Sports big data has been an emerging research area in recent years. The purpose of this study was to ascertain the most frequent research topics, application areas, data sources, and data usage characteristics in the existing literature, in order to understand the development of data-driven baseball research and the multidisciplinary participation in the big data era. A scoping review was conducted, focusing on the diversity of using publicly available major league baseball data. Next, the co-occurrence analysis in bibliometrics was used to present a knowledge map of the reviewed literature. Finally, we propose a comprehensive baseball data research domain framework to visualize the ecosystem of publicly available sports data applications mapped to the four application domains in the big data maturity model. After searching and screening process from the Web of Science, Science Direct, and SPORTDiscus database, 48 relevant papers with clearly indicated data sources and data fields used were finally selected and full reviewed for advanced analysis. The most relevant research hotspots for sports data are sequentially economics and finance, sports injury, and sports performance evaluation. Subjects studied ranged from pitchers, position players, catchers, umpires, batters, free agents, and attendees. The most popular data sources are PITCHf/x, the Lahman Baseball Database, and baseball-reference.com. This review can serve as a valuable starting point for researchers to plan research strategies, to discover opportunities for cross-disciplinary research innovations, and to categorize their work in the context of the state of research.
The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a dramatic increase in baseball viewership, thereby providing an opportunity to comprehensively explore the determinants of the new audience. To this end, we analyze the preferences of the Taiwanese audience in 2019 and 2020, both before and after the COVID-19 outbreak, through TV ratings based on the effect of outcome uncertainty, tournament factors, consumer availability, and game quality. The empirical findings show that the behavior of the small-scale Chinese Professional Baseball League (CPBL) sports television viewing market differs from that of large-scale markets such as Major League Baseball. Additionally, the effect of the outcome uncertainty of the game is inconsistent before and after the COVID-19 pandemic. New audiences, unlike existing audiences, have been affected by team quality and consumer availability that are statistically significant, but tournament factors are not significant. This study provides the first empirical analysis of the factors driving TV ratings of CPBL games as well as the impact before and after the COVID-19 outbreak as a contribution to filling the gap in sports communication research. The observations can be used by strategic departments of professional teams for their marketing target, to identify potential fans, and to direct their marketing resources towards sustaining or even growing during the pandemic events.
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