The Relationship between Player Characteristics, Team Characteristics and Athletes’ Remuneration: An Advanced Empirical Study of Asian and US Professional Baseball Leagues

Zhenjia Liu,Yishu Wang,Bingbing Zong,Xuewei Zhang

doi:10.4236/me.2017.87060

Abstract

This paper studies factors that determine salary among professional baseball players in the Asian (Japan,KoreaandTaiwan) and US. Empirical results show that US baseball players are the highest paid and those in Taiwan receive the lowest salary, with a large difference of 75 times. Experience, age, education and other variables, as well as population of teams’ home cities are influential. Whether or not a player transfers to other teams, their health conditions (measured as BMI) and other variables significantly affect salary, and there is no significant variance arising from different management environments in different countries. Although team age and player salary are correlated significantly in the three countries, the correlation is positive in the US and negative in Asian (Japan, Korea and Taiwan). However, their health conditions (measured as BMI), training, education and population of teams’ home cities have insignificantly correlation with the total salary from multi-year contracts.

Highlights

Salaries of baseball players are high.1 A review of literature on factors that de-Average Per capita GDP Average Salary of Baseball PlayersZ
As there is incomplete information on professional athletics, we have tried to guarantee data reliability by obtaining information from data provided by professional baseball leagues around the world3
3http://mlb.mlb.com (Major League Baseball, American); http://www.npb.or.jp (Nippon Professional Baseball, Japan); http://www.cpbl.com.tw (Chinese Professional Baseball League, Taiwan); http://www.koreabaseball.com (Korea Professional Baseball League) 4http://home.a07.itscom.net/kazoo/pro/pro.htm (Salaries of Japanese Baseball Players) http://content.usatoday.com/sports/baseball/salaries/default.aspx (Salaries of U.S Professional Baseball Players) http://mlbcontracts.blogspot.com (Contracts Signed by US Professional Baseball Players) http://twbsball.dils.tku.edu.tw/wiki/index.php?title=%E9%A6%96%E9%A0%81 (Wikipedia: Baseball) http://www.baseball-reference.com/players (Other data on Major League Baseball) 5Professional baseball players’ salaries are not made public in Taiwan or Korea

Summary

Introduction

Salaries of baseball players are high. A review of literature on factors that de-Average Per capita GDP (in US$10,000) Average Salary of Baseball Players (in US$10,000)Z. Average Per capita GDP (in US$10,000) Average Salary of Baseball Players (in US$10,000). Liu et al 866 termine baseball player salaries shows that include experience [1] [2], player’s performance [2], age [3], contract length [4], team performance [5], sports awards [6], previous-season team revenues [7], and contract signing team located in birth state [8] as factors affecting athlete salary. In addition to an analysis of salary structures, this paper mainly aims at studying salary differences among players. This paper is divided into five sections. The second includes a review of the literature on professional athletes’ salaries and proposes hypothesis.

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion