Through sports, cities can reach fans from all different walks of life to rally together and support a competitive cause. Each city’s fan base is distinct—with their individual personalities being reflective of the culture and environment of the home city. The intent of this paper is to study the effect of multiple on and off field factors as they relate to attendance across three major professional sports in city markets. This will determine which city markets have the strongest, or weakest, overall fan bases. Ultimately, this study will end with an educated recommendation for professional sports franchise relocation or a league expansion.

The professional sports industry is one of the most engaging and entertaining markets in the United States. Specifically, Major League Baseball is unique in the sense that it is America’s pastime and oldest American sport. Professional baseball teams are businesses that trade commodities in the form of baseball players. Unlike publicly traded stocks, baseball players are not traded on an exchange. So, what determines the “price” of professional baseball players? More specifically, what determines the price of professional pitchers in the MLB? My study reveals that pitching is an extremely subjective aspect of baseball and there is no one statistic that can be used to forecast a pitcher’s salary. Based on my research and analysis, I investigate which performance metrics are the most important in determining a professional pitcher’s salary and if these metrics can ultimately be used to forecast future pitchers’ salaries in order for baseball franchises to acquire undervalued pitchers.

Master of Science / Department of Statistics / Abigail Jager / Baseball has long provided statisticians a playground for analysis. In this report we discuss the history of Major League Baseball (MLB) umpires, MLB data collection, and the use of technology in sports officiating. We use PITCHf/x data to answer 3 questions. 1) Has the proportion of incorrect calls made by a major league umpire decreased over time? 2) Does the proportion of incorrect calls differ for umpires hired prior to the implementation of technology in evaluating umpire performance from those hired after? 3) Does the rate of change in the proportion of incorrect calls differ for umpires hired prior to the implementation of technology in evaluating umpire performance from those hired after? PITCHf/x is a publicly available database which gathers characteristics for every pitch thrown in one of the 30 MLB parks. In 2002, MLB began to use camera technology in umpire evaluations; prior to 2007, the data were not publicly available. Data were collected at the pitch level and the proportion of incorrect calls was calculated for each umpire for the first third, second third, and last third of each of the seasons for 2008-2011. We collected data from retrosheet.org, which provides game summary information. We also determined the year of each umpire’s MLB debut to differentiate pre- and post-technology hired umpires for our analysis. We answered our questions of interest using longitudinal data analysis, using a random coefficients model. We investigated the choice of covariance structure for our random coefficients model using Akaike’s Information Criterion and the Bayesian Information Criterion. Further, we compared our random coefficients model to a fixed slopes model and a general linear model.

No description available.

Baseball has not always been identified as a man’s game despite the fact that its boosters began proclaiming it a “manly” pastime in antebellum America. This thesis reveals, for the first time, that baseball began as a gender-neutral sport. Countless girls and women across the country played the game in every decade of the nineteenth century that the game existed, organizing the same types of teams that boys and men did. The thesis explains how and why the gender-neutral game become so fiercely gendered as masculine and explains how this characterization persisted despite dramatic changes in gender ideals and roles over time. Close scrutiny of nineteenth-century sources indicates that baseball’s gendered character was neither inevitable nor quickly solidified. For decades journalists, scholars, and ordinary citizens unwittingly perpetuated the gendered narrative—a narrative introduced by men with a personal and financial stake in shaping the game for their own purposes and one accepted and reinforced in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth by female physical educators who organized a structure for girls’ and women’s sport that discouraged elitism and encouraged participation by individuals of all physical characteristics. This thesis traces the evolution of baseball throughout the nineteenth century, focusing on the development of the formal structure of the sport and the cultural “creed” it shaped. To the extent allowed by available primary sources, each chapter highlights the perceptions of female players, particularly as they saw themselves in the context of baseball culture and social ideals of gender.

Significant research has been conducted on the physics of ball and bat collisions in an effort to model and understand real-world conditions. This thesis expands upon previous research to determine the maximum distance a ball can travel under ideal circumstances. Bat mass, bat speed, pitch speed and pitch spin were controlled values. These values were selected based on the highest recorded MLB values for their respective category. Specifically these are: Babe Ruth’s largest bat, Giancarlo Stanton’s recorded swing speed and Aroldis Chapman’s fastest fastball. A model was developed for a planar collision between a bat and ball using conservation laws in order to achieve the maximum exit velocity of the ball during a head-on collision. However, this thesis is focused on home runs and long fly-balls that occur from oblique collisions rather than the line drives produced by head-on collisions. The planar collision model results were adjusted to oblique collisions based on data from previous experimental research. The ball and bat were assumed to be moving in opposite directions parallel to one another at the point of impact with the ball slightly elevated above the bat. The post-collision results for the launch angle, spin and final exit velocity of the ball were calculated as functions of the perpendicular distance from the centerline of the bat to the centerline of the ball. Trajectories of the ball were calculated using a flight model that measured the final distance of the ball based on lift and drag forces. The results indicate that the optimum pre-collision parameters described above will maximize the distance traveled by the ball well beyond the farthest recorded home run distance. Experimentally determined factors such as the drag coefficient and coefficient of restitution have a significant impact on the flight of the ball. Implications of the results are discussed.

An examination of the origins of the separation of boys into baseball and girls into softball due to Victorian era ideas about gender, and the current day institutional exclusion through Title IX and culturally constructed notions about the appropriate place of women in the sporting world.

The purpose of this study is to analyze baseball collision by using finite element method, and investigate batting effect on the sweet spot on the bat and then change the baseball geometry parameter. In addition, the researcher would like to investigate the effect of flight on batted ball by changing swing parameter. LS-DYNA is used to simulate collision on the different position on the bat after using SolidWorks to build modal, then compare the results to locate the exact position of sweet spot on the bat. By building different weight, length and radius of bat barrel, and simulate collision individually, the researcher wishes to investigate the influence of changing bat geometry parameter to batting effect on sweet spot. At last changing the undercut distance and bat swing angle, two of the swing parameter, to simulate collision, and the results of collision are used to get flight trajectory by numerical method, then analyze the influence of changing swing parameter to batted ball range. This study can provide bat geometry characteristic, swing information, and a reference for choosing a baseball bat, even help adjust batting feel for the batter.

Thesis (M.S.)--Brigham Young University. Dept. of Exercise Sciences, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.)--Central Connecticut State University, 2002. / Thesis advisor: Matthew Warshauer. " ... in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in History." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 109). Also available via the World Wide Web.