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A fascinating study of discrimination in baseball, it's a long read and I will paste the conclusion with the linik
https://webspace.utexas.edu/hamermes/ww ... uthors.pdf
VI. Conclusions
The analyses of individual pitches and game outcomes suggest that baseball
umpires express racial/ethnic preferences in their decisions about players’ performances. Pitches are slightly more likely to be called strikes when the umpire shares
the race/ethnicity of the starting pitcher, an effect that is observable only when
umpires’ behavior is not well monitored. The evidence also suggests that this bias
has substantial effects on pitchers’ measured performance and games’ outcomes.
The link between the small and large effects arises, at least in part, because pitchers alter their behavior in potentially discriminatory situations in ways that ordinarily would disadvantage themselves (such as throwing pitches directly over the
plate). As in many other fields, racial/ethnic preferences work in all directions—
most people give preference to members of their own group. In MLB, as in so
many other fields of endeavor, power belongs disproportionately to members of the
majority—white—group.
The type of discrimination that we have demonstrated is disturbing because of
its implications for the sports labor market. In particular, minority pitchers are at a
significant disadvantage relative to their white peers, even in the absence of explicit
wage discrimination by teams. Although some evidence suggests such explicit
discrimination exists, i.e., there is a wage gap among baseball players of different races, the fact that almost 90 percent of the umpires are white implies that the
measured productivity of minority pitchers may be downward biased. Implicitly, estimates of wage discrimination in baseball that hold measured productivity (at
least of pitchers) constant will understate its true size.
More generally, our results suggest caution in interpreting any estimates of wage
discrimination stemming from equations relating earnings to race/ethnicity, even
with a large set of variables designed to control for differences in productivity. To
the extent that supervisors’ evaluations are among the control variables included
in estimates of wage discrimination, or even if they only indirectly alter workers’ objective performances, their inclusion or their mere existence contaminates
attempts to infer discrimination from adjusted racial/ethnic differences in wages.
If racial/ethnic preferences in evaluator-worker matches are important, standard
econometric estimates will generally understate the magnitude of racial/ethnic discrimination in labor markets.
While the specific evidence of racial/ethnic match preferences is disturbing, our
analysis of the expression of discrimination should be encouraging: When their decisions matter more, and when evaluators are themselves more likely to be evaluated
by others, our results suggest that these preferences no longer manifest themselves.
Indeed, these findings imply that the particular impacts of racial/ethnic match preferences in baseball may now have been vitiated, since beginning in 2009 all ballparks are equipped with QuesTec or similar technologies.
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Clearly, raising the price
of discrimination in the labor market generally is more difficult; but our results may
suggest analogous measures that might have the desired effects
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