Abstract
The value of Major League Baseball players has long been viewed as the most controversial issue. In order to analyze the relationship between players' abilities and their salaries, list of all Major League Baseball players excluding pitchers, catchers and designated hitters in all games during 2005 and 2014 were collected. The winning percentages and team-level performance figures during this period were also collected. The approach was divided into three parts. First, the panel data two-way fixed effect model, considered individual-specific effect and time-specific effect simultaneously, was used to estimate the salary equation. By roughly dividing the fielders' performance into aggressive ability and fielding ability, we can dig out that only the shortstops' fielding ability is significantly valuable while almost every fielder's aggressive ability is all significantly valuable. Therefore, we can verify the stereotype about "Bat is more valuable than gloves for baseball players." Secondly, the same methodology was used to estimate the relationship between winning percentage and team performance.It was found that the pitcher's ability contributes the most, followed by aggressive ability, and the fielding ability in the last place. So we can treat the stereotype mentioned earlier as a reasonable phenomenon. The last method applied was the panel quantile regression with fixed effect, which was proposed in Koenker (2004), to estimate the salary equations in different quantiles of salary. We found that the fielding abilities were almost insignificant in every quantile we concerned while the values of aggressive ability and historical aggressive ability increase with the quantile ascend.