Baseball Projects

Amplified Incentives: How Pitcher Behavior Changes during their Contract Year

Using pitch by pitch data from a sufficient sample of pitchers, this work highlights how pitchers behave differently when in different contract states. When pitchers are in their contract year (one year before their existing deal expires) fastball velocity increased significantly in lower leverage situations.  Furthermore, using year by year statistics average fastball velocity for pitchers in their contract year is significantly higher, relative to those pitchers who are in a long-term contract. This result indicates that due to the amplified incentives in a contract year, players exert damaging effort as the career concerns motive outweighs the injury risk. This result provides an empirical foundation for my theory paper mentioned above.