IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/spr/semchp/978-3-031-68479-1_13.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

A Quantile Regression Approach to All Runs Are Created Equal

In: Principles and Paradoxes of Sports Economics

Author

Listed:
  • Ryan Pinheiro

    (St. Bonaventure University)

Abstract

In 2003, the book Moneyball by Michael Lewis claimed that certain performance metrics (such as walks and on-base percentage) were being undervalued in the Major League Baseball (MLB) labor market in the years prior to the book’s publication. According to Moneyball, the Oakland Athletics were able to construct a competitive roster despite being a small market team due to the team’s recognition and exploitation of these statistics in the MLB labor market. Previous research on the topic has yielded mixed results on whether an inefficient market truly existed prior to the publication of Moneyball and whether a labor market correction took place in the post-Moneyball period. This paper extends previous research by utilizing a quantile regression approach to investigate these questions at the different levels of the free agent player salary distribution. Additionally, this paper uses the approach proposed by Lindsey (Oper Res 11(4): 477–501, 1963) and applied by Pinheiro and Szymanski (J Sports Econ 15270025221085712, 2022), to structurally measure player performance through the run value contribution of the player. Using the timeframe 1997–2016, we find that the MLB labor market for skills was largely efficient both before and after the book’s publication at the different levels of the salary distribution, refuting the central claim of Moneyball.

Suggested Citation

  • Ryan Pinheiro, 2024. "A Quantile Regression Approach to All Runs Are Created Equal," Sports Economics, Management, and Policy, in: Stefan Szymanski (ed.), Principles and Paradoxes of Sports Economics, pages 143-159, Springer.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:semchp:978-3-031-68479-1_13
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-68479-1_13
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:semchp:978-3-031-68479-1_13. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.