* Lest we forget: Gerald W. Scully

May 30, 2009

For those of you who don’t know who he is (and I must admit I didn’t either), the late Dr. Scully

was the first to apply labor economics to sports, said former colleague Philip K. Porter, now professor of economics at the University of South Florida.

Sports economists refer to his groundbreaking work as “the Scully Equations…”

The theory is credited by many as underpinning the legal arguments that eventually would lead to the end of Major League Baseball’s “reserve clause,” which bound players to one team. The reserve clause was lifted, and player salaries began to rise, in 1975, the year after Dr. Scully published his work.

He  wrote or edited five books, including The Business of Major League Baseball, (The University of Chicago Press, 1989). A review of the book appeared in the Spring 1990 edition of Journal of Sport History. Read more about Scully here, from the Dallas Morning News website.

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