Using a Fantasy Baseball Simulation to Teach Economic Concepts

This is a classroom activity using the free ESPN Fantasy Baseball platform to draft players and the Out of the Park software ($40) to simulate a baseball season. The activity enhances learning of economic concepts of marginal product and competitive balance. It also improves the data literacy skills of locating and downloading data, and using Excel functions to organize data and clean data. Students ran regression models to proxy the concept of marginal product in evaluating relative performance and collected data to compare players’ predicted point contribution. Students compared the competitive balance among leagues using team performances. The activity is appropriate for upper-level courses in Economics of Sports, Microeconomics, Labor Economics, and Sport Management