A new study finds that baseball players who competed in track and field during high school went on to perform better as professionals than those who focused only on baseball. Despite that clear advantage, Major League Baseball teams do not appear to factor track experience into their decisions when drafting players or setting signing bonuses.
The research comes from a University of Florida sport management professor and a team of colleagues, according to a report by Phys.org. The study will soon be published in the Journal of Sport Management and was supported by the Society for American Baseball Research.
"It's a bit of a Moneyball-type finding. There's a clear performance benefit, but teams aren't recognizing it when they make decisions about talent," said Chris McLeod, Ph.D., an associate professor in UF's Department of Sport Management.
The dataset behind the study is unusually deep. Researchers Tiberiu Ungureanu, Jason Sigler, and Zeynep Yavic combined decades of professional performance records with nearly 97,000 historical survey responses originally collected by baseball historian William Weiss. Those surveys asked players which sports they participated in during high school. By connecting those answers to long-term career outcomes, the team found patterns that earlier research had missed.
Track appears to build speed, explosiveness, and timing. Those qualities translate directly to baserunning and fielding at the professional level. Other sports, including basketball and football, did not show the same consistent benefit for baseball players.
"Multisport participation isn't a one-size-fits-all answer," McLeod said. "It depends on whether the skills from one sport cross over to another. Other sports do not consistently relate to performance improvement for baseball players like track does."
The researchers also tackled a potential problem with their findings. Faster athletes might naturally be drawn to track, which could mean the sport itself is not responsible for better outcomes. To address this, the team used a statistical method called Coarsened Exact Matching to control for that possibility and strengthen their conclusions.
The findings carry weight beyond professional scouting. Youth sports in the United States have shifted heavily toward early specialization, with travel teams and year-round training programs now common for children in elementary and middle school. Parents often feel pressure to commit their children to a single sport as early as possible.
"There's a lot of anxiety among parents about making the 'right' choice for their child's future," McLeod said. "Our study is one of the strongest pieces of evidence that specializing early in baseball alone does not necessarily lead to better outcomes."
The study does not argue that every athlete should play multiple sports. It argues that the specific combination of skills matters. For baseball players, the speed and explosive movement demands of track appear to be a particularly good match. Whether MLB front offices begin to weigh that evidence when building draft boards remains to be seen.
