Who Integrated Major League Baseball Faster Winning Teams or Losing Teams? A Comment

Abstract

This article offers some comments on recent articles in this journal about the process of racial integration in certain sports venues. Nothing in these articles changes the basic result in an earlier article where the authors show that entrepreneurship by winning teams is the key to understanding which teams integrated first and why.

The Spread of Integration in Major League Baseball

“…Third, when we estimate our empirical model in "Estimation and Discussion", we adopt a specification flexible enough to let the data tell us how performance affects the spread of integration; this results in a different view of being "in contention" than might otherwise be assumed. Fourth, we argue in the same section that the data can tell us to what extent integration was driven by competitive considerations, giving new insight into this debate (see Coyne et al 2010a, Goff and Tollison 2010, Hanssen and Meehan 2009, and Hanssen and Meehan 2010.…”

“…We agree with Hanssen and Meehan that using the fraction/number 7 of black players on the roster as the dependent variable in regressions is unwise; we analyze the panel data as a pooled cross-section, and using levels instead of changes introduces severe serial correlation and simultaneity: the fraction of black players in a given season is strongly correlated with the fraction of black players last season, as is performance correlated from season to season. In Goff and Tollison (2010) the authors claim that their inflated statistical significance is a side issue, because they "know which came first," i.e., that the best teams integrated first; but they "know" this precisely because of their inflated statistical significance. Indeed, Granger causality tests (Granger, 1969) show a distinct lack of support for their claim.…”

Integration of North and South American Players in Japan's Professional Baseball Leagues

“…SeeGoff and Tollison (2010) for a critique ofHanssen and Meehan (2009). 28 See Whiting (1989) andFitts (2005Fitts ( , 2009) for important histories of professional baseball in Japan.29 Possible sources of higher salaries paid to foreign players include the absence of an NPB draft assigning rights to a foreign player to a specific team and the higher reservation wages of U.S. players, particularly during the 1950s and 1960s when Japan's economy was rebuilding and Japanese salaries were relatively low.…”