Investigating Dad Strength in Sports
Dad strength has been a common urban legend circulated through all walks of life. While it might seem nonsensical to believe that one will just somehow get stronger after the birth of a child, I’ve always believed that in sports, athletes for whatever reason just perform better afterwards. I partly believe in this theory because I’ve seen plenty of articles praising a player’s performance after the birth of a new-born. However, when things are put into perspective, there are probably plenty of athletes that have babies that don’t get an article praising them, and after all there’s no direct causation that indicates a player should perform better after the birth of a child.
This still has me wondering, how do players, overall, perform after the birth of a child?
In this search I’ll be looking at the MLB. In 2011, the MLB implemented a paternity list where players could get put on the list in order to spend 1–3 days off with their families and come back afterwards. I’ll be investigating every player who has been placed on the paternity list since 2011, and how they’ve performed the game afterwards.
Part 1, The Querying:
Since I don’t want to bore all of you with the whole explanation, in layman’s terms, I created a program that scraped every transaction from every team from mlb.com/transactions and found the players that were activated from the paternity list. Afterwards, I looked up every player in Fangraphs and tracked their performance in the next game back.
If you want to see more about the code, as well as the final table of data, I’ll link the GitHub repository here.
Part 2, The Results:
Hitters: If we span the results over the years, there are indications that players perform better after becoming a father. In total, spanning from 2011–2022, new fathers had a line of .262/.294/.452. Meanwhile the league averages spanned across the same time frame were .251/.321/.408. From these points we can make two simple observations. The slugging percentage is a bit higher than major league average, and the on base percentage is a bit below major league average.
While issues about the sample size could be pointed to, it’s still worth noting that across the entire time frame, the new fathers accumulated 606 plate appearances, which is equivalent to nearly an entire MLB season for a single player.
In addition, if we look at some specific years, we can see that the slugging percentage was drastically higher than league averages. In the graph below, the blue line represents the MLB average slugging percentage while the orange represents the new fathers’. From the graph, we can see that in the past three full seasons of MLB games (2020 omitted due to COVID shortened season), new fathers all had a slugging percentage in the .500s and above. These three years also account for over 200 PAs, around a third of the total PAs for new fathers.
The 2022 season stands out among the rest of the years, not only were there a record high of plate appearances, but the percentage of home runs to hits is pretty ridiculous. There were 24 hits and 9 of them were home runs. This ratio, .375 HR/H, is a higher home runs to hits ratio than Aaron Judge’s 2022 season, .350 HR/H.
Pitchers: For pitchers, the trend continues. Over the 12 season time frame, the pitchers had posted a stat line of
5.26 ERA, 3.57 BB/9, 9.65 HA/9, 1.26 HR/9 and 9.42 SO/9.
Meanwhile, the league averages across those seasons were
4.41 ERA, 3.14 BB/9, 8.62 HA/9, 1.11 HR/9 and 8.12 SO/9.
From these two lines, one thing sticks out. Every single statistic was higher for the new fathers compared to the league averages. Obviously, for pitchers, other than the SO/9 being higher, this isn’t a good sign. However, it is interesting that the SO/9 is so much higher.
As we can see, the same trend where in the most recent years, pitchers had a higher SO/9 than the beginning years of the paternity list. In the past five seasons, players activated from the paternity list beat the league average SO/9 by at least one in each year.
Conclusions:
Overall, both pitchers and hitters seem to perform better in certain categories rather than just becoming a better baseball player overall. If we look at the specific stats, this can be attributed to the stat that they perform differently in compared to the league average.
For instance, with hitters they hit home runs at a higher rate than normal which led to the slugging in turn being higher, and for pitchers, the SO/9 was considerably higher. Both homeruns and strikeouts are the pinnacle outcomes on either side of the ball. They’re both galvanizing plays that usually require more power and energy. The extra adrenaline from being a new father might be what provides an extra kick for them to perform better.
It’s also worth noting that when these outcomes aren’t achieved, the other statistics get way worse. For hitters, homerun hitters that don’t hit homeruns usually strikeout more and get on base less. This trend can also be seen in our totals where the slugging was higher than average, while the on base percentage suffered. For pitchers, we can see that when they weren’t striking hitters out they were giving up way more hits and walks which in turn led to their ERA being higher. This relation shows that while new fathers might perform better in the more appealing categories that get highlighted, they perform much worse in the ones that people don’t talk about.
Part 3, Twitter:
Whether you’re a baseball junkie that loves the intricacies and movie-like stories of the beautiful game, or a sports-bettor with a gambling addiction; make sure to follow my twitter bot a follow. This twitter bot will tweet whenever a player is activated off the paternity list, as well as highlighting players that performed well after being activated.
