Major League Baseball Research Papers (original) (raw)

The link between team payroll and competitive balance plays a central role in the theory of team sports but is seldom investigated empirically. This paper uses data on team payrolls in Major League Baseball between 1980 and 2000 to examine the link and implements Granger causality tests to establish whether the relationship runs from payroll to performance or vice versa. While there is no evidence that causality runs from payroll to performance over the entire sample period, the data shows that the cross section correlation between payroll and performance increased significantly in the 1990s. As a comparison, the paper examines the relationship between pay and performance in English soccer, and it is shown that Granger causality from higher payrolls to better performance cannot be rejected. We argue that this difference may be a consequence of the open market for player talent that obtains in soccer compared to the significant restrictions on trade that exist in Major League Baseball.

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- Economics, Sports economics, Granger causality, Competitive balance
- by John Burger
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- Sports economics, Market Size, Major League Baseball, Generic model

Most data involving organizations are hierarchical in nature and often contain variables measured at multiple levels of analysis. Hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) is a relatively new and innovative statistical method that organizational scientists have used to alleviate some common problems associated with multilevel data, thus advancing our understanding of organizations. This article presents a broad overview of HLM's logic through an empirical analysis and outlines how its use can strengthen sport management research. For illustration purposes, we use both HLM and the traditional linear regression model to analyze how organizational and individual factors in Major League Baseball impact individual players' salaries. A key implication is that, depending on the method, parameter estimates differ because of the multilevel data structure and, thus, findings differ. We explain these differences and conclude by presenting theoretical discussions from strategic management and consumer behavior to provide a potential research agenda for sport management scholars.

- by Samuel Todd
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- Small Business, Strategic Management, Management Science, Consumer Behavior

In our 2006 paper, we examined the implications of Michael Lewis' book for the labor market in Major League Baseball. Our tests provided econometric support for Lewis' claim of mis-pricing in the baseball labor market's valuation of batting skills. We also found suggestive evidence that the dispersion of statistical knowledge throughout baseball organizations was associated with a sharp attenuation of the mis-pricing. This paper takes a closer look at the economic issues raised by Lewis for the baseball labor market. We extend the sample both backward and forward in time, seeking to determine how long the pricing anomaly existed, and whether the recent attenuation in the anomaly is robust to new observations. In addition, we refine the measures of skill used in our tests to more closely match the narrative account in Lewis' book. Using both our earlier and refined measures, we find that the pricing anomaly extends well before the period described in Moneyball, and that with some important caveats, the market correction in the post-Moneyball period persists. Finally, improvements in personnel management associated with a closer link between pay and performance may be responsible for the sharply increased correlation between winning percentage and payroll in recent years.

- by Jahn Hakes
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- Labor Market, Personnel Management, Decode-And-Forward, Decode and Forward

This study presents analysis of the impact of “official product” sports sponsorships with the National Football League (NFL), Major League Baseball (MLB), the National Hockey League (NHL), the National Basketball Association (NBA), and the Professional Golfers Association (PGA) on the stock prices of sponsoring firms. The primary finding of the study is that, in the main, announcements were accompanied by increases in shareholder wealth. The 53 sponsors analyzed experienced mean increases in stock valuations of about $257 million. A multiple regression analysis of firm-specific stock price changes and selected corporate and sponsorship attributes indicates that official product sponsorships with the NBA, NHL, and PGA and those with smaller market shares were associated with the largest gains in share prices. Although corporate cashflow (a proxy for agency conflicts) is statistically unrelated to shareholder approval, sponsorships by high-technology companies were associated with stronger stock price reactions than otherwise. Finally, product congruence with the sponsored sport was positively related to changes in stock prices.

- by T. Bettina Cornwell
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- Marketing, Tourism, Business and Management, Event Study

... Abstract. Since 2005, Major League Baseball (MLB) has suspended 258 players under its Drug Prevention and Treatment Program. ... "Learning unethical practices from a co-worker: the peer effect of Jose Canseco," MPRA Paper... more

- by Vittorio Addona
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- Mechanical Engineering, Statistics, Drug Use, Human Growth Hormone

From an almost standing start at the beginning of the 1990s, the number of statues of U.S. baseball and English soccer heroes has risen inexorably. By 1 st September 2011, 33 soccer players and 67 Major League Baseball (MLB) players were, or were soon to be, depicted by existing or commissioned subject specific statues inside or adjacent to the stadia they once performed in. Yet even amongst the very finest exponents of their sport, relatively few players are honored in this way.

- by Chris Stride and +1
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- Mechanical Engineering, Statistics, Baseball, Branding
- by David Molina
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- Major League Baseball

Several authors have recently suggested that an expanding labor pool has led to improvement in professional sports leagues’ competitive balance. The basic premise is that a rise in team player options leads to less variability in player performance and therefore increased competition. The present work examines the initial step (i.e., the relationship between the influx of foreign-born players and various measures of talent compression). The results suggest that the geographic diversity of today’s baseball players has reduced variability in individual player performance.

- by Martin B Schmidt
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- Evolution, Labour Economics, Sport, Sports economics

The Coase theorem maintains that where free-market precepts exist, the allocation of property rights does not impact the distribution of resources. An application to Major League Baseball suggests that institutions such as free agency and the reverse-order amateur draft would not impact player distributions and therefore would not impact competitive balance. The present study finds that the distribution of wins is generally consistent with the precepts of the Coase theorem and therefore suggests a course for those who wish to alter the level of competitive balance: Major League Baseball should increase its focus on expanding the size of its labor pool. (JEL O15, L83, C22) When there are no transaction costs the assignment of legal rights have no effect upon the allocation of resources among economic enterprises. ÐStigler (1988)

- by Martin B Schmidt
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- Economics, Property Rights, Coase Theorem, Competitive balance

Automating the scheduling of sport leagues has received considerable attention in recent years, as these applications involve significant revenues and generate challenging combinatorial optimization problems. This paper considers the traveling tournament problem (TTP) which abstracts the salient features of major league baseball (MLB) in the United States. It proposes a simulated annealing algorithm (TTSA) for the TTP that explores both feasible and infeasible schedules, uses a large neighborhood with complex moves, and includes advanced techniques such as strategic oscillation and reheats to balance the exploration of the feasible and infeasible regions and to escape local minima at very low temperatures. TTSA matches the best-known solutions on the small instances of the TTP and produces significant improvements over previous approaches on the larger instances. Moreover, TTSA is shown to be robust, because its worst solution quality over 50 runs is always smaller or equal to the best-known solutions.

- by Laurent Michel
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- Applied Mathematics, Computer Science, Simulated Annealing, Scheduling

ii © 2013 Michael Nitzani ALL RIGHTS RESERVED iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS To each of the following people, I owe a debt of gratitude, for they were all jointly responsible to differing degrees at one time or another in helping me stay in school and complete my educational objectives. who have iv all either have lent their professional time, knowledge, or inspired me in helping me complete this project.

- by Michael Nitzani
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- Baseball, Rational Choice, Baseball History & America, Bounded Rationality

Research question: Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is increasingly important to business, including professional team sport organisations. Scholars focusing on CSR in sport have generally examined content-related issues such as implementation, motives or outcomes. The purpose of this paper is to add to that body of knowledge by focusing on process-related issues. Specifically, we explore the decision-making process used in relation to CSR-related programmes in the charitable foundations of the English football clubs. Research methods: Employing a grounded theory method and drawing on the analysis and synthesis of 32 interviews and 25 organisational documents, this research explored managerial decision-making with regard to CSR in English football. Results and findings: The findings reveal that decision-making consists of four simultaneous micro-social processes ('harmonising', 'safeguarding', 'manoeuvring' and 'transcending') that form the platform upon which the managers in the charitable foundations of the English football clubs make decisions. These four micro-social processes together represent assessable transcendence; a process that is fortified by passion, contingent on trust, sustained by communication and substantiated by factual performance enables CSR formulation and implementation in this organisational context. Implications: The significance of this study for the sport management literature is threefold: (1) it focuses on the individual level of analysis, (2) it shifts the focus of the scholarly activity away from CSR content-based research towards more processoriented approaches and (3) it adds to the limited number of studies that have utilised grounded theory in a rounded manner.

This study explores the forecasting of Major League Baseball game ticket sales and identifies important attendance predictors by means of random forests that are grown from classification and regression trees (CART) and conditional inference trees. Unlike previous studies that predict sport demand, I consider differ-ent forecasting horizons and only use information that is publicly accessible in advance of a game or season. Models are trained using data from 2013 to 2014 to make predictions for the 2015 regular season. The static within-season approach is complemented by a dynamic month-ahead forecasting strategy. Out-of-sample performance is evaluated for individual teams and tested against least-squares regression and a naive lagged attendance forecast. My empirical results show high variation in team-specific prediction accuracy with respect to both models and forecasting horizons. Linear and tree-ensemble models, on average, do not vary substantially in predictive accuracy; however, OLS regression fails to account for various team-specific peculiarities.

- by Steffen Q. Mueller
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- Attendance, Random Forests, Sports Forecasting, Major League Baseball
- by Mark Nagel
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- Seasonality, San Francisco, Major League Baseball, Capacity constraint

In this case study analysis, we explored the motives for playing Strat-O-Matic Baseball (SOMB), a baseball simulation played as a board game or online, from the perspective of the uses-and-gratifications theory. In phase I of the study, SOMB manager narratives (N = 50) were analyzed for motive statements. In phase II, an online survey asked SOMB managers (N = 222) to respond to motive items as well as four measures of Major League Baseball (MLB) and SOMB identification. Overall, eight motives for playing SOMB emerged from the 64-item pool of motive items. These eight motives were nostalgia, knowledge acquisition, social bonding, enjoyment, vicarious achievement, game aesthetics, convenience, and escape. Our findings suggest these motives predicted measures of MLB and SOMB identification in significantly different ways. Theoretical implications, future research, limitations, and discussion questions are presented in this analysis.

- by John Spinda
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- Uses And Gratifications, Sports Fans, Motives, Sport fandom

Five studies examined the relationship between talent and team performance. Two survey studies found that people believe there is a linear and nearly monotonic relationship between talent and performance: Participants expected that more talent improves performance and that this relationship never turns negative. However, building off research on status conflicts, we predicted that talent facilitates performance—but only up to a point, after which the benefits of more talent decrease and eventually become detrimental as intrateam coordination suffers. We also predicted that the level of task interdependence is a key determinant of when more talent is detrimental rather than beneficial. Three archival studies revealed that the too-much-talent effect emerged when team members were interdependent (football and basketball) but not independent (baseball). Our basketball analysis also established the mediating role of team coordination. When teams need to come together, more talent can tear them apart.

- by Roderick Swaab
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- Football (soccer), Economics of Football (soccer), Conflict, Baseball

Using a panel of Major League Baseball team attendance data for the period 1950-2003, we determine that after controlling for team quality and other factors, a new modern era ballpark adds 27-36% to total attendance over a ten-year period and on average generates present-value stadium revenues of $133 million for the franchise. We further find that due to noncomplementarity between new stadiums and team success, team profits are maximized when an owner "pockets" increases in revenue rather than reinvesting in the on-field quality of the team.

- by Jahn Hakes
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- Public Finance, Urban Development, Sport, Construction Cost
- by David Findlay
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- Higher Education, Price Elasticity, Sports economics, Seasonality

John Lindsay, the mayor of New York City from 1966 to 1973, developed an innovative media strategy for his underdog reelection campaign in 1969. A Yale graduate with a patrician image, Lindsay sought to win over middle-class voters by associating with the New York Mets during the baseball team’s unlikely march to the World Series. When the “Miracle Mets” clinched the pennant, Lindsay ventured into the delirious clubhouse and received a champagne shower from the players. Lindsay called the celebration “a nonpolitical event,” but newspaper photographs of the post-game revelry have been credited for Lindsay’s subsequent victory at the polls. Lindsay’s association with the Mets exemplifies an understudied period when politicians such as Richard Nixon, Robert F. Kennedy, and George McGovern used athletes as surrogates.

- by Nick Hirshon
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- 1960s (U.S. history), Baseball, New York history, Politics

PGA) on the stock prices of sponsoring firms. The primary finding of the study is that, in the main, announcements were accompanied by increases in shareholder wealth. The 53 sponsors analyzed experienced mean increases in stock valuations of about $257 million. A multipie regression analysis of firm-specific stock price changes and selected corporate and sponsorship attributes indicates that official product sponsorships with the NBA, NHL, and PGA and those with smaller market shares were associated with the largest gains in share prices. Although corporate cash flow (a pro~'for agency conflicts) is statistically unrelated to shareholder approval, sponsorships by high-technology companies were associated with stronger stock price reactions than otherwise. Finally, product congruence with the sponsored sport was positively related to changes in stock prices.

- by john clark
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- Business, Marketing, Tourism, Consumer
- by marketing team
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- Case Study, Major League Baseball
- by Jahn Hakes
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- Labor Market, Personnel Management, Decode-And-Forward, Decode and Forward

A detailed longitudinal dataset is assembled containing annual performance and biographical data for every player over the entire history of professional major league baseball. The data are then aggregated to the team level for the period 1920-2009 in order to test whether teams built on a more even distribution of observed talent perform better than those teams with a mixture of highly able and less able players. The dependent variable used in the regressions is the percentage of games a team wins each season. We find that conditioning on average player ability, dispersion of both batting and pitching talent displays an optimal degree of inequality, in that teams with too high or too low a spread in player ability perform worse than teams with a more balanced distribution of offensive and defensive talent. These findings have potentially important applications both inside and outside of the sporting world.

- by Kerry Papps
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- Labour Economics, Applied Economics, Firm Performance, Seasonality

Purpose -The purpose of the paper is to demonstrate that organizational task interdependence has an impact on the performance of home teams in sport. Design/methodology/approach -The paper uses a cross-sectional research design. It tests the authors' hypothesis using a probit analysis of nine years of data from Major League Baseball and eight years of data from the National Hockey League. Findings -The paper determines that the underlying task interdependence of a sport has a significant impact on the performance of a sport team. Originality/value -The paper argues that sport managers need to consider organizational structure when accounting for team performance. Moreover, the structure of the sport(s) needs to be considered when making adjustments to the league(s) that might affect the competitive balance.

- by Michael Dake
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- Clinical Sciences, Major League Baseball

Professional sports leagues, franchises, and civic boosters, have used the promise of an all star game or league championship as an incentive for host cities to construct new stadiums or arenas at considerable public expense. Past league-sponsored studies have estimated that Super Bowls, All-Star games and other sports mega-events increase economic activity by hundreds of millions of dollars in host

- by Robert Baumann
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- Seasonality, Impact Analysis, Regression Analysis, Economic Impact

In many ways enshrinements and memorials are a reflection of society’s larger sensibilities and self-image. This is also true for sport halls of fame. Sport halls of fame have not only aspired to tell us who the best players are during their respective eras, they have also endeavored to inform us about who we are as people (Gendreau/Springer, 2015). For the National Baseball Hall of Fame, its great challenge is two-fold. It must showcase the historical story of baseball, while also reflecting how the sport represents the United States as its “national pastime.” To accomplish this challenge, the National Baseball Hall of Fame has created a model for the induction of players to its institution. In this analysis, I will highlight what this model is and explore how moral components aid, or detract, from the institution accomplishing its overarching objective. After this diagnostic research, I will recommend changes to this model where I believe it detracts from its prime directive.

- by Markell Braxton-Johnson
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- Baseball, Sports Ethics, Baseball History & America, Philosophy of Sport

Although numerous models of team performance have been articulated over the past 20 years, these models have primarily focused on the individual attribute approach to team composition. The authors utilized a role composition approach, which investigates how the characteristics of a set of role holders impact team effectiveness, to develop a theory of the strategic core of teams. Their theory suggests that certain team roles are most important for team performance and that the characteristics of the role holders in the "core" of the team are more important for overall team performance. This theory was tested in 778 teams drawn from 29 years of major league baseball (1974 -2002). Results demonstrate that although high levels of experience and job-related skill are important predictors of team performance, the relationships between these constructs and team performance are significantly stronger when the characteristics are possessed by core role holders (as opposed to non-core role holders). Further, teams that invest more of their financial resources in these core roles are able to leverage such investments into significantly improved performance. These results have implications for team composition models, as they suggest a new method for considering individual contributions to a team's success that shifts the focus onto core roles.

- by Rozelle Frederick
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- Marketing, Psychology, Applied Psychology, Baseball

Professional baseball operates a tiered system of talent development facilitated by alliances between Minor League Baseball (MiLB) clubs and higher status Major League Baseball (MLB) parent teams. This study applies management theory to advance the literature on MiLB demand modeling by proposing and testing a new set of demand determinants based on interorganizational alliance principles. Team executives at the AA level should be alert to the high cost of switching team alliances and of changing to a parent club in closer geographical proximity. At the AAA level, affiliation with a winning MLB club exerts a positive effect on AAA demand.

- by Nola Agha and +1
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- Baseball, Strategic Alliances, Minor Leagues, Switching Costs

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the importance of the Spanish language and the remarkable contribution to Major League Baseball by Spanish-American players.

Both the popular press and industry insiders have claimed that the growing gap between the "rich" and "poor" teams in major league baseball has led to a greater disparity on the field of play and that the eventual outcome of this gap will be lower attendance. The purpose of this inquiry is twofold. First, an investigation into the level of competitive balance reveals that relative to major league baseball's historical record and contrary to the contentions of the media, the 1990s was the most competitive decade on the field of play. Second, the previously unexplored link between aggregate attendance and league competitive balance is examined. This investigation suggests that a relationship between these factors does indeed exist, whether one explores the relationship strictly across time or with the use of a panel data set. 145 AUTHORS' NOTE: We would like to thank the editor and an anonymous referee. We would also like to thank Rodney Fort for providing additional data. The usual disclaimer still applies.

- by David Berri
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- Panel Data, Sports economics, Competitive balance, Major League Baseball

We formulate the head-to-head matchups between Major League Baseball pitchers and batters from 1954 to 2008 as a bipartite network of mutually-antagonistic interactions. We consider both the full network and single-season networks, which exhibit interesting structural changes over time. We find interesting structure in the network and examine their sensitivity to baseball's rule changes. We then study a biased random walk on the matchup networks as a simple and transparent way to compare the performance of players who competed under different conditions and to include information about which particular players a given player has faced. We find that a player's position in the network does not correlate with his success in the random walker ranking but instead has a substantial effect on its sensitivity to changes in his own aggregate performance.

- by Mason Porter
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- Mathematical Physics, Quantum Physics, Seasonality, Structural Change

The main body of this paper presents and evaluates a probability-based measure of productivity in major league baseball, and applies this measure to the question of clutch performance. These measures make use of data on every play throughout the season. The concept is based on the effect of a player's action -say hitting a two run homer or grounding into a double play -in changing the state of the game, and thus increasing (or decreasing) his teams' probability of winning the game.

- by Jahn Hakes
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- Major League Baseball

Election into Major League Baseball's (MLB) National Hall of Fame (HOF) often sparks debate among the fans, media, players, managers, and other members in the baseball community. Since the HOF members must be elected by a committee of baseball sportswriters and other entities, the prediction of a player's inclusion in the HOF is not trivial to model. There has been a lack of research in predicting HOF status based on a player's career statistics. Many models that were found in a literature search use linear models, which do not provide robust solutions for classification prediction in complex non-linear datasets. The multitude of possible combinations of career statistics is better suited for a non-linear model, like artificial neural networks (ANN). The objective of this research is to create an ANN model which can be used to predict HOF status for MLB players based on their career offensive and defensive statistics as well as the number of career end of the season awards. This research is limited to investigating players who are not pitchers. Another objective of this report is to give the audience of this particular journal an overview of ANNs.

- by Gary Weckman
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- Mechanical Engineering, Statistics, Linear Model, Seasonality

Moneyball (Lewis, 2003) is a book about baseball. The book describes how a small-market Major League Baseball team, the Oakland Athletics, has been able to compete with large-market teams by being innovative in a tradition-laden industry. However, when read through a business management lens, one discerns that this baseball book, in fact, has general management lessons in a variety of

It has traditionally been argued that the organizer of a sports league would prefer more competitive balance to the level that emerges in a noncooperative equilibrium. This argument has been used to justify restraints on competition between teams, which also tend to raise profits at the expense of players and consumers. This paper shows that in theory a planner would prefer less, not more, competitive balance. The paper uses data from the second tier of professional English league football to show just how unbalanced a league planner would choose.

- by Stefan Szymanski
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- Economics, Soccer, Football, Profitability

- by David Berri
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- Labour Economics, Sport, Sports economics, Major League Baseball

I investigate whether the removal of the reserve clause in professional baseball affected the competitive nature of the industry in the context of whether the distribution of team wins has been affected by free-agency. Unlike previous studies which use the standard deviation of winning percentage, I use a more sensitive measure of parity. I calculate the deviations of the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index of team wins from the competitive ideal during 1920 to 1996 and relate them to player-talent distribution and structural changes in the industry. I isolate the structural effect of freeagency and find that it has adversely affected the parity of the American League but that it has had no statistical influence on the parity of the National League.

- by Craig Depken
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- Industrial Organization, Applied Economics, Concentration, Standard Deviation

Five studies examined the relationship between talent and team performance. Two survey studies found that people believe there is a linear and nearly monotonic relationship between talent and performance: participants expected that more talent increases performance and that this relationship would never turn negative. However, building off research on status conflicts, we predicted that talent facilitates performance…but only up to a point, after which the benefits of more talent will decrease and eventually turn negative as intra-team coordination suffers. We also predicted that the level of task interdependence would be a key determinant of when more talent would be detrimental versus beneficial. Three archival studies revealed that the too-muchtalent effect only emerged when in tasks where team members were interdependent (football and basketball) but not independent (baseball). Our basketball analysis established the mediating role of team coordination. When teams need to come together, more talent can tear them apart.

- by Michael Schaerer and +1
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- Psychology, Cognitive Science, Economics of Football (soccer), Conflict
- by Kim Cameron
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- Finance, Competition, Competitive advantage, Sustainable Competitive Advantage

Tax law revisions of 2004 altered the "roster depreciation allowance" enjoyed by pro sports team owners. Supporters claimed this would practically eliminate costly legal oversight by the IRS and, ultimately, increase owner tax bills. Government officials and leagues remained silent on team value impacts but outside analysts argued they would rise by 5%. We model this policy change and investigate it empirically. Supporters in Congress were absolutely correct that owner tax payments should increase but outside analysts underestimated team value increases by half. No wonder Major League Baseball and the National Football League favored the revision. (JEL D21, G38, H25, L83) * We thank Michael Wark for helpful research assistance, and Michael Coulson, Virginia Bullard, and anonymous referees for helpful comments.

- by Michael A Istvan Jr.
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- Creative Writing, American Literature, Sociology, Sociology of Sport
- by Jarron Saint Onge
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- Economics and Human Biology, Baseball, World War II, Applied Economics
- by Jarron Saint Onge
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- Demography, Population, Population Policy, Major League Baseball

The posting system used in major league baseball to obtain free agent players from Japan has some similarities and many di¤erences from the transfer system used to obtain foreign free agents in European football. This paper uses auction... more

- by Duane Rockerbie
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- Auction Theory, Market Failure, Major League Baseball
- by Justin Isaacs
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- Economics, Sports economics, Profitability, Consumer Preference