Sports, Media and Data Part I

With the Olympics in full swing, baseball heading into the pennant races and NFL players reporting to comically-undersized college dorm rooms across the nation, now seems as good a time as any to reflect on sports.  Specifically, I have recently begun thinking about the intersection of sports, media and data.

I believe that this discussion deserves an airing because it informs how we think about data in general and marketing data specifically.  As sports and the media that cover them evolved into professionally-managed businesses, these data grew in importance.  Moreover, I think that by understanding how we depend on data as fans will help us understand how to use data more effectively as marketers.

Certainly, other writers have considered sports and media at greater length and with substantially greater talent than I plan to do.  The Gray Lady has a reporter dedicated to this beat.  Names such as Grantland Rice, Red Barbour, Howard Cosell, Walter Iooss and Chris Berman symbolize entire eras of sports.  They and their colleagues have become almost as much a part of the game as balls, green grass and parquet floors.

However, the contributions of these men--and the relatively few women alongside of them--do not stand alone as the contributions of media to sport.  I will argue that the data provided by media contributed as mightily as the words spun by their bards.  Think of a sports world without box scores, on-screen graphics, Vegas odds, and out-of-town scores.  Think of how your own understanding of sports has benefited from slow-motion replays, telephoto shots and injury reports. These data comprise an element of sports unavailable to the fan until the 20th century, for the most part.

I will argue first that the data made available by new media channels have changed fans’ appreciation of sports in ways more profound than the people mentioned above.  More to the point, the media and their attendant data have elevated some sports above others, each in its own time.  For instance, I’ll argue that telegraph and newspaper made horse racing the business that it is (or was, at any rate), that radio provided data that turned baseball into America’s true pastime and that TV, cable TV and HDTV each bore data that made football, basketball and finally ice hockey more than just men in colorful uniforms running around.

Today, we’ll begin with horse racing and in subsequent posts, we’ll cover how other individual sports owe their popularity to specific media vehicles--and their data--and how that happened.  Finally, we’ll discuss what sport(s) the Internet and its multifold technologies have conspired to make pre-eminent.