Abstract
Since the Japanese National Baseball team won the inaugural World Baseball Classic, “small ball” has been accepted, at least by the media, as a mainstream form of baseball management in Korea. Small ball refers to a manager’s active intervention or strategy implementation in baseball games. In general, the frequency of managers’ orders for play actions such as a sacrifice bunt is higher in Asian baseball than in North American baseball. This paper attempts to statistically test the hypothesis that small ball is effective in winning games by using data from Korean baseball. The panel data analysis of a stochastic production frontier model presents somewhat mixed empirical results, but the overall evidence suggests that small ball actually has detrimental effects on the number of runs scored.
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Notes
See Fox (2006) for more details.
More background on small ball can be found in sabermetrics materials. For example, see Fox (2005).
The derivation of the conditional expectation is found in Battese and Coelli (1993).
In fact, more possible outcomes exist for a bunt attempt when a runner is on 1st base with no outs: (1) runners on 1st and 2nd bases with no outs if a bunt turns out to be a hit single, and (2) no runners on base with two outs if a bunt ends up in a double play. However, we ignore these cases in our calculations since their chances are slim.
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Acknowledgement
The author is grateful to two anonymous referees for constructive suggestions. The author also acknowledges that this research is financially supported by the Sogang Research Fund.
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Lee, Y.H. Is the small-ball strategy effective in winning games? A stochastic frontier production approach. J Prod Anal 35, 51–59 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11123-010-0182-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11123-010-0182-2