Three Essays on Sports Economics
Date Issued
2014
Date
2014
Author(s)
Chang, Ted
Abstract
This dissertation consists of three essays revolving around Major League Baseball in relation to sports economics. The first essay discusses the effects of overwork on the career and lifespan of professional baseball players. By using the data of players from Major League Baseball (MLB), a working time determination model is used to derive the unplanned working time influenced by a player''s teammate performance. Previous unplanned working time is then added to the working time model to see if it influences the future working time and performance of the players. A career average unplanned working time is also calculated to check if it is related to a player''s lifespan. The results show that, for MLB batters, high unplanned working time leads to working less in the following season, but the working time of the pitchers seems to be unaffected. Moreover, high unplanned working time makes players perform poorly and more likely to retire. However, the effect of overworked on a player''s mortality rate is not obvious. The second essay examines the seemingly self-explanatory concept that batters have an advantage when facing opposite-hand (OH) pitchers. While this opposite-hand (OH) advantage is known to be ex ante, the performance of players is ex post, which contains information about their intrinsic skill, hand (dis)advantage, and teams’ recruiting strategies. Based on more than 1.3 million MLB play-by-play data from 2000 to 2012, we provided a quantitative estimate of the OH advantage and made analyses. The results showed OH advantage accounts for about 7-15% of the ex post on-base plus slugging. Second, marginal batters, both right-handed and left-handed, are more subjective to the proportion of left-handed pitchers than the average batters. Third, there should be 7.5% more left-handed batters in MLB. The third essay investigate the common belief that postseason experience is quite valuable and players with postseason experience are highly esteemed. Regressions are made to determine if the free agent players who had participated in postseason games or won the World Series are more valuable. The results show that teams have higher demand on pitchers who won in the previous World Series, but batters with previous postseason experience do not earn higher salary. However, the batters'' career postseason experience is more valuable than the pitchers''. Also, batters who had more experiences in higher stages of postseason will less likely to keep playing in the future, and those who won the Championships more often are most inclined to retire.
Subjects
sports economics
MLB
overwork
opposite-hand advantage
postseason experience
Type
thesis
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