An Interview with J.C. Bradbury, author of The Baseball Economist

On March 15, J.C. Bradbury's book The Baseball Economist will be arriving in bookstores. Bradbury, an economist at Kennesaw State University in Georgia, has been analyzing and writing about baseball issues using tools of the economic trade for years, primarily using his popular Sabernomics blog as a forum for his ideas.

It's a good thing that a selection of Bradbury's wide-ranging essays have made it between hard covers. While many popular bloggers have published books that consist of little more than polished versions of their Web musings, The Baseball Economist consists almost entirely of new studies and new writing.

The range of topics Bradbury covers is impressive. The first chapter is on hit batsmen and how differences between rates iin the AL and NL can be explained by the "price" of hitting a batter (which has changed over the years). The second chapter presents a surprising finding about how much "protection" on-deck batters really provide. The topics then expand in scope, to scouts vs. stat-heads, player salaries, steroids, the issue of whether or not MLB is a monopoly, and finally expansion. This is a book you can dip into at random: each chapter stands alone. And you'll find plenty of variety.

Although Bradbury is an academic, his writing style is fluid and accessible. He doesn't use many technical terms, but when he does, he explains them clearly and briefly, in a fashion that makes the material more easily understood. This is a book that's worth your buck. Let's hope we'll see another collection from Bradbury in a couple of years.

Read my interview with J.C. after the jump.

Jeff Merron: Your book covers a lot of separate topics, from hit by pitch rates and left-handed catchers in the early chapters to the question of whether baseball is a monopoly in one of the final chapters. Was your original intent to cover such a wide range of subjects?

J.C. Bradbury: When I first started I knew that I had a lot of different things to say about baseball, and as an economist I found these issues interesting. Initially I was leaning more toward what's in the latter chapters of the book, traditional economics. I started my blog [Sabernomics: Economic Thinking about Baseball] to help flesh out my ideas, to see not only what interested other people, but what interested me.

After a while I thought I should really concentrate on these other types of little issues within the game, because that's why I'm really interested in economics. You can take a universal  theory of human behavior and you can apply it to a lot of different things. I decided to go where there was the most fun.

JM: So your blog was borne from the idea of writing a book?

JCB: It was one of the ways I justified working on my blog. But I realized it was also important for me to be thinking about a lot of these ideas. Most of the things I write about in my blog are not in my book. One exception is the chapter on Leo Mazzone, which is really just a blog post that got out of control.

Other times I'd have an idea and think, "This is great," but then after a while I'd think, "This is a terrible idea. I can't believe I ever thought of writing a chapter about this."  The blog helped me keep in tune with what was going on in baseball, and helped me practice thinking about the issues.

JM: Were you encouraged by the responses to your blog?

JCB: Absolutely. It feels great to write something and see that someone else is really into it. It's also discouraging when you write something and get some nasty e-mails.

JM: Do economists pay attention to your blog?

JCB: Yes. I've gotten quite a bit of responses from economists. My field of economics is public finance regulation, and I've made a lot of friends in that field, by attending conferences and so on. But I've made a lot more friends since I've started blogging.

JM: Did you coin the term sabernomics?

JCB: Yes. I was thinking of the weblog and I didn't want to make it just "economic thinking about baseball." A lot of times economists combine words and come up with new terms, like "econometrics." Then I thought of "sabernomics."

JM: You mention in your chapter on Leo Mazzone that pitchers don't only get better under Mazzone, but they also get worse when they leave. I think one reason for that is that the Braves environment is unique; it's extraordinarily professional and consistent. So I think one reason they get worse is that their working environment is almost always going to get worse. I also think that Mazzone is very consistent in his support of his pitchers. If you have a couple of bad outings, you don't lose your spot in the rotation. But a lot of pitching coaches won't do that. I was thinking that those might be two factors.

JCB: I think that there's no doubt that when you take a player and put them on the Braves, they get better. The players love Bobby Cox. And I think that's very important. As with separating out the effect, pitchers say very positive things about the man. Should he get all the credit? Absolutely not. But because he was in charge he deserves some of the credit, and because the pitchers say so he deserves some of the credit.

JM: To me the most important finding in your book is the lack of influence of the on-deck hitter. It's such a well-worn and consistent strategy that you'd think that someone would have changed it if it didn't work. What were your thoughts about that particular study?

JCB: I was convinced before we started the study that there had to be protection. There's no way the on-deck hitter does not influence the pitcher.

But the more I thought about it and saw the results were in the opposite direction, and it fit with what I later thought and talked about, which is that pitchers frequently alter their effort.

There are two things to think about. One is that a manager may do better to think more about lefty-righty matchups more than protection. And I think as a general manager it could make a huge difference in what players you sign.

JM: Let's talk about the big city/small city problem, and about how each person in each city's population adds a certain amount of potential revenue. I thought there should be a third category there, which would be cities in flux. I thought about the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1950s. Both teams are winning, which should mean lots of revenue. But in 1957 both are gone, because of the suburban exodus. Do you think there should be such a category?

JCB: That was also about the huge boom on the West Coast -- as big as those populations were, they were nothing compared to all the baseball fans out in California. I did look at some things like change in population growth and other variables.

But after a while I just realized, look, the issue isn't city size -- there is going to be some advantage for bigger cities -- but it doesn't seem to explain all that much of the woes of the small market teams, or success of the big market teams. When I was growing up as a kid the Yankees stunk! They had bad management. It's not that they don't have an advantage, but if you want to think about why the Kansas City Royals are so bad, population differences is on the list -- we have to fix it -- but there are many other problems there.

JM: Where and when do you think expansion will happen next?

JCB: It's definitely going to have to happen. The population is growing and is getting wealthier. There are a lot of people who want to spend money on professional sports. Baseball has always expanded. When it hasn't, it's paid the price -- people have come in and tried to form new leagues and they've ended up expanding due to that pressure. I think right now we've reached a stable situation, but I think in about 10 years you'll hear expansion being talked about again.

JM: What do you think has caused the boom in the spring training economy in the last 10 or 15 years?

JCB: Sports are a luxury good, and when people get wealthier, they want to consume more sports. It's all being driven by the U.S. economy. People say, "Hey, I can take more time off from work, I can take more extravagant vacations because I'm wealthier, and it's a nice time of year to do that." I think it explains the new stadiums. If the economy tanked for a while, these places would be the first to struggle, but they've benefited most from the growth of the economy. People have to spend their money on something, and we're seeing that sports facilities are really growing to serve this extra wealth.