Accounting and Performance Metrics in the Baseball Industry

This doctoral thesis explores the roles of accounting and performance metrics in the baseball industry, a sport characterized by significant income inequalities amongst players. I entered the field with a broad research question, trying to understand how accounting mechanisms and technologies influence the decision-making processes of Major League Baseball organizations related to the evaluation, acquisition and monitoring of high-profile employees, namely baseball players. This work begins with Chapter II, which examines how new technologies, such as data analytics and camera-based tracking systems, have changed performance measurement and management control systems in the industry. It illustrates that these technological devices have impacted the temporality of performance metrics and have transitioned the industry toward a "society of control" (Deleuze, 1992). In Chapter III, I explore how baseball operations specialists translate player evaluations into player valuations, notably with financialized valuation methods. However, the chapter also illustrates that the valuations of players' contracts are debated by clubs' accounting executives, who claim that such valuations are not consistent with the "reality" of accounting. By exploring the interplay between valuation and accounting, this chapter illustrates how "hyperreality" (Baudrillard, 1994) is a core feature of sports accounting, which is strategically displayed by clubs' owners in their communications with key stakeholders. Finally, in Chapter IV, I explore the technologies and rationalities underlying human capital contracts, new financial products available to underpaid minor league players, and how these contracts change participants' subjectivity. I demonstrate that human capital contracts enable participants to foresee a brighter future and that they act as a coping device by providing an escapist form of imagination. Taken together, the three chapters show how baseball players are transformed into human "assets," in part by being financialized by their employer but also by contributing to their own financialization.