(iStockphoto)
Our paper on discrimination in baseball has finally been published (the June issue of the American Economic Review). While it received a lot of media and scholarly comment in draft, the final version contained a whole new section. The general idea is that those discriminated against will alter their behavior to mitigate the impacts of discrimination on themselves. But while reducing the impacts, these changes are not costless. For example, if you’re an Hispanic pitcher and think that the white umpire is against you, you’ll change your pitches. Where will you throw? How will you throw?
The paper shows that the pitcher will avoid giving the umpire a chance to use his discretion in judging a pitch. More pitches go into the strike zone, more are clearly balls. More are fastballs, fewer curves and change-ups. A rational response, but by avoiding the umpire’s discrimination the pitcher makes it easier for the batter to hit the ball or to walk. Here’s the abstract:
Major League Baseball umpires express their racial/ethnic preferences when they evaluate pitchers. Strikes are called less often if the umpire and pitcher do not match race/ethnicity, but mainly where there is little scrutiny of umpires. Pitchers understand the incentives and throw pitches that allow umpires less subjective judgment (e.g., fastballs over home plate) when they anticipate bias. These direct and indirect effects bias performance measures of minorities downward. The results suggest how discrimination alters discriminated groups’ behavior generally. They imply that biases in measured productivity must be accounted for in generating measures of wage discrimination.
And here’s a graph showing called strikes by distance from home-plate center. Data from 2007-2008 (N=144,990)
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. You can also watch it on 
Learn from the far superior sport of cricket or even tennis and employ a tracking technology called ‘Hawkeye’.
Hot debate. What do you think?
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I haven only skimmed through the study, so there is a good chance this may have been addressed in the paper, but I’m wondering if/how the authors addressed the errors in the system for judging the strike zone. This reminded me of an article I read back in March from Baseball Prospectus about the accuaracy of the PITCHfx data. http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=13109 You may need a subscription to view the link. It would be difficult to summarize it here, the jist though is that (sometimes significant) errors occur in systems for judging the strike zones (PITCHfx, K-zone, QuesTek, etc.)
On the wage discrimination discussed at the end of the full article. It appears that you haven’t differentiated between subjectivity of the evaluator affecting measured output and it affecting actual output. For example, with piece work a worker may make one hundred widgets but his boss syas there’s only 90; so measured performance varies from actual performance. With baseball the subjectivity affects actual petrformance; if the umpire says it’s not a strike, it’s not a strike. Therefore, if there’s a bias against minority pitures, this will affect there actual performance and you’d expect them to be paid less.
What about the race of the batter who is up at the time?
Is that factored in?
And do you differentiate the pitcher’s perception or prediction of bias from an umpire versus any actual bias of an umpire? It’s a little unfair to imply that a specific umpire “A” is biased simple because a pitcher behaves as if he expects that umpire to be biased.
If a white woman crosses the street to avoid a black man, it doesn’t make that man a thug. It only describes her perception.
Do you think baseball manufacturer’s hire Haitian witch doctors to cast a voodoo spells on the balls so Hispanic and Black players have a better chance at hitting them?
The whole premise, study and article is idiotic.
There are good umpires, and better umpires. They all make mistakes sometimes.
This whole thing is ridiculous.
Hot pitchers get bigger strike zones regardless of race. If it’s a big name pitcher, the umpire has a fan-based obligation to make things interesting. Take Mariano Rivera. Umpires made him the pitcher he is today. He gets +3 to 4 inches on both sides of the plate and very low calls as well. No pitcher in baseball has a larger strike zone. Racism exists in all of us. Those who claim it doesn’t are only fighting it. It’s a natural response…