Sports
Carl and I discuss the opportunity generated by the Covid-19 pandemic to study natural experiments in sports. Many of the things we used to take for granted--stadiums full of fans, weekly travel schedules, consistent training opportunities--have been disrupted for some or all players, in tennis and other major sports. We consider what we can learn about home-court advantage, the predictability of results, the role of unchanging venues, and even the speed of play, by comparing pre-pandemic numbers with their corresponding post-restart figures. We also wonder about the limitations of these sorts of studies, because there are always confounding variables. The biggest one of all: the pandemic itself.