Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Comment on “A Business Analysis of Asian Baseball Leagues”

2016; Wiley; Volume: 11; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/aepr.12123

1832-8105

Eiji Yamamura,

Sport and Mega-Event Impacts

Jang and Lee (2016) provide an intriguing and original perspective to compare the development process of professional baseball leagues among three different countries; the Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB), the Korean Baseball League Organization (KBO), and Major League Baseball (MLB). Here, my comments cover three points to develop and deepen the arguments for future research: (i) the influence of socioeconomic structure on team performance; (ii) the possibility of the emergence of twin-peaks in the winning percentage distribution; and (iii) the possibility of a U-shape form of competitive balance (CB). First, Korea consists of nine provinces, and it seems generally known that the Korean society is rooted in the original identity in each region. As reported in existing research (e.g. Yamamura, 2012; Kahane et al., 2013), the social and cultural homogeneity of sports team players contributes to improving performance. Accordingly, players of the team share the regional identity, which possibly improves teamwork and then team performance. The territorial draft system, which allows a team to select local talents, had been used from the start of the KBO in 1982 (Korea Herald, 2013). Some teams exploited the system to improve team performance. An example is Haitai Tigers and its hometown, which is located in Jeolla Province. Tigers' players mainly came from Jeolla Province, which leads to homogeneity within the team and high degree of solidarity. Tigers made the best use of solidarity to construct its dynasty by winning the championships eight times during the period 1986–1997. However, the league abolished the territorial draft in 2008.1 Further, as a consequence of economic development, geographical labor mobility among regions is thought to have been promoted. Then, it is plausible that team membership becomes more heterogeneous, influencing the team performance. Such a transition of the labor market seems to influence the CB in KBO. In 2014, KBO revived the old territorial system. It would be worthwhile to examine the effect of the system and team homogeneity on team performance.2 Second, as is illustrated in Jang and Lee's (2016) figure 2, a twin-peaks form tends to emerge in the winning percentage distribution of MLB, especially in the period of 2000–2014. MLB teams are thought to be divided into two groups: a group with a high-winning ratio and a group with a low-winning ratio. At least, it is unclear whether team performance converges for MLB. On the other hand, such phenomenon cannot be observed for NPB and KPB. As is widely known, a twin-peaks phenomenon has been observed in gross domestic product per capita based on cross-country data. The shape of the world income distribution looks like a normal distribution in 1960, and then becomes a bi-modal “twin-peaks” distribution in 1990 (Jones, 1997). If this mechanism also holds true for a professional baseball league, the shape of the distribution of winning percentage in JPB and KBO might move to a “twin-peaks” distribution in the future. It is worth scrutinizing the emergence of the MLB “twin-peaks” (also JPB and KBO in the future) by using sophisticated statistical methods. Furthermore, it is interesting to investigate the reason why the twin-peaks emerged in MLB. Third, consistent with Jang and Lee's argument, the relative standard deviation (RSD) of the NPB's Pacific League and KBO have fallen consistently.3 However, in MLB, CB does not improve consistently. I see from Jang and Lee's (2016) table 5 that the MLB's RSD fell in the 1980s and then slightly increased in the period from the 1990s to 2010s. If Ja ng and Lee's data for the MLB's RSD was graphed, a U-shape can be observed when the sample is limited to the period after 1960. Several questions naturally arise: why does the RSD's pattern differ between MLB and the Asian baseball leagues? Will CB of NPB and KBO follow the course of MLB in the future?