Should Baseball Teams Acquire Superstars? No, Says a Labor Economics Study

You would think that superstars make championship teams. On balance, no, they do not according to an exhaustive labor economics study (cited below). This intriguing study explains that team success, as it relates to a team’s talent, depends on narrow talent gaps between high and low performers. Teams with this narrow range of talent dispersion outperform teams that have wide talent variance, including superstars at the top of the range.

The study analyzed data from 1920-2009 for professional baseball teams and rosters.

Teams achieved the most wins when the dispersion of batting and pitching talent had an “optimal degree of inequality”— a Goldilocks effects that shows that teams with too little or too much variance underperform relative to teams in the middle for performance variance.

The study has intriguing implications for management of workplaces, especially where employees work in some type of team arrangement.

In workplaces that depend on joint performance, selecting the optimal distribution of talent inequality may be a determinant of success for the organization. Employers might put more thought into considering how a new hire will impact the team’s dispersion of ability.

Superstars may upset team chemistry is one key implication. Another implication is that a team with fairly evenly distributed talent will be greater than the sum of its part.

Back to baseball, I think of the Cubs and Cardinals, two teams I follow (I am a Cubs fan, which means I also follow the Cardinals, albeit with ungenerous wishes for their lack of success). The 2016 Cubs were a good examples of a team with a narrow talent dispersion—they had lots of promising but unproven players, and some decent veterans sprinkled in. The 2019 Cardinals seemed to over-achieve, relative to their talent—they had only one All-Star in 2019, but went fairly deep into the playoffs. The 2019 Cubs had a wide talent dispersion among position players— Baez, Rizzo, Contreras, and Bryant at the top-end weighed down by Heyward, Schwarber, Almora, Russell, and Bote-- not to mention bad pitching.  

Source: Kerry L. Papps, Alex Bryson, & Rafael Gomez, “Heterogeneous Worker Ability and Team-Based Production: Evidence from Major League Baseball, 1920–2009,” Labour Economics, Vol. 18 (2011), p. 310-319.