Miller-McCune on Baseball

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In a March 16^th article in Miller-McCune online, Tom Jacobs wrote about the possible bias in baseball, pop-ups and economics. The article was titled, “Race Ball: Our National Pastime?“.

I found the first section on race to be inconclusive as the dates they researched were from three different date ranges 1954-1968, early 70’s to early 80’s and All Star voting from 1990 to 2000. In my opinion, since the author starts out with the following opening line: “Although half a century has passed since Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in Major League Baseball, a suspicion has persisted that white fans are less than enthusiastic about rooting for black players.“, I would think he would have taken studies that were all in the same date range in order to make his point seeing that 50 years from Robinson’s first MLB game would bring you to 1997. Therefore, I would think that research done between 1997 and 2008 would have been more beneficial to his article. But don’t take my word for it, read it yourself & tell me if you agree with me or not.

In the section concerning pop-ups, there is a lot of physics to which I am at a loss. It’s all greek to me, but if any of our readers can verify what’s mentioned there as being correct or incorrect, please let us know. If it’s correct, it’s an interesting read under the heading: A Towering, Sky-high Metaphor That Happens Every Spring.

The third and final section of this article is titled, “Socialists Never Could Hit the Curve Ball” and speaks on the current MLB revenue sharing plan which the commissioner thinks is working wonderfully. In this section, an argument is made which suggests that some smaller market teams are just pocketing this money without using it on player payroll. To see what is said in contract to that claim, please go to the article and feel free to share with us your ideas in the comment section of this post!

Editor’s note: Special thanks to Janice at Miller-McCune who sent me this link a while back. Sorry for the delay. J