Customer discrimination against black major league baseball pitchers reconsidered

Abstract

The proposition that customer prejudices reduce attendance at major league baseball games with black starting pitchers is re-examined. In contrast to earlier studies, no such effect is found.

Notes

¹ Other branches of the customer discrimination literature have examined prices of baseball memorabilia (Nardinelli and Simon, 1990) and fan All Star voting (Hanssen and Anderson, 1999). Kahn (1991) reviews the early literature on discrimination in baseball and other sports.

² In April teams and/or pitchers have not yet established their identities and weather may vary significantly between cold and warm weather cities. In September, minor league players are often called up to the majors, altering team composition and introducing pitchers without established records.

⁴ In some specifications lagged records or average of current and lagged were used. Other attempts to capture pitcher quality included earned run average (ERA), strikeouts/inning and All Star status. Inclusion of none of these variables significantly altered the results.

⁵ A comparable variable for the home team is not included as it would be perfectly collinear with the team-year fixed effects.

³ Hausman tests rejected a random effects model in favour of fixed effects at the 1% level in all specifications.

⁶ Combined league equations were also estimated, but these are excluded to conserve space. They do not affect the article's conclusions and their results are available from the author.

⁷ Specification tests failed to reject either the linear or log version in favour of the other.

⁸ Consistent with the findings of Hanssen (1998).