Good Sports
Birth Order and Risk Taking in Athletics: A Meta-Analysis and Study of Major League Baseball
Frank Sulloway & Richard Zweigenhaft
Personality and Social Psychology Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
According to expectations derived from evolutionary theory, younger siblings are more likely than older siblings to participate in high-risk activities. The authors test this hypothesis by conducting a meta-analysis of 24 previous studies involving birth order and participation in dangerous sports. The odds of laterborns engaging in such activities were 1.48 times greater than for firstborns (N = 8,340). The authors also analyze performance data on 700 brothers who played major league baseball. Consistent with their greater expected propensity for risk taking, younger brothers were 10.6 times more likely to attempt the high-risk activity of base stealing and 3.2 times more likely to steal bases successfully (odds ratios). In addition, younger brothers were significantly superior to older brothers in overall batting success, including two measures associated with risk taking. As expected, significant heterogeneity among various performance measures for major league baseball players indicated that older and younger brothers excelled in different aspects of the game.
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Arthur De Vany
Economic Inquiry, forthcoming
Abstract:
There has been no change in Major League Baseball home run hitting for 45 yr, in spite of the new records. Players hit with no more power now than before. Records are the result of chance variations in at bats, home runs per hit, and other factors. The clustering of records is implied by the intermittency of the law of home runs. Home runs follow a stable Paretian distribution with infinite variance. The shape and scale of the distribution have not changed over the years. The greatest home run hitters are as rare as great scientists, artists, or composers.
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Vittorio Addona & Jeremy Roth
Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports, March 2010
Abstract:
Since 2005, Major League Baseball (MLB) has suspended 258 players under its Drug Prevention and Treatment Program. Moreover, the Mitchell Report yielded the names of 89 alleged users of performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs). This documentation enables quantification of the impact of PEDs on player performance. Literature with this goal is limited, and has focused primarily on batters. Some authors have examined Roger Clemens, but there has been no previous work assessing the influence of PEDs on pitchers more generally. We gathered average fastball velocity from Fangraphs.com for all MLB pitchers who threw at least 10 innings in a month between 2002 and 2008 (11,860 player months). Pitchers were deemed to be PED users if they were named as such in the Mitchell Report or suspended by MLB for a positive PED test. Human growth hormone (HGH) usage was tracked separately. We modeled fastball velocity by PED and HGH usage, age, a Starter/Reliever indicator, and several control variables. Using PEDs significantly increased average fastball velocity by 1.074 MPH overall. When PED impact was allowed to vary by pitcher type (Starter/Reliever) and age, its benefits were most substantial later in a player's career. For example, at age 35, the effect of PEDs was 1.437 MPH for relievers and 0.988 MPH for starters. HGH use was significantly negatively correlated with fastball velocity. This suggests disproportional HGH use by injured players hoping to hasten their recoveries, and is consistent with frequent explanations provided in the Mitchell Report.
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Tournament Incentives, League Policy, and NBA Team Performance Revisited
Joseph Price, Brian Soebbing, David Berri & Brad Humphreys
Journal of Sports Economics, April 2010, Pages 117-135
Abstract:
Taylor and Trogdon found evidence of shirking under some, but not all, draft lottery systems used in three different National Basketball Association (NBA) seasons. The authors use data from all NBA games played from 1977 to 2007 and a fixed effects model to control for unobservable team and season heterogeneity to extend this research. The authors find that NBA teams were more likely to intentionally lose games at the end of the regular season during the seasons where the incentives to finish last were the largest.
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Payback Calls: A Starting Point for Measuring Basketball Referee Bias and Impact on Team Performance
Choong Hoon Lim & Ryan Rodenberg
European Sport Management Quarterly, December 2009, Pages 375-387
Abstract:
Recent scandals in sports have (re-)emphasized the need for targeted monitoring that is legal, reasonable and effective. The National Basketball Association (NBA) provides an ideal environment to measure the effect of individual referees on team performance and non-conclusively test for possible bias by referees against league teams and affiliated individuals. In the course of analyzing 654 games and 77 referees over seven NBA seasons, we find that no NBA referee had a significant adverse effect on team performance or exhibited bias against the Dallas Mavericks when considering all games (regular season and playoffs). However, when analyzing only the 80 playoff games involving the team, we find one example of an NBA referee having a significantly adverse effect on team performance. Retribution theory is used to explain the possibility of such a prima facie finding. Nevertheless, given our use of nonconclusive indirect detection methods, such a finding merely gives rise to a rebuttable presumption.
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Age and Winning Professional Golf Tournaments
Gizachew Tiruneh
Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports, January 2010
Abstract:
Most professional golfers and analysts think that winning on the PGA Tour peaks when golfers are in their thirties. Rather than relying on educated guesses, we can actually use available statistical data to determine the actual ages at which golfers peak their golf game. We can also test the hypothesis that age affects winning professional golf tournaments. Using data from the web sites of the Golf Channel, the PGA Tour, the European PGA Tour, and the LPGA Tour, I calculated the mean, the median, and the mode ages at which professional golfers on the PGA, European PGA, Champions, and LPGA Tours had won between 2003 and 2007. More specifically, the ages at which golfers on the PGA, European PGA, Champions, and LPGA Tours peak their wins seem to be 35, 30, 52, and 25, respectively. The regression analysis I have conducted seems to support my hypothesis that age affects winning professional golf tournaments.
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Is March Madness Contagious? Post Season Play and Attendance in NCAA Division I Basketball
Craig Depken
University of North Carolina Working Paper, March 2010
Abstract:
Using data describing Division I men's basketball from 1990-2009, this paper presents empirical evidence that participating in the NCAA tournament or the National Invitational Tournament (NIT) generates internal benefits in the form of increased future attendance to a team's home games. These impacts are in addition to those generated by team winning percentage and other institutional characteristics. The evidence suggests that having more conference members in the NCAA tournament generates external benefits in the form of future attendance, although there do not appear to be similar impacts associated with the NIT. Finally, there appear to be no greater internal benefits but lower external benefits for Big Six conference members, relative to members of smaller conferences. Thus, if the NCAA tournament selection process is biased against smaller conferences then their members face two levels of costs: they receive lower distributions from the NCAA basketball revenue pool and also enjoy lower attendance than they otherwise would.
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Anomalies in Tournament Design: The Madness of March Madness
Robert Baumann, Victor Matheson & Cara Howe
Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports, March 2010
Abstract:
Tournament design is of crucial importance in competitive sports. The primary goal of effective tournament design is to provide incentives for the participants to maximize their performance both during the tournament and in the time period leading up to the tournament. In spectator sports, a secondary goal of tournament design is to also promote interesting match ups that generate fan interest. Seeded tournaments, in general, promote both goals. Teams or individuals with strong performances leading up to a tournament receive higher seeds which increase their chances of progressing further in the tournament. Furthermore, seeding ensures that the strongest teams or players are most likely to meet in the final rounds of the tournament when fan interest is at its peak. Under some distributions of team or player skill, however, a seeding system can introduce anomalies that could affect incentives. Our analysis of the NCAA men's basketball tournament uncovers such an anomaly. The seeding system in this tournament gives teams with better success in the regular season more favorable first round match ups, but the tournament is not reseeded as the games progress. Therefore, while higher seeds progress to the 2nd round of the tournament at uniformly higher rates than lower seeds, this relationship breaks down in later rounds. We find that 10th and 11th seeds average more wins and typically progress farther in the tournament than 8th and 9th seeds. This finding violates the intended incentive structure of seeded tournaments.
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Using "Dominetrics" to Impose Greater Discipline on Performance Rankings
Scott Beaulier & Robert Elder
Journal of Sports Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Importing the methodology of Cherchye and Vermeulen (2006), the authors discuss the many ways "dominetrics" can measure performance. They then apply the approach to National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I men's basketball rankings. The ordinal approach they take removes some subjectivity from the Rating Percentage Index (RPI). Just as Pareto relationships are obtained without subjective cardinal weighting schemes, the dominance relationships applied here eliminate the subjectivity of cardinal weighting. Because heated debate inevitably ensues after the NCAA Selection Committee's announcement of at-large invitees to the NCAA tournament, the subjectivity-minimizing dominetric provides a barometer for evaluating the relative qualities of college basketball teams.
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Evidence of bias in NCAA tournament selection and seeding
Jay Coleman, Michael DuMond & Allen Lynch
Managerial and Decision Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
We investigate bias in the selection and seeding decisions of the NCAA Division I Men's Basketball Committee. Using data on 910 teams associated with the ten tournaments from 1999 to 2008, we test for bias toward teams from seven major conferences and six mid-major conferences, as well as for bias toward teams represented on the Committee. We find substantial support for the hypothesis of bias in favor of virtually all major and mid-major conferences in selection and/or seeding, as well as evidence of bias toward majors over mid-majors. We also find substantial evidence of bias toward teams with some type of Committee representation.
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The Psychology of Rivalry: A Relationally-dependent Analysis of Competition
Gavin Kilduff, Hillary Anger Elfenbein & Barry Staw
Academy of Management Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
We investigate the psychological phenomenon of rivalry, and propose a view of competition as inherently relational, thus extending the literatures on competition between individuals, groups, and firms. Specifically, we argue that the relationships between competitors - as captured by their proximity, relative attributes and prior competitive interactions - can influence the subjective intensity of rivalry between them, which in turn can affect their competitive behavior. Initial tests of these ideas within NCAA basketball indicate that (1) dyadic relationships between teams are highly influential in determining perceptions of rivalry (2) similarity between teams and their histories of prior interactions are systematically predictive of rivalry and (3) rivalry may affect the motivation and performance of team members. These findings suggest significant implications for both the management of employees and the competitive strategies taken by organizations.
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The Price of Anarchy in Basketball
Brian Skinner
Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports, January 2010
Abstract:
Optimizing the performance of a basketball offense may be viewed as a network problem, wherein each play represents a "pathway" through which the ball and players may move from origin (the in-bounds pass) to goal (the basket). Effective field goal percentages from the resulting shot attempts can be used to characterize the efficiency of each pathway. Inspired by recent discussions of the "price of anarchy" in traffic networks, this paper makes a formal analogy between a basketball offense and a simplified traffic network. The analysis suggests that there may be a significant difference between taking the highest-percentage shot each time down the court and playing the most efficient possible game. There may also be an analogue of Braess's Paradox in basketball, such that removing a key player from a team can result in the improvement of the team's offensive efficiency.
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Ryan Rodenberg & Daniel Stone
Florida State University Working Paper, April 2010
Abstract:
Age is often used in law and public policy as a low-cost proxy for competency, maturity, and ability. Age is also used in numerous sport (and non-sport) labor markets to determine workplace eligibility. We exploit the enactment of the women's professional tennis minimum age rule (AR) in 1995 to estimate the effects of ARs on short-run and long-run labor market outcomes. We find no evidence that the AR has had a beneficial effect on players' career longevity or success, and weak evidence that players subject to the AR actually had worse outcomes than those not subject to the rule. Our results suggest that sport governing bodies should revisit "one size fits all" eligibility rules that are paternalistic in nature.