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Record W4410892071 · doi:10.1142/s2810943025500064

Team Production and Factor Substitution in Major League Baseball

2025· article· en· W4410892071 on OpenAlexaff
Duane W. Rockerbie

Bibliographic record

VenueInternational Journal of Empirical Economics · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldEconomics, Econometrics and Finance
TopicSports Analytics and Performance
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Lethbridge
Fundersnot available
KeywordsSubstitution (logic)LeagueProduction (economics)Factor (programming language)Computer scienceEconomicsMicroeconomicsPhysics

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

In this paper, we estimate a translog production function for Major League Baseball (MLB) teams that uses factor inputs for hitting, pitching and defence over the 1960–2024 MLB seasons. The computed elasticities of substitution suggest that hitting and pitching are used in fixed proportions, while both hitting and pitching are highly substitutable for defence. Teams that used a designated hitter (DH) substituted hitting and defence to a much greater degree than those without a DH. The widespread adoption of analytics after the 1995 season increased the substitution of pitching and defence markedly but not hitting and defence. These results call into question the widespread use of the Cobb–Douglas production function in estimating the marginal revenue products of players.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.002
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.004
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.049
Threshold uncertainty score0.098

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0020.004
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.001
Bibliometrics0.0010.002
Science and technology studies0.0000.001
Scholarly communication0.0020.001
Open science0.0010.001
Research integrity0.0010.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0060.001

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.039
GPT teacher head0.291
Teacher spread0.252 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designObservational
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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