Major League Baseball (MLB) rules restrict the movement of any franchise into another’s territory. These territorial rules are designed to protect each team’s potential local revenue sources as well as to provide stability throughout the league. Recently, Major League Baseball approved...

We examine the need for and the presence of competitive balance in professional sports leagues. We argue that competitive balance helps to further fan welfare and we propose a new measure of competitive balance that hopefully better reflects the needs of fans—that is, compared with measures...

We analyzed issues of playoff uncertainty (PU) by examining competitive balance and outcome uncertainty. Specifically, we (i) developed an alternative measure of PU, (ii) analyzed the relationship between PU and postseason structure in Major League Baseball (MLB), and (iii) tested the PU of the...

The present paper examines aggregate player movement in Major League Baseball over the majority of the 20th century. Major League Baseball has been subject to numerous exogenous shocks across the period. For example, it has been subject to competition during the mid-1910s with the introduction...

In late 2011, at a time when other leagues such as the National Football League and the National Basketball Association had engaged in work stoppages, Major League Baseball owners and the MLB Players Association harmoniously agreed on a new five-year collective bargaining agreement. This article...

In this paper we investigate the impact of upper and middle level managers on firm performance by simultaneously estimating manager and match qualities for management pairings in Major League Baseball (MLB). We document the economic significance of managers at both organizational levels and...

An important issue in many antitrust lawsuits involving professional sports leagues and their member teams is the extent to which franchises within the same, and across different, professional sports leagues compete with one another for fans and advertisers. Complicating the issue is the fact...

There has been much discussion recently in the world of professional sports about competitive balance. As more is focused on the growing disparity between large market and small market teams, one must ask whether the luxury tax, as implemented by Major League Baseball, has had its intended...

There has been much discussion recently in the world of professional sports about competitive balance. As more is focused on the growing disparity between large market and small market teams, one must ask whether the luxury tax, as implemented by Major League Baseball, has had its intended...

The unwillingness of team owners to share their data prohibits a direct assessment of the value of professional team sports ownership. But insights into that value can be gleaned from actual team sale prices. First, throughout the entire modern history of Major League Baseball (MLB), the average...