Professional Baseball

This article examines the historical treatment of Hal Chase and Danny Gardella as a case study in baseball's epistemic monopoly-the institutional control over what constitutes legitimate knowledge and whose testimony counts as credible within the sport. Chase's 1914 legal victory in American League Baseball Club of Chicago v. Chase, 149 N.Y.S. 6 (N.Y. Sup. Ct. 1914), briefly ruptured that monopoly by establishing that the reserve clause lacked mutuality. Within years, Chase was recast from labor pioneer to archetype of corruption. Three decades later, Gardella's antitrust challenge (Gardella v. Chandler, 172 F.2d 402 (2d Cir. 1949)) met identical rhetorical strategies: vilification, blacklisting, and erasure. Drawing on theories of epistemic injustice and narrative power, this paper argues that baseball's reserve system operated not only as economic apparatus but as epistemological regime-maintaining dominance through control over historical memory. Analysis of forty-seven contemporary newspapers from 1914-1920, thirty-one from 1946-1950, legal documents, and digital archives reveals a tripartite pattern: legal challenge, moral counter-narrative, institutional forgetting. This pattern persists in algorithmic systems: when queried about Chase, Large Language Models like ChatGPT and Claude reproduce corruption narratives while omitting his legal victory, demonstrating how digital infrastructures inherit and amplify institutional knowledge monopolies. By recovering Chase and Gardella as epistemic subjects rather than moral anomalies, we reveal how knowledge systems-from print journalism to artificial intelligence-continue to define, suppress, and selectively rehabilitate dissent.

Cultural historians study the change of human civilization over time. They focus on people's beliefs, rituals, ideas, identity, social norms, institutions, and materials, with particular attention to the meanings of that culture's elements (Hutton 1981). Cultural historians before World War II focused on high culture, but thereafter, because of the influence of cultural anthropology, they began to study popular culture, that include every day experiences and artifacts that express mass values and attitudes. Since the late 1960s, scholars have studied sport's interaction with high and low culture, and also sport as an independent element of culture with s symbolic acts, representation, and struggle over meaning of sport's myths and realities. American cultural historians have relied heavily on anthropologist Clifford Geertz's concept of "thick description," a process of studying and contextualizing human behavior. This was modeled by his analysis of the cultural significance of Balinese cock fighting which he called "deep play, " that illuminated the network of social relationships in that traditional society (Geertz 1973). This process encouraged historians to study the sporting world and individual sports as cultural texts. A new trend that soon followed was an emphasis on memory as a cultural historical category, followed by the "linguistic turn" in the 1980s that emphasized the importance of language, a perspective in far greater vogue in Europe than the US. Cultural scholars outside North America are far more reliant on theory, particularly the polyschematic analyses of Michel Foucault, along with advocates of the visual and audio turns. Culturally minded sport historians employ cultural analysis as a window through which to understand the broader society. They are concerned about such matters as race, ethnicity and gender, employment of science and technology to enhance performance, the formation of identity for fans and team supporters, cultural diplomacy, and sports myths that influence and shape behavior (Arcangeli 2012; Burke 2004; Cook et al 2008).

This paper traces representational strategies employed by "Hoop Dreams," the documentary for which two black teenagers and their families consented to have three white film makers follow them around in their day-to-day life for five years. Storytelling techniques, choice of narrator, and on-vs. off-screen action all reflect film maker bias and filter reality. Of particular interest is the way the film employs juxtapositional editing strategies to make sociological observations about racial relations in current American society. As "Hoop Dreams" is placed against the broader cultural context of popular culture representations of class and race, and how mass audiences receive such works, the other topics of discussion which emerge include: (1) the current high visibility of black role models both positive and negative; (2) the images in "Hoop Dreams" contrasting sharply with the black affluence depicted in other television programming; (3) the ghetto playground as a fantasy melting pot experience for white America; and (4) the limitations of film and the documentary genre in depicting the whole person, his family relationships, and his sociological reality. Still, the paper concludes that the success of "Hoop Dreams" is a testament to good film making, as well as to the fact that American culture is desperate for messages that will bring races together rather then pushing them apart. (AEF/BEW)

Oblique injuries are known to be a common cause of time out of play for professional baseball players, and prior work has suggested that injury rates may be on the rise in Major League Baseball (MLB). To better understand the current incidence of oblique injuries, determine their impact based on time out of play, and to identify common injury patterns that may guide future injury prevention programs. Descriptive epidemiological study. Using the MLB Health and Injury Tracking System, all oblique injuries that resulted in time out of play in MLB and Minor League Baseball (MiLB) during the 2011 to 2015 seasons were identified. Player demographics such as age, position/role, and handedness were included. Injury-specific factors analyzed included the following: date of injury, timing during season, days missed, mechanism, side, treatment, and reinjury status. A total of 996 oblique injuries occurred in 259 (26%) MLB and 737 (74%) MiLB players. Although the injury rate was steady in MiLB,...

There are several variables that are considered important to achieve an increase in the speed of pitching in baseball. But coaches do not know the level of influence of these variables. The objective of the research is to establish the level of interrelationship between the main physical variables controlled in the process of sports preparation in baseball and the speed of pitching in a sample of non-players. An intentional sampling was used to select 34 students of 3rd and 4th year of the degree in Physical Culture at the University of Matanzas. Tests were conducted to measure the levels of explosive force from various muscle planes. Pearson's and determination coefficients were applied to establish the level of statistical interrelation between the variables. It was obtained that the seven variables analyzed show a statistical correlation that goes from weak, to very weak, even nonexistent, therefore, the research hypothesis is rejected.

Twenty-five years ago tonight, June 23, 1998, then Dodgers prospect Adrian Beltre made the improbable oneway trip from AA San Antonio to the big club in Los Angeles. The next night, the steady march to Cooperstown for Beltre began in Dodger Stadium. Beltre hit the first pitch he saw as a major leaguer into left field for a double and an RBI. Beltre added another base hit that night in the Dodgers 6-5 win over the Angels. Just 19 years old, but at the time everyone around baseball thought he was 20. Even at 19, he was a young 19, having just celebrated a birthday in early April. Beltre was the first Dodger to make the leap from AA to LA since Mariano Duncan did the same in 1985. Beltre only played 64 games with the San Antonio Missions, but that limited sample size left an impression as he hit .321 with 13 home runs, 56 RBI, 21 doubles, and 20 stolen bases. Before heading to Los Angeles, there was the matter of the game to be played that night in El Paso. In the case of Beltre, he did not play in that final game, though he stayed with the team until the final out. Why Beltre did not play in that final game with San Antonio is a story for another day. Well before the game, Missions manager Ron Roenicke was on the phone with new Dodgers General Manager

There are several variables that are considered important to achieve an increase in the speed of pitching in baseball. But coaches do not know the level of influence of these variables. The objective of the research is to establish the level of interrelationship between the main physical variables controlled in the process of sports preparation in baseball and the speed of pitching in a sample of non-players. An intentional sampling was used to select 34 students of 3rd and 4th year of the degree in Physical Culture at the University of Matanzas. Tests were conducted to measure the levels of explosive force from various muscle planes. Pearson's and determination coefficients were applied to establish the level of statistical interrelation between the variables. It was obtained that the seven variables analyzed show a statistical correlation that goes from weak, to very weak, even nonexistent, therefore, the research hypothesis is rejected.

Home runs in baseball-fair balls hit out of the field of play-have risen since 1980, driving strategic shifts in gameplay. Myriad factors likely account for these trends, with some speculating that global warming has contributed via a reduction in ballpark air density. Here we use observations from 100,000 Major League Baseball games and 240,000 individual batted balls to show that higher temperatures substantially increase home runs. We isolate human-caused warming with climate models, finding that >500 home runs since 2010 are attributable to historical warming. Several hundred additional home runs per season are projected due to future warming. Adaptations such as building domes on stadiums or shifting day games to night games reduce temperature's effects on America's pastime. Our results highlight the myriad ways that a warmer planet will restructure our lives, livelihoods, and recreation, some quantifiable and easily adapted to, as shown here, many others, not.

is an assistant professor of marketing in the Barney Barnett School of Business and Free Enterprise at Florida Southern College. Her research interests and consulting include pricing and marketing strategies, nonprofit management, leadership, and entrepreneurship. Joris Drayer, PhD, is an assistant professor of sport and recreation management at Temple University. His research interests include ticketing and pricing strategies in both primary and secondary ticket markets, as well as consumer behavior.

Teams that operate in professional sports leagues often display a cyclical pattern in team winning percentages that are driven by the payroll choices of owners that are inconsistent with a single, stable equilibrium. Two explanations emerge: a stable equilibrium that is shifting over time due to shifts of the revenue or payroll function; or moving between two stable equilibriums. We employ the Bounds test for cointegration between relative team revenues and payrolls to detect multiple equilibria in a sample of Major League Baseball teams over the 1990-2018 seasons. The results suggest the possibility of multiple equilibria for five teams even after accounting for moves to new stadiums that shift the team revenue function.

Teams that operate in professional sports leagues often display a cyclical pattern in team winning percentages that are driven by the payroll choices of owners that are inconsistent with a single, stable equilibrium. Two explanations emerge: a stable equilibrium that is shifting over time due to shifts of the revenue or payroll function; or moving between two stable equilibriums. We employ the Bounds test for cointegration between relative team revenues and payrolls to detect multiple equilibria in a sample of Major League Baseball teams over the 1990-2018 seasons. The results suggest the possibility of multiple equilibria for five teams even after accounting for moves to new stadiums that shift the team revenue function.

In this paper, we study the relationship between sports analytics and success in regular season and postseason in Major League Baseball via the empirical data of 2014-2017. The categories of analytics belief, the number of analytics staff, and the total number of research staff employed by MLB teams are examined. Conditional probabilities, correlations, and various regression models are used to analyze the data. It is shown that the use of sports analytics might have some positive impact on the success of teams in the regular season, but not in the postseason. After taking into account the team payroll, we apply partial correlations and partial F tests to analyze the data again. It is found that the use of sports analytics, with team payroll already in the regression model, might still be a good indicator of success in the regular season, but not in the postseason. Moreover, it is shown that both the team payroll and the use of sports analytics are not good indicators of success in the postseason. The predictive modeling of decision trees is also developed, under different kinds of input and target variables, to classify MLB teams into no playoffs or playoffs. It is interesting to note that 87 wins (or 0.537 winning percentage) in a regular season may well be the threshold of advancing into the postseason.

Introduction: The aim of the research is to identify differences in stressors' perception and potentially stressful situations regarding the injury history of the 24 baseball pitchers who are members of Villa Clara's pre-selection team. Material and Methods: A predominantly quantitative mixed study was carried out, also using descriptive statistics. The Sports Aspects and Injuries Questionnaire and the Brainstorming were used, and an ad hoc questionnaire was designed. The age of the pitchers ranged between 18 and 33 years, with a mean age of 22.38 (SD = 3.80), and a sporting experience between 6 and 21 years, with a mean of 12.63 (SD = 3.52). Results: There was a marked presence of psychosocial stressors related to little social support from coaches, teammates, and referees, as well as stress-generating situations made up of elements related to the adverse result of their activity, the significance of the game, the talent of the opponent, and the moments of the game, being the beginning and the end those that cause a greater tension in these pitchers. The pitchers who have been injured experience a greater degree of stress in situations that compromise their performance. Conclusions: The pitchers who have been injured experience high levels of psychic tension during various unfavorable game situations, which guides the need to implement direct and specific psychological preparation for competitions.

A review of baseball history from its colonial origins to the sabermetric and big data present day. Through biography and statistical analysis, against the backdrop of American History, baseball's evolution is examined and explored in an entertaining fashion.

Topics included:

Formation of professional baseball
Hitting, Pitching, Fielding: Evolution by era with statistics & key players biographies
Negro Leagues: Formation and biographies of key players and teams
Historic ballparks
Branch Rickey & Bill Veeck
Montreal Expos: A forgotten franchise
Macrosabermetrics: Financial and wins above replacement (WAR) model
Financial valuation of players, draft, and scouting

The purpose of this study was to verify the eŠectiveness of the Heads Up Tackling program for defensive players and its in‰uence on safety and performance. Head impacts in football players are directly associated with brain and spine injury, and have been proposed to be associated with injuries such as chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). Therefore, improvement of safety has been a challenge in American football, from the perspective of injury prevention. In 2012, USA Football, the national governing body for amateur American football in the USA developed the Heads Up Football (HUF) program which included``Heads Up Tackling'' (HUT), a set of new guidelines for tackling. HUT has been attracting attention in the context of safe tackling through a new coaching methodology. Although in Japan so far, there have been no reports of football-related chronic injuries caused by head impacts, many concussions occur in football games. Therefore, it seem necessary to identify a methodology for teaching tackling techniques in order to reduce the risks of head and neck injury. A number of studies have focused on coaching intervention in relation to safety, and for reducing head impact exposure and injury. However, no reports have focused on the impact of these eŠorts on athletic performance during a game. If it could be conˆrmed that HUT reduces the risk of injury in football games without decreasing athlete performances, it would be a useful resource for instruction on tackling skills. Here, 4 matches in the Japan top league (X-league) 2014 and 2015 season were analyzed, before and after HUT intervention was executed in the preseason of 2015. A total of 166 coded tackles were compared in terms of``tackling characteristics'',``amount of injuries'',``eŠectiveness of tackling'', and``loss of yards'' to examine the eŠect of HUT techniques oǹ`s afety'' and``eŠectiveness''. The results revealed that (1) the frequency of``head down'' tackling was signiˆcantly lower after HUT intervention, (2) the``amount of injuries'' was reduced after HUT intervention, (3) there was no eŠect on the``eŠectiveness of tackling'' in games, (4)``loss of yards'' was reduced after HUT intervention, and (5) HUT appeared to reduce the risks of injury in football games, without decreasing tackling performance.

sportswriters called them, offer another remarkable chapter to nineteenth-century colored baseball. The Gordons (1884-86) comprised talented ball tossers from independent professional colored aggregations: the Unknowns and the Garden Citys, both of Chicago, and the Black Stockings of St. Louis. The Gordons' professional tours followed a regional circuit previously traveled by the Black Stockings in 1883, and it is not improbable that former Black Stockings' players scheduled their new club's road itinerary. Like the Black Stockings, the Gordon Base Ball Club crossed bats with black and white clubs, professionals, semi-professionals and so-called amateurs. Leslie A. Heaphy's Black Baseball and Chicago correctly observes that little is known about late nineteenth-century teams or individual players in the Garden City-another name for Chicago-because sports coverage of colored nines tended to be sporadic. Heaphy explains: "Most of these early teams had to rely on word of mouth advertising and the like since newspapers came and went rather quickly. There were twenty-six African American newspapers established in Chicago between 1878 and 1920 but few lasted." 2 When referring to the Gordon Base Ball Club of 1884, for example, Heaphy's assessment of local newspapers, both white (The Chicago Tribune, The Chicago Daily News, and Daily Inter-Ocean) and colored (The Conservator), appears correct. However, I will suggest here that evidence not be restricted to the Chicago press, and, as the evidence does illustrate, colored and white newspapers throughout the Midwest and South covered the Gordon Base Ball Club's exploits. What makes the Gordons special? Given the limited number of years the

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the "Content") contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content.

The sport data tracking systems available today are based on specialized hardware (high-definition cameras, speed radars, RFID) to detect and track targets on the field. While effective, implementing and maintaining these systems pose a number of challenges, including high cost and need for close human monitoring. On the other hand, the sports analytics community has been exploring human computation and crowdsourcing in order to produce tracking data that is trustworthy, cheaper and more accessible. However, state-of-the-art methods require a large number of users to perform the annotation, or put too much burden into a single user. We propose HistoryTracker, a methodology that facilitates the creation of tracking data for baseball games by warm-starting the annotation process using a vast collection of historical data. We show that HistoryTracker helps users to produce tracking data in a fast and reliable way.

Split season league design resets standings at the midpoint of the season, thus allowing for two periods in which a team can potentially achieve success in a single season. This context allows us to test both the reputation of the first half winner and the league standing effect on demand. Examination of game-level data from the 2010 Southern League reveals fans are unaffected by measures of both team quality and league standing in the second half of the season. On the other hand, the first half winners saw an 11% increase in attendance as a percent of stadium capacity, suggesting that in the second half of the season winners matter more than winning. (JEL L22 and L83)

Unlike most businesses, firms in a sports league need viable competitors. While a certain amount of domination is optimal, from an individual owners perspective, too much will result in league dissolution, and thus a lower utility for every owner. Hence, there is a limited positive production network externality. This paper examines the optimal level of the externality in professional baseball using data from each game of the 1996 MLB season. Both absolute and relative quality are important determinants of the demand for sports contests. In fact, fans prefer a game in which two high quality teams are competing, but the home team has approximately twice as good of a chance as the visiting team of winning.

This paper is about travelling and exploring, assessing the historical importance of fan pilgrimages and the geographic spaces in which, and through which, fans travel to get closer to their object of fandom. But it also about how those spaces can become toxic, acting as painful reminders of the object turned bad, tragic failure and community rejection. Through a case study of the Steve Bartman incident during the 2003 National League baseball championship playoff game between the Chicago Cubs and Florida Marlins at Wrigley Field, and an auto-ethnographic study of the physical grounds and stadium, I present ongoing research into fan tourism and sports fandom. The vitriolic reception Bartman received when he inadvertently interfered with a potentially game-winning play that might have seen the Cubs reach their first World Series since 1945 highlights toxic fan behavior familiar to many sports. However, that the seat he occupied on the night serves as an unofficial monument to that mo...

NOTE: Due to size limitations, this has been published in three separate parts, with the abstract and references to all three parts included with each. This is Part 3, directed exclusively to NCAA Men’s College Basketball. In Situational Underlying Value for Baseball, Football and Basketball – A Statistic (SUV) to Measure Individual Performance in Team Sports, an all-encompassing, overall statistic to measure “clutch” performance by individual players in the team sports of major league baseball, professional football (NFL), and NCAA men’s college basketball was developed, called “Situational Underlying Value” (SUV). This work supplements and extends the development and initial demonstrations of the use of the SUV statistic for these three team sports by tracking the performance of three specific teams in these three sports over a significant portion of their most recent seasons: (1) for major league baseball, 54 of the 162 games played by the Seattle Mariners in 2017; (2) for profes...

Background: In the wake of COVID-19, almost all major league sports have been either cancelled or postponed. The sports industry suffered a major blow with the uncertainty of sporting events being held in the near future. Various scenarios of how and when sports might recommence have been discussed. This paper examines various scenarios of how Major League Baseball team performance is going to be impacted by the presence of fans, or the lack thereof, in the context of physical distancing and other COVID-19 countermeasures Methods: The paper simulates, using a neural network and a logit regression model, the win-loss probabilities for various scenarios under consideration and also estimates the home effect for each team using data for the 2017-2019 seasons. Results: The model demonstrates that individual team home effect is symmetric between home and away and teams will not necessarily have a win or loss of any additional games in neutral stadiums, as teams with a high home field eff...

All but two professional baseball leagues have adopted the “designated hitter” (DH) rule, which allows a team’s manager to designate a player to bat at the plate and run the bases in place of another player, usually the team’s pitcher. Unlike the team’s other players, the designated hitter does not take the field to play defense. This paper provides a survey of a large literature investigating the DH rule’s effect on the incentives of pitchers to hit batters and on changes in the number of hit batsmen. We also consider whether the DH rule provides a good example of a natural experiment, as some professional baseball leagues were “treated” with the DH rule and others were not treated.

The so-called Pythagorean Theorem of Baseball presumes a relationship between a team's wins and losses and its runs scored and runs allowed. This method and related work fail to capture the nuances of the conditional behavior of wins given run totals. We present an alter- native method which captures this dependence and allows for appropriate conditional inference. Because exact computations are impractical, we present an approximate method using Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). Comparisons and contrasts are drawn between the proposed method and established ones.

In this paper, we propose a use of insurance or securitization for injury risk management for sport teams. We focus on injury risks of star soccer players in the J.League, the Japanese professional soccer league, since injury risks of the stars for J.League clubs are quite significant. In this paper, we first show how we can evaluate these insurance or securitization. We utilize Wang transforms for valuing these securities since Wang transforms allow us to take the incompleteness of the market into consideration. Second, we show how these securities improve the corporate value of the soccer teams. Wang transforms can be used for risk management since they can capture the risk aversion of the managers for the valuation. We show how use of these securities improves the corporate value depending on the risk aversion of the managers when using these securities. Underlying of the proposed insurance or securitization is the number of games missed due to the injury of the insured star players. The underlying can be a single player or multiple players. The premium of the insurance or the securitization based on the multiple stars is lower as the number of insured is lower as long as the correlations among underlying players' injury risks are low enough.

Japan's fiscal conditions are the most severe of any industrialized nation, moreover, the aging of Japanese society will continue, and an increase in the national burden is inevitable. In part because of the view that the burden of taxes and of social security has a negative impact on the incentive to work and thereby impedes the vitalization of the economy, reforms of public spending and the social security system are being implemented continuously for the purpose of avoiding increases in the national burden rate (or potential national burden rate) as much as possible. That notwithstanding, the fact remains that people derive certain benefits from aspects of the social security system, such as health care, pensions, and nursing care, and there exists social capital beneficial to both current and future generations. Consequently, when discussing the optimal level of the national burden rate, it is also important to consider the benefits received from public spending and the soci...

The game of baseball was an integral part of life in 20th-century America. The relation baseball had with its fans, though, evolved as the game moved from quiet pastime to a multibillion dollar business. As the presented evidence will suggest, consumer demand at the close of the 20th century was less about loyalty to 'our team' and more about winning. Possible explanations for this trend are greater competition, labor-management strife, free agency, and a general change in the focus of sports away from simple quiet pastimes to one of profit-maximizing business.

The sport data tracking systems available today are based on specialized hardware (high-definition cameras, speed radars, RFID) to detect and track targets on the field. While effective, implementing and maintaining these systems pose a number of challenges, including high cost and need for close human monitoring. On the other hand, the sports analytics community has been exploring human computation and crowdsourcing in order to produce tracking data that is trustworthy, cheaper and more accessible. However, state-of-theart methods require a large number of users to perform the annotation, or put too much burden into a single user. We propose HistoryTracker, a methodology that facilitates the creation of tracking data for baseball games by warm-starting the annotation process using a vast collection of historical data. We show that HistoryTracker helps users to produce tracking data in a fast and reliable way. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing → Human computer interaction (HCI); HCI design and evaluation methods; Empirical studies in HCI ; Interaction design; Empirical studies in interaction design;

The purpose of this study was to consider the problem of rubber baseball in each administrative division, and to suggest the direction of developments in the future. In regard to rubber-ball baseball in the area of Tochigi and Gifu, which does not have a large city, results were obtained which had sufficient balance among six indices. It is suggested that it is necessary to introduce a system that collects fees based on an individual registration system in order to strengthen the financial ground of the sport.

An econometric analysis of 2013 Major League Baseball season is conducted with respect to regular season victories. Results obtained confirm many, but not all, results reported in prior research. The importance of solid team pitching, defense, and offense is underscored. Outcomes for salaries and league affiliations differ substantially from prior seasons. History may serve as a guide to what occurs on the field, but it does not always repeat in the manner indicated in bygone years. Ultimately, 2013 represents a departure from the standard baseball norm.

When a Major League Baseball club signs a Japanese star player, it obviously tries to commercialize its investment in the player. The initial focus is on home attendance (ticket sales) and television audiences, plus merchandise sales. These elements are similar to those considered for any high-performing players. However, for Japanese stars, there is also the potential to attract significant fandom from the local Japanese community. This represents an opportunity for truly incremental local revenue for the team. In addition, teams try to attract revenue from Japan-such as from corporate sponsors, advertising signage at the home field, and visiting Japanese fans traveling to the U.S. to see these stars perform. In addition to treating team efforts at growing local Japanese community support, this paper examines seven factors for success in attracting revenues from Japanese companies and fans: pitcher or position player, player's popularity, non-stop flights from Japan, distance from Japan, non-sport tourist attractions in a city, size of Japanese community in the city and player's and team's performance. The most important factor, however, is the player's talent and popularity in terms of performance in both Japan and the U.S. and his media exposure in Japan including endorsement contracts. In addition, if a MLB club signs a Japanese position star player and is based in a city which is endowed with a variety of non-baseball tourist attractions, this would have a further advantage for the team.