Demand For Offense : Designated Hitters and MLB Attendance

In 2022, Major League Baseball changed its rules to include the designated hitter position in both the American and National Leagues. Up until that year, designated hitters were only used by American League teams. This rule change creates an environment where half of a major sports league is given a shock to offensive production. We analyze the demand for offense by investigating how the designated hitter affects attendance and offensive production for National League teams. Our results contribute to a rich literature that analyzes how offense affects fan participation, as we provide the first evidence using causal inference that offense increases fan attendance. Using a difference-in-differences framework, we show that the offense created by a designated hitter increases attendance by about 3.5-7.9% at National League home games as a result of the rule change. Given a point estimate increase in total offense of about 4.85%, we find evidence that attendance is likely elastic with respect to total offense