Baseball attendance. Baseball team owners want to attract fans to games. The New York Mets acquired the pitcher Pedro Martinez in 2005. Martinez is considered one of the best pitchers of his era, having won the Cy Young Award three times. Martinez had his own fans.

Possibly, he attracted more fans to the ballpark when he pitched at home, helping to justify his 4-year, $53 million contract. Is there really a “Pedro effect” in attendance?

We have data for the Mets home games of the 2005 season. The regression has the following predictors:

a) All of these predictors are of a special kind. What are they called?

b) What is the interpretation of the coefficient for Pedro Start?

c) If we’re primarily interested in Pedro’s effect on attendance, why is it important to have the other variables in the model?

d) Could Pedro’s agent claim, based on this regression, that his man attracts more fans to the ballpark? What statistics should he cite?

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Weekend Yankees Rain Delay Opening Day Pedro Start 1 if game is on Saturday or Sunday, 0 otherwise 1 if game is against the Yankees (a home- town rivalry), 0 otherwise 1 if the game was delayed by rain (which might have depressed attendance), 0 otherwise 1 for opening day, 0 for the others 1 if Pedro was the starting pitcher, 0 otherwise Here's the regression. Dependent variable is: Attendance R-squared = 53.9% R-squared (adjusted) = 50.8% s =6998 with 80 674 degrees of freedom Variable Intercept Weekend Coeff SE (Coeff) t-ratio P-value 28896.9 1161 24.9 0.0001 9960.50 1620 6.15 0.0001 Yankees 15164.3 4218 3.59 0.0006 Rain Delay -17427.9 7277 -2.39 0.0192 Opening Day 24766.1 7093 3.49 0.0008 Pedro Start 5428.02 2017 2.69 0.0088