What’s in a Smile?

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Hope may spring eternal in the early months of the Major League Baseball season, but not everyone approaches the game with a smile on their face. In one of the more unusual pieces of research published this spring, Twitter user @JayCuda collected the spring training headshots of the 26 players on every MLB team’s Opening Day roster and found clear evidence that, at least on their respective photo days, some units were much happier than others.

There is some room for difference of opinion, of course, on what exactly comprises a smile. Cuda found at least one player on eight teams that he credited with a “half smile” and awarded half a point in his sample. Nonetheless, his data shows a wide disparity between teams: There were 25 and a half smiles among the 26 players on the Rays’ Opening Day roster, the most of any team, and only seven on the Rangers. There were 18 players smiling among the median MLB team. The Brewers were a bit below that mark at 14.

But all of this raises a bigger question: Does it mean anything? Are there any underlying factors that might lead to a team being more or less likely to be happy in these photos and, presumably, with their respective teams? 

Happiness = Success?

Starting with the most obvious question: There’s virtually no evidence that this presumed happiness correlates with team success, past or future. There is no visible connection that would suggest that this measure has anything to do with how the players’ respective teams performed last season. And while it’s impossible to know how good these teams expect themselves to be, there is a reasonable proxy for likely performance in the projected standings, and those don’t correlate with this perceived happiness either.

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So maybe the right question isn’t “what,” but “where?” These photos are of players who made Opening Day rosters, but for the most part that’s not when they were taken. Teams typically have photo day sometime early in spring training, weeks before and sometimes thousands of miles away from their regular season home. In recent generations teams have been more likely to move spring training sites to Arizona, but, at least anecdotally, this spring teams training in the Grapefruit League were slightly more likely to smile in their photos. Teams that train in Florida averaged 18.2 smiles per 26 players, while Cactus League teams averaged just 17.2. It’s something, but probably not enough to make any kind of determination based on one year of data.

Trying another track: The old adage says that money can’t buy happiness, but can it get baseball players to smile? Economic disparity is one of the notable narratives of the current era of baseball, and this season the two most expensive teams, the Mets and Yankees, are only spending slightly less this season than the bottom eight combined. If anything, however, this data suggests players might be happier on teams that aren’t giving out big contracts. Payroll and headshot smiles actually have a statistically significant reverse correlation, meaning that players are more likely to be smiling on the teams that aren’t paying them as much.

If anything, though, that reverse correlation provides breadcrumbs to follow towards a plausible explanation supported by the data. Players on teams with lower payrolls are more likely to smile in their headshots, but players making less money are also likely to be earlier in their professional careers. Baseball’s economic structure is such that players in their early years of service time make several times less than players who have reached their arbitration years, who in turn often make less than players who have reached free agency. Teams with lower payrolls lean heavily on those pre-arbitration players. As a result, their teams are noticeably younger.

Players getting one of their first MLB opportunities are significantly more likely to take on a “just happy to be here” attitude in spring training. Consider, for example, this series of images shared by a user in the Facebook group for the baseball podcast Effectively Wild:

The image shows Robert Andino in three consecutive seasons, but three very different points in his career. In 2010 Andino was coming off his first season as an MLB regular. In 2011, after a disappointing 2010 season, he’s down to what might have been described as a “half smile.” The smile is gone in his 2012 headshot.

It remains to be seen which team will be the surprising upstart story this season, the squad that surpasses expectations and captures fans’ imaginations with their energy and exuberance. Not all of baseball’s young teams will be successful this season, but the ones that are will almost certainly look like they’re having the most fun.