Salaries and Race in Professional Baseball: Discrimination 10 Years Later

Abstract

A series of multiple regression analyses using the most recent publicly available data on the salaries of veteran hitters in major league baseball uncovers little evidence of economic discrimination by race. Comparisons of unstandardized regression coefficients for player variables, by race and position, reveal a number of instances of inequality. However, these inequalities do not occur consistently with respect to the same type of performance, nor do they always place blacks at a disadvantage. Furthermore, blacks who do not enjoy the market power granted to players by the advent of free agency are not uniformly victimized by discrimination in salaries. Instead, the newest evidence suggests that signs of salary discrimination that were found in data on hitters from the 1977 season are not manifest 10 years later.