Consumer discrimination in professional sports: new evidence from major league baseball

Abstract

Previous research in sports economics has looked for the presence of consumer discrimination among sports fans of professional teams and it has produced mixed results. Scully (1974a, b) found evidence to suggest that fans of Major League Baseball (MLB) clubs did engage in consumer discrimination in the 1970s, but more recent work by Sommers and Quinton (1982) found no such evidence. In this article, we present evidence that suggests that consumer discrimination persisted in MLB into the early 1990s. Specifically, our empirical work suggests that consumers in Boston, Cleveland, Houston, San Diego and Saint Louis chose to attend fewer baseball games–ceteris paribus–when the home team in these cities added Hispanic players to the roster.

Notes

¹ Additional research on consumer discrimination relating to baseball has focused on the market for baseball trading cards.

² We would like to thank Dr Timmerman for all of his hard work in compiling the race data set and we would also like to thank him for so graciously sharing his data.

³ We would like to thank Michael Muniz, our research assistant, for his hard work on this project.

⁴ Average ticket price data are not available for all of the years that we have examined in this study.

⁵ The majority of MLB cities have only one team. However, for cities that do have two teams we have recorded dummy variables for each team. Thus, in Table 3 we find statistically significant results for the New York Mets; we did not find comparable results for the New York Yankees. This suggests that fans of the Mets are sensitive to the racial and ethnic composition of their team in a way that fans of the Yankees are not.

⁶ On a major league roster containing 25 players, a one-player increase within a racial/ethnic category represents a 4% increase in that group's population.