Demand for offense: designated hitters and MLB attendance

Alexander Cardazzi and Zachary Rodriguez

Applied Economics, 2024, vol. 56, issue 60, 9393-9406

Abstract: In 2022, Major League Baseball changed its rules to include the designated hitter position in both the American and National Leagues. Up until that year, designated hitters were only used by American League teams. This rule change creates an environment where half of a major sports league is given a shock to offensive production. We analyse the demand for offence by investigating how the designated hitter affects attendance and offensive production for National League teams. Our results contribute to a rich literature that analyzes how offence affects fan participation, as we provide the first evidence using causal inference that offence increases fan attendance. Using a difference-in-differences framework, we show that the offence created by a designated hitter increases attendance by about 3.5–7.9% at National League home games as a result of the rule change. Given a point estimate increase in total offence of about 4.85%, we find evidence that attendance is elastic with respect to total offence.

Date: 2024
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DOI: 10.1080/00036846.2024.2302929

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