Any baseball datasets that identify race?

[u/Select-Life-6106]

Hey all. I'm a college student working on an empirical project designed to determine whether MLB umpires show any biases when calling balls/strikes against white and nonwhite players. Are there any (preferably free) datasets out there that have a race variable? Any information helps.

[u/SirPsychoSquints]

I don’t have a direct answer to your question, but there have been attempts at this before. Read up on how they did it maybe?

https://sabr.org/journal/article/is-there-racial-bias-among-umpires/

https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cmc_theses/2677/#:~:text=The%20results%20suggest%20that%20umpires,majority%20of%20umpires%20in%20MLB.

http://blog.philbirnbaum.com/2021/08/are-umpires-racially-biased-2021-study.html?m=1

[u/Select-Life-6106 → u/SirPsychoSquints]

Thanks for the help!

[u/Jeff_Banks_Monkey → u/SirPsychoSquints]

That SABR article is a good one

[u/AHandsomeKiller]

I don’t know about race but Stathead has a birth country search option as a biographical filter. How you’d pull balls and strike call accuracy out of that, I’m not sure. Especially pre-statcast era. 

[u/Baseball-Reference → u/AHandsomeKiller]

This is probably your best bet u/Select-Life-6106