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Josh Pahigian, an adjunct professor in UNE’s Department of English and Language Studies, has coauthored a paper in the March 2012 issue of The Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports. Pahigian and three statistics/mathematics professors at the University of Sheffield in England collaborated on the paper entitled “Modeling Stadium Statue Subject Choice in U.S. Baseball and English Soccer.”

Pahigian and his coauthors Chris Stride, Ffion E. Thomas, John P. Wilson begin by noting the proliferation of statue installations honoring U.S. baseball players and British soccer players outside the stadiums of these sports since the 1990s. They then investigate and compare the defining characteristics of stadium statue subjects in the two sports. To facilitate this, they first developed a shortlist of potential causal factors likely to influence subject selection by considering the motivations behind statue building.

The MLB Hall of Fame and the English Football League “100 Legends” lists were used as samples of the best performers from each sport. Logistic regression models were built to test the effects of potential predictors for the selection of statue subjects, including player loyalty, team locality, player longevity, performance of the player and the team, and the effect of nostalgia or memory (i.e., the era a player performed in).

The study found that players who played most or all of their careers at one club or franchise and those active in the 1950s and 1960s were most likely to be depicted. This latter finding, in particular, suggests that the role of a statue as a nostalgia/heritage marketing object is dependent in part on the “chance” effect of birth era. Distinct characteristics of each sport, such as baseball franchise relocation and international soccer success, were also found to have a significant effect upon the probability of depiction.