Ninth International Conference on Sport & Society

Abstract

College baseball has grown in popularity over the course of the last few years, as is evidenced by the increased national and regional broadcasts of games on television. For some schools, baseball is the third revenue-generating sport; however, the sport has not received much attention in the academic sports literature. As the economic proposition has changed across college sports (see Southall, Nagel, Amis, and Southall, 2008), there have been more commercial and branding opportunities that are associated with college baseball. This study seeks to fill the void in the extant literature and examines the rise in expenditures and revenues, and their impact on winning, using a sample of Power Five Conference baseball teams from 2007 to 2014. The study uses ANOVA, and a combination of regression, to find that there is a moderate, positive relationship between expenditures and success. Specifically, expenditures account for 18% of the variance in winning, and a 5% increase in win percentages is evidenced with every additional million-dollar investment in the sport. Additionally, the same investment increases the odds of qualifying for the NCAA Tournament by 248%, for a Super Regional by 112%, and for the College World Series by 127%. The implications of these findings, with respect to the “arms race”, principle-agent theory, and revenue theory of costs, as well as recommendations to frame decision-making at the administrative level are included here.