MLB Had First Loser Advantage

Baseball's pain presaged its gain over NBA

I want to give CBS NBA reporter Sam Quinn credit for being a font of sports idea generation. He recently made a great point about Major League Baseball’s unexpected rise into, as Ross Barkan and others allege, its sudden status as America’s second favorite sport.

As many of you know, “first mover advantage” in business is when a company gains greatly by being a pioneer of a new product or market. In that vein, according to Sam’s theory, baseball has also benefited from being first. It just so happens that this “first” recently looked more like a death trap than burgeoning opportunity.

Having long been dogged by post Moneyball optimization, the sport was first to attempt adaptations. During years in which the pollyannaish NBA was talking itself into what it was becoming, wounded MLB was desperately trying to escape what it had become. Enter Theo Epstein and the league’s reforms to counter nerd exploitation of its rules.

Obviously the NBA still has time to reverse the ill effects of nerd optimization, but it’s playing catch up now. Baseball won this round by being first to lose.