The Martlet

Baseball managers don’t matter

They may wear the same uniforms as their players, but baseball managers don’t matter nearly as much as the on-field stars.

A study in May’s Journal of Sport Management found that baseball managers are virtually ineffective.

The study’s researchers, one of whom was from Ontario’s Brock University, looked at the differences in major league teams’ winning percentages, and found that less than one per cent of the variance resulted from the manager’s leadership, while almost three quarters could be pinned on players.

The authors suggested that it might not make sense for owners to spend much on managers if they are interested in winning, but owners may have other motivations such as making a profit, obtaining the “trophy status” that comes with owning a major league team, or a desire to enhance a community asset, which the manager may contribute to.

The authors also examined which managers were most efficient at improving their team’s performance between 1991 and 2005, and found that L.A. Dodgers manager Joe Torre, former Texas Rangers manager Johnny Oates and Team U.S.A. manager Davey Johnson were the top three respectively.

The study also found that managers’ salaries aren’t based on their efficiency. Instead, experience played the most important role. The authors claim this is similar to the corporate world, where “award-winning CEOs extract large compensation packages, which are not warranted based on performance.”

The study, titled “Major League Baseball Managers: Do They Matter?” predicted that managers will only become more useless as statistics, rather than managerial wisdom, are used more widely in decision-making.

Jumping the gun

Sprinters closest to the starter’s pistol have a faster reaction time, a study in the June edition of Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise has discovered.

Researchers at the University of Alberta examined reaction time data from the 2004 Olympics and found that sprinters and hurdlers who were in lane one, closest to the starter’s pistol, had “significantly lower reaction times” than those further away.

Runners in lane one tended to react faster by between 11 and 25 milliseconds, which the authors noted “is not trivial, given the fact that the first and second places in the men’s 100-metre sprint final in 2004 were separated by only 10 milliseconds.”

The authors also tested runners at the University of Alberta to see if louder starting signals reduced reaction time.

They found that both a louder starting signal and hearing the signal earlier contributed to the advantage.

Sprinters at the Olympics have individual speakers behind their starting blocks telling them when to start, but by tradition, a starter also fires a pistol that can be as loud as 181 decibels — considerably louder than a jet engine.

The paper, titled “‘Go’ Signal Intensity Influences the Sprint Start,” recommends using a silent pistol to start races, as is done at the International Association of Athletics Federation (IAAF) World Championships.

Nepotism in NASCAR?

Father-son combinations are abundant in NASCAR racing.

Bobby Allison and Davey Allison, Dale Earnhardt and Dale Earnhardt Jr., and Lee Petty, Richard Petty and Kyle Petty are just a few examples.

With 30 per cent of 2005 NASCAR drivers being a father, son or brother of another current or former driver, it’s easy to think that nepotism is involved.

But a study in June’s Journal of Sports Economics found that, for the most part, NASCAR drivers are there on their own merits.

“Our results suggest that the N in NASCAR does not stand for nepotism,” the American authors wrote in their study titled “Nepotism or Family Tradition? A Study of NASCAR Drivers.”

The study examined 30 years of NASCAR data to determine if fathers, sons or brothers had longer careers than drivers with similar performances who had no family connections.

They found it evident that sons did not have any statistically significant advantage in terms of their career length.

However, fathers who had a son follow in their footsteps were more than twice as likely to retire in any given year than their performance warranted, the study found.

As for brotherly love, it was found that the first brother of a NASCAR driver didn’t experience any advantage, but second brothers had longer careers than their performance warranted.

“This result suggests that second brothers may free ride on the first brother’s reputation,” the authors wrote.

The study suggests that brand-name loyalty, where sponsors associate themselves with the family name of top drivers, may explain the behaviour of fathers retiring early and second brothers having longer careers.