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,

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.