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Economists are not a timid lot. We like to take our game to other people's playgrounds and see if we can beat them. We think our game plan—building models based on the assumption that rational people are responding to incentives, crunching a lot of numbers, and ruthlessly sharpening our spikes—can be applied just about everywhere, so we're not afraid to take road trips. Many find this adventurous bent laudable, although occasionally over-eager economists take on competition that's pretty tough and the home crowd boos them off the field.
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A recent article in the Wall Street Journal told of one such case. When Cornell economist Michael Waldman used statistical evidence to argue that autism is linked to television watching, autism experts and parents of autistic children roundly criticized him and tried to eject him from the ballpark. Or take the case of The Marketplace of Christianity, in which economists Robert B. Ekelund, Jr., Robert F. Hebert, and Robert D. Tollison mangled the religious history of Christianity from the Reformation to the present in a ham-fisted attempt to impose public choice theory and neoclassical economics on spiritual matters. There were a few valuable insights, but overall a lot more misses than hits. And of course there's the case of Steven D. Levitt, co-author of the surprise bestseller Freakonomics. He's made news by applying economic arguments and statistical evidence to topics ranging from test taking to naming babies and crime. His argument that the Roe v. Wade decision precipitated a substantial drop in the crime rate a couple decades later is far from what most people once considered to be economics. Serious questions have been raised about the validity of this finding, but the umpiring crew hasn't yet reached an official ruling.
And now we have economists sizing up sports. Though this may seem trivial to some, perhaps yet another sign of academic decline, the economics of sport is a booming business. My bet is that economists are attracted to analyzing sports primarily because many are enduring sports fans—plus most economists are "stat heads," and a good many of them spent their youths mentally recalculating their favorite player's batting average after each of his at bats.
But there's another reason baseball and economics fit like hand and glove: sports can provide an empirical testing ground for economic theories that may otherwise go untested. This is perhaps the biggest advantage of sports markets, that they make available detailed performance measures for individuals (and their coworkers and managers). Appropriately, undergraduate courses in the economics of sports have popped up at leading research universities like Cornell, Harvard, and Vanderbilt. The Journal of Sports Economics was launched in 2000 and has published nearly 200 articles on sports of all varieties: football, basketball, hockey, golf, racing (foot, horse, bicycle, and auto), boxing, rugby, and even cricket. Topics include player compensation and incentives, league and tournament structures, racial discrimination, the value that consumers put on having a professional team in town, the efficiency of betting markets, the effects of competitive balance on attendance, and the economic impacts of stadium and sports spending. But regardless of what economic issue is being studied, baseball—perhaps because of its sublime essence—is king. More than twice as many studies examine it than the runner-up (soccer).
It's not surprising, then, that while the sports economics field has sprouted an wide array of monographs (Stephen Shmanske's Golfonomics, to take just one example), the best of these—such as Andrew Zimbalist's May the Best Team Win: Baseball Economics and Public Policy, which I've discussed with eager students in my Current Economic Issues course—deal with good old American baseball. Out of the dugout and into the lineup steps The Baseball Economist. J. C. Bradbury of Kennesaw State University pitches a slider he calls Sabernomics (coined after Sabermetrics, whose root word comes from SABR—the Society for American Baseball Research—which sprang largely out of the research of the justly revered number-crunching guru Bill James).
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