Determinants of Baseball Success: An Econometric Approach

Jacob Andrew Loree

Business and Economic Research, 2016, vol. 6, issue 2, 1-12

Abstract: While much has been investigated into the relationship between several baseball statistics and success, the literature is more heavily focused on individual level characteristics and the salary of individual baseball players. This paper investigates, at a more macro level, the importance of key baseball statistics on the level of wins a team can expect on average using the Lahman Baseball Database for all teams from 1985 to 2015. After several robustness tests, the most important variables an average team should focus on is the total number of runs a team gives up and getting on base as often as possible (by walks as well as base hits). The paper finds that while team salary is statistically significant, it takes an unreasonably large change in salary to be meaningful in terms of number of wins recorded. Therefore, previous research on the effect of salary on team success may be overblown.

Keywords: Baseball Statistics; Econometrics; Sports (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.macrothink.org/journal/index.php/ber/article/view/9488/7882 (application/pdf)
http://www.macrothink.org/journal/index.php/ber/article/view/9488 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mth:ber888:v:6:y:2016:i:2:p:1-12

Access Statistics for this article

Business and Economic Research is currently edited by Daisy Young

More articles in Business and Economic Research from Macrothink Institute
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Technical Support Office ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).