Five Men Out

Interesting take on the NBA point-shaving case from The Wages of Wins. Their very well-reasoned point: the Black Sox scandal of the 1919 World Series (chronicled in the excellent movie and even better book Eight Men Out) didn't actually hurt baseball attendance any.

I'll buy that. But is it really an apt comparison?

After all, the public didn't even learn about the Black Sox until the next year. At the time, baseball didn't have one-one-hundredth the competition for an entertainment dollar that the NBA faces today. And just a year or two after the Black Sox, baseball's popularity exploded due to the emergence of a certain larger-than-life outfielder who played his home games in the Bronx and hit a lot of home runs.

A more apt comparison comes from TrueHoop, which discusses the last time NBA figures were implicated in point shaving. Yikes. Between that and the CCNY scandal, I'm getting the impression that basketball in the '50s was more staged than a Broadway musical.