Baseball Card Values

where price is the natural log of the rookie card price. The availability variable is the natural log of the card availability that the authors obtained from PSA (Professional Sports Authenticator) and the performance variable is the TPI and TPR for pitchers and hitters respectively. The black variable is a dummy variable that is equal to one if the player is black and zero otherwise. As for the second equation only, “the inclusion of the interaction term, Black*Performance, allows for any race effects to

vary by player performance”(Findlay & Santos, 2012, p. 131). When Findlay and Santos used the correct performance and price data, “none of the estimated

coefficients on the race variables, Black or Black*Performance, is statistically

significant”(Findlay & Santos,

2012, p.

131) which led to their result that player race has no effect on card prices which holds consistency with Hewitt, Muñoz, Oliver, and Regoli’s findings in 2005.

Race, Performance, and Baseball Card Values is extremely similar to the study by Santos and Findlay, in that they compared white and black National League hall of famer players and their respective cost of the cards. However, this study involved a larger sample, so it can better be applied to the general baseball population. They were trying to see if the racial discrimination in the MLB also affected the purchasing prices for collectors. As such, they decided to control for performance in their random sample, due to the fact that they were only taking a sample of 51 different players cards. In model that the authors used, the dependent variable was card value in dollars. The model had three independent variables which were race, performance, and card availability.

The race variable was determined by “inspecting each player’s card in Berger and Slocum’s (1985) Topps Baseball Cards, 1951-1985. The players were dichotomized into Black (n = 18) and White (n = 33) subcategories.”(Hewitt, Muñoz, Oliver, & Regoli, 2005, p. 416). TBR is assumed to be one of the best indicators of a player’s performance and is used for the performance variable in the model. As for the card availability variable, the authors used card population reports published by the PSA is a good estimator for how scarce or abundant a baseball card is in the market. The results of the study showed that there was no connection between baseball card prices and race, providing some difference from the above study. This analysis looked again at high level players and their respective baseball card prices. By only using HOF players they controlled for the players skill and tried to determine the relationship between race and card value.
Racism in Baseball Card Collecting: Fact or Fiction? is the final article we decided to examine. This piece focuses on the impact, if there is any, of a player’s race on his rookie baseball card. This paper used 17 white and 12 nonwhite baseball Hall-of-Fame members to determine its result. The sample size is somewhat small with 29 total observations. Regoli looked at the rookie card prices for each observation and found the average card value of the white players to be $379 and the mean card value for nonwhite to be $392. This is a very slight difference in the card values so Regoli used a two-tailed t-test with 27 degrees of freedom and found the t-value to be .11 which is not statistically significant compared to the .05 significance level. Next, Regoli calculated a Point-Biserial correlation to be .02 which shows a very weak relationship between a player’s race and the value of their rookie card price. Overall, Regoli concluded that there is no considerable racism in baseball player’s rookie card prices.
The articles listed above generally agree with each other that racism in baseball card prices doesn’t really exist. They used different models and different methods to show their findings but the results stay consistent.