{"id":3263,"date":"2020-07-30T12:15:08","date_gmt":"2020-07-30T16:15:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/fordscholars\/?p=3263"},"modified":"2020-08-10T20:44:10","modified_gmt":"2020-08-11T00:44:10","slug":"vertical-integration-and-competitive-balance-in-professional-sports-evidence-from-minor-league-baseball","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/fordscholars\/2020\/07\/30\/vertical-integration-and-competitive-balance-in-professional-sports-evidence-from-minor-league-baseball\/","title":{"rendered":"Vertical Integration and Competitive Balance in Professional Sports: Evidence from Minor League Baseball"},"content":{"rendered":"

Professor Qi Ge and Alex Eisert ’22, Economics Department<\/em><\/p>\n

This summer, I was privileged to work on a project examining competitive balance and vertical integration in sports with Professor Ge. Specifically, we looked into the relationship between major (MLB) and minor (MiLB) league baseball. Hailing from New York, I am a lifelong Yankees (MLB) fan, and growing up, I also frequented Hudson Valley Renegades\u2019 (MiLB) games during my summers in Dutchess County.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Professor Ge and I hard at work over Zoom.<\/p><\/div>\n

\"\"<\/a>

I donned a Renegades’ hat while holding up a picture of logos of the minor league teams with my favorite names.<\/p><\/div>\n

A feeder or minor league is a lower-level, but still professional-grade entity that athletes usually participate in before moving to the highest level (or major league). The more that a sport\u2019s minor leagues are tied to its major league, the more that major league can be said to have engaged in vertical integration; the minor leagues operate as a part of the supply chain for the majors. No such system is as expansive and complex, and perhaps as tightly integrated, like that of Organized Baseball.<\/span><\/p>\n

My first task was to explore the relationship between MLB and MiLB throughout the years with a comprehensive literature review. 1921 marked the first year that MLB teams could have ownership stakes in minor league teams, and they immediately began buying up minor league teams as a place to put young ballplayers, signed for cheap, stashing them until they were ready for the major leagues.<\/span><\/p>\n

My main task was to gather data on which MiLB teams have been MLB-owned, and on the performance of minor league teams throughout the years. We will ultimately use these datasets to look into the effects that MLB ownership has on league-wide competitive balance for the two highest levels of the minor leagues, AA and AAA.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

We learned that, as of today, every AA and AAA team has at least some ties to a major league team, hence the one-to-one ratio.<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Professor Qi Ge and Alex Eisert ’22, Economics Department This summer, I was privileged to work on a project examining competitive balance and vertical integration in sports with Professor Ge. Specifically, we looked into the relationship between major (MLB) and minor (MiLB) league baseball. Hailing from New York, I am a lifelong Yankees (MLB) fan, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9121,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[77494],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3263","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ford-2020"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/fordscholars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3263","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/fordscholars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/fordscholars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/fordscholars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9121"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/fordscholars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3263"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/fordscholars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3263\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3515,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/fordscholars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3263\/revisions\/3515"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/fordscholars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3263"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/fordscholars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3263"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/fordscholars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3263"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}