Evaluation of the Current State of Nippon Professional Baseball in Digitalization

Abstract

This survey is a survey on the evaluation of Japanese professional baseball players. Due to the corona epidemic, many sports around the world are affecting the management of organizations. In Japan, we were able to accommodate spectators for a while, but the number of people is limited. As a result, many professional baseball teams that were already in the red during the off-season were announced. Severe business conditions are affecting not only Nippon Professional Baseball but also sports such as soccer and basketball. Also, this applies not only to Japan but to the rest of the world. There are various sales composition ratios to make money in sports competitions. In Nippon Professional Baseball, ticket income, broadcasting rights income, sponsor income, goods sales, fan clubs, etc. You can see how much the coronavirus has an impact, as most of the sales come from ticket revenue. Looking at other sports, in the J-League of soccer, there are teams centered on sponsor income, which may reduce the impact of ticket income, but it is difficult to decide the direction immediately. When it becomes difficult to manage teams, the salary of player is also affected. In fact, at Japan Professional Baseball Players Association, we ask the team to give relative evaluations, such as giving serious management explanations and wanting them to stop intentionally lowering their annual salary. But the real problem is the evaluation is clearly different when looking at the annual salary by role. Especially young pitchers, even if they pitch in many games, may be lower than veteran players. Therefore, I conducted a survey on the current evaluation of pitchers in Nippon Professional Baseball. Multiple regression analysis was performed using the player’s annual salary as the axis of the dependent variable, and the total results up to 2019 as the independent variable, and the results of 2019 including the number of pitches and the number of wins. By performing multiple regression analysis, we were able to find out what was evaluated by many teams and what was the cause of the increase in annual salary. In addition to the results of this analysis, we will propose businesses and initiatives that Nippon Professional Baseball should work on in the future based on online events held all over the world.