more sensitive, recording, for instance, when a listener switches channels midsong.

At the same time, SiriusXM is becoming more adventurous. “I tell my programmers if they are finding out and discovering music only through record label promotion people, then they are not doing their jobs,” Steve Blatter, Sirius’s senior vice president for music programming, said. “We very strategically are more aggressive than terrestrial radio in the way we identify songs and push them.”

That strategy over the past two years has led to many successful bands’ receiving their first broad exposure. Sirius’s country channel was the first to play Florida Georgia Line’s “Cruise,” which has topped the Billboard Country Songs chart for four weeks. After that early airplay on Sirius, the duo signed a recording contract with Republic Nashville.

Mr. Regan’s Alt Nation channel has also led the pack of FM alt-rock stations in several instances, band managers said. Foster the People’s hit “Pumped Up Kicks” played on SiriusXM’s Alt Nation three months before climbing the rock radio charts. Grouplove, a Los Angeles band on Atlantic Records, enjoyed heavy airplay with its first single, “Colours,” on Alt Nation in March 2011, five months before it broke through on broadcast radio.

“It’s kind of like the biggest alternative station in the country and it’s definitely a test bed for things,” said David Wolter, an executive for artists and repertory at RCA Records. “I certainly keep an eye on their playlist.”

Mr. Regan seems to relish plucking artists from obscurity. One example is Atlas Genius, from Adelaide, Australia, whose song “Trojans” ended up at No. 5 on Billboard’s 2012 year-end alternative-songs chart.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/16/arts/music/siriusxms-alt-nation-becomes-a-proving-ground-for-new-bands.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Media Business Tagged With: , ,

Easing Out the Gray-Haired. Or Not.

May 28, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Nothing, he said, is as tough as telling fellow partners that their best days are behind them. “I’ve always joked that I wish I could have these conversations by phone,” Mr. Levine said. “If someone wants to stay and you don’t want them to, that’s the hardest. It’s like going to your parents and telling them they can’t handle their affairs anymore.”

If anyone doubts the sensitivity of the task, consider the case of Jorge Posada, the once-formidable New York Yankee who at the ripe old age of 39 found himself demoted in the starting lineup, unable to consistently do the one thing a designated hitter does — hit. When he got the news earlier this month, he walked into manager Joe Girardi’s office an hour before the game was to start and announced he wasn’t going to play.

Few professionals in other fields have that option — Posada’s contract guarantees him $13.1 million this year, despite a batting average of .183, the lowest among designated hitters in Major League Baseball. But the painful encounter between coach and lagging star — Posada apologized the next day — is one that is taking place with increasing frequency in the wood-paneled aeries of law firms, banks and other elite professions, industry insiders said.

“All the rules have changed,” said a longtime New York executive recruiter, Richard Stein of Caldwell Partners. “In a market that’s become extremely lean and mean, these individuals who have tended to be the senior statesmen of their day are sometimes the first to go.”

It can happen at any age, of course, but it’s an especially delicate issue in an era when many workers stay on after they turn 66, when they qualify for full Social Security benefits.

Even as old notions of professional courtesy and obligation erode, so too has the quiet acceptance of traditional, mandatory retirement ages. Twice in recent years the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has sued top law firms, accusing them of discriminating against older partners, and a closely watched case now under way could make it even harder for firms to dislodge aging lions.

As roughly 44 million baby boomers hit retirement age over the next decade, the problem of how and when to step aside is becoming a hot-button issue, said Robert J. Gordon, a professor of economics at Northwestern University. Many older workers have had to put off retirement because of stock market losses during the recent deep recession. And while unemployment among older workers is lower than the national average at 6.2 percent, it is up sharply from three years ago, when it stood at 2.9 percent.

Some jobs will always have age restrictions — police officers, firefighters, air traffic controllers and the like. And in corporate America, mandatory retirement ages for senior management face less resistance, thanks in part to generous incentives to leave early that are perfectly legal. What is more, federal law permits age limits for the top brass who set corporate policy.

But chief executives still have a habit of hanging on, said Jeffrey A. Sonnenfeld, a professor at the Yale School of Management and the author of a book on the subject, “The Hero’s Farewell.” Mr. Sonnenfeld has even developed a taxonomy to describe how different executives handle the challenge of going into the sunset.

The monarchs stamp out rivals and remain on the throne until they die or are forced out, while the ambassadors become senior statesmen, attending the economic forum at Davos, Switzerland, and similar affairs. Generals leave under pressure and spend their days plotting a Napoleonic return to power. Finally, there are the governors, who go on to do something else, like philanthropy or public service.

Rupert Murdoch at the News Corporation and Sumner M. Redstone at Viacom are quintessential monarchs, but Andrew S. Grove has became an ambassador for Intel, Mr. Sonnenfeld said. Steven P. Jobs is a general at Apple, and Henry M. Paulson Jr., formerly of Goldman Sachs, has emerged as a governor with his tenure as Treasury secretary under President George W. Bush.

On Wall Street, firms like Goldman don’t have a mandatory retirement age, but there are other ways of easing people out, like “de-partnering,” when partners are quietly dropped from the top ranks.

It is an especially tough issue in the legal profession. There is no mandatory retirement age for federal judges — one remains on the bench at 103 — and solo practitioners often work into their 70s and 80s. Senior partners at big law firms, on the other hand, frequently feel the heat much sooner.

“It’s a huge issue with law firms amid the downturn,” said Jonathan Ben-Asher, an employment lawyer in New York. “Partners may be eased out or chucked out, but in my experience, it is much harder for older partners to maintain their position if their billable hours decline. They’re not given the same courtesies or deference there was in years past because there is less money to go around.”

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=6191c0192741332cf47328562eba7be8

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