Past studies estimating the marginal revenue products of baseball players have assumed individual players' hitting performances to be independent of teammate spillovers. However, the baseball community's widely held belief in “protectionâ€â€”that a good (bad) player can improve...

Defense in baseball is a product of team production in which pitchers and fielders jointly prevent runs. This means that raw run-prevention statistics that economists often use to gauge the value of pitchers, such as earned run average, may not properly assign credit for their performances....

The research of sports economists often addresses issues of interest to nonacademics. The shared interests often lead to interactions that have benefits and costs. The benefits center on nonacademic research—found in the ‘‘sabermetric’’ and...

Krautmann contends that Scully’s method for estimating the marginal revenue products of baseball players using team revenues is flawed. Krautmann suggests an alternate method that uses free-agent salaries to impute players' revenue contributions. The Scully method has its weaknesses;...