What Baseball and Thomas Sowell Can Teach Us About Disparities

The 2026 Major League Baseball season is the 151st season since the National League began play in 1876. It offers a useful way to think about disparities. One disparity stands out at once: baseball talent is not spread across the states in proportion to population.

Using all players who made their MLB debut between 2020 and 2025, I compare each state’s actual number of debuting players with the number expected from that state’s share of births in the relevant cohorts. I then calculate an actual-to-expected ratio. A value above one means a state produced more players than expected. A value below one means it produced fewer.

The top and bottom states appear in the table below. The differences are striking. Florida ranks first with a ratio of 1.95, which means it produced about 95 percent more players than expected. Iowa, by contrast, produced more than 80 percent fewer than expected. Illinois comes closest to proportional representation, with a ratio of 1.004, almost exactly what one would expect from its share of births.

Thomas Sowell warns against what he calls the equal-chances fallacy in Social Justice Fallacies:

“In the real world, there is seldom anything resembling the equal outcomes that might be expected if all factors affecting outcomes were the same for everyone. Even in a society with equal opportunity—in the sense of judging each individual by the same standards—people from different backgrounds do not necessarily even want to do the same things, much less invest their time and energies into developing the same kinds of skills and talents.”

Many things shape the odds of becoming an MLB player: chances to play, the quality of competition, good coaching, athletic ability, and personal interest. Even if those factors were more equal than they are, outcomes would still differ. People differ in ambition, taste, and the goals they choose. Some devote themselves to baseball. Others choose other sports, music, business, engineering, or medicine.

Disparities, then, are a normal part of life. They do not by themselves show that someone has been mistreated, victimized, or exploited. Major League Baseball, of course, has a real history of excluding Black players. But that exclusion also made teams weaker than they otherwise would have been. Over time, competition imposed costs on teams that refused to integrate, which made discrimination harder to sustain. In MLB today, the underrepresentation of players from some states likely reflects ordinary factors such as climate.

When discussing nationality patterns in the National Hockey League, Sowell makes a similar point:

“Different climates are among the many other things that are not equal. Colder climates, with waterways frozen for months at a time, offer more opportunities for more people to grow up developing the ice-skating skills essential for hockey. Such climates are far more common in Canada and Sweden than in the United States in general or California in particular.”

The same logic applies to baseball. In my analysis, the five most overrepresented states are Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, California, and Alabama. Warm weather allows more year-round play, more outdoor practice, and more chances to build baseball-specific skills.

Climate is not the whole story, however. Alabama and Mississippi have similar climates, yet Alabama’s actual-to-expected ratio is 1.36, while Mississippi’s is only 0.91. That suggests other factors matter too. A stronger baseball culture may help explain why some warm-weather states produce more major leaguers than similar states. Sowell’s broader work on culture and geography suggests that this kind of variation should not surprise us.

The most underrepresented states are mostly colder ones, including Connecticut, Maine, Michigan, New York, New Jersey, and Ohio. No players from Alaska, South Dakota, Vermont, or Wyoming made their MLB debut between 2020 and 2025.

Sowell makes a similar point in Discrimination and Disparities. Geographic differences have long shaped unequal outcomes. Coastal peoples and those in river valleys have often had advantages over otherwise similar peoples living inland or in the mountains. He notes that 53 percent of the world’s gross domestic product is produced on just 8 percent of the world’s inhabited land area. Baseball offers another example. We should not expect MLB players to be spread evenly across the states, and unequal outcomes alone do not prove injustice.

To sum up, Sowell writes:

“The idea that it would be a level playing field, if it were not for either genes or discrimination, is a preconception in defiance of both logic and facts. Nothing is easier to find than sins among human beings, but to automatically make those sins the sole, or even primary, cause of different outcomes among different peoples is to ignore many other reasons for those disparities.”