Shirking or Stochastic Productivity in Major League Baseball: Comment

In an earlier article in this Journal [1], Anthony Krautmann tests the hypothesis that a major league baseball player has a greater tendency to shirk during the season immediately following the signing of a long-term contract than he does during the season immediately preceding the signing of a long-term contract. His method was very straightforward. He observed performance data on 110 non-pitchers who signed contracts of 5 years in length or greater from 1977 to 1983. By comparing each player's career slugging average (SA) with the SA's for the years immediately after and before the player signed a contract, he could not reject the null hypothesis that no shirking took place. The basic thrust of this comment is that the SA is not the performance measure most likely to reveal shirking if it does exist. Krautmann relates that in [2] Lehn found a positive correlation between the number of years remaining on a player's contract and the number of days spent on the disabled list. However the slugging average used in Krautmann's paper would not necessarily be affected by the number of days a player spends on the disabled list. A measure more closely correlated with time spent on the injured reserve list would be total bases.