ESPN’s Gammons Spouts Sports Stats

Spouting dozens of celebrity stories and reams of statistics, Peter Gammons, the popular baseball commentator, fielded questions from a packed audience yesterday at Harvard Law School (HLS).

Gammons, who has covered baseball for 30 years, is an analyst on ESPN’s “Baseball Tonight” and writes a column for ESPN’s web site.

During his prepared remarks, Gammons characterized the last decade of major league baseball as an unparalleled “golden era” both for business and the level of play.

“20 years ago, baseball was a small business,” he said, characterizing many of the teams as “mom-and-pop” operations.

Gammons gave much of the credit for transforming baseball into a major industry to George Steinbrenner, the owner of the New York Yankees.

“George has had more to do with changing the business than any man in the history of baseball,” he said. He applauded Steinbrenner as the first owner to successfully brand a team, and pointed to similar marketing successes with the Boston Red Sox.

Both teams, Gammons said, are among the 15 most recognizable brands in the U.S.

Predicting the future direction of the sport, Gammons noted the vital role of player diversity in attracting new fans. 32 percent of major-league players, he said, are foreign born, and that figure increases to 43 percent in the minor leagues.

Gammons said another example of major league baseball’s emergence as a major corporate force is the increasing nubmer of graduates from elite universities in management positions. Gammons said that Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland Athletics, recently asked him to have interested Harvard students send applications to his office.

During a question-and-answer session, Gammons offered his opinions on nearly every team. When asked about the Red Sox, he predicted that the team would return to the World Series within 10 years.

Gammons also touched briefly on several contentious issues, ranging from the recent NBA Pacers-Pistons brawl to union negotiations and performance-enhancing drug use, which he said was rampant in baseball in the mid-1990’s.

Despite those setbacks, Gammons concluded that “I enjoy baseball more today than at any other time in my career.”

Gammons’s visit was organized by the Harvard Law School Committee on Sports and Entertainment Law, a student group.

Michael Giordiano, a third-year law student and the committee’s president, said that many HLS students look forward to careers in sports and entertainment, but the Law School offers few classes in either field.

“Many of us are more interested in being people in sports or entertainment who happen to have law degrees, rather than specifically being sports or entertainment lawyers,” Giordiano said.

“I think it’s a popular option [for HLS students]—eventually.”