As excessively high temperatures have gripped much of the country in recent weeks, I have continued to wonder if the level of reader/poster civility erodes accordingly. Though I could not prove it, experience tells me there would be a correlation between heat and crankiness.
With the help of STATS LLC, the Wall Street Journal has the data that indicates this definitely occurs on Major League Baseball fields across the nation. They looked at the game time temperatures of every contest during which an ejection occurred since 2002. There are typically between 200-300 boots given each season.
They found that the ejection rate increases correspondingly with the thermometer reading. The following table indicates the rate of ejections per 100 games by 10-degree bandwidths.
MLB ejection rate by game time temperature (since 2002)
| Game Time Temperature | Ejections per 100 games |
| <50 | 5.8 |
| 50-59 | 7.2 |
| 60-69 | 8.4 |
| 70-79 | 8.6 |
| 80-89 | 10 |
| 90+ | 11.4 |
(Source: Wall Street Journal)
In a quick search, I could only find St. Louis Cardinals ejections this season. Interestingly, there have had just three, with the most notable the one-game suspension-generating umpire bump performed by Ryan Theriot in Cincinnati two weeks ago.
On the other hand, over three times as many Cardinals opponents in 2011 have been thrown out of games. The most recent of the nine was a quartet of Tampa Bay Rays booted on the first of last month – until Cubs manager Mike Quade was run on Saturday night after arguing about Matt Holliday‘s hard slide toward Starlin Castro.
Because I was curious, I looked up the temperatures of the games with the 13 ejections. I cannot draw any conclusions from this. I do wonder, though, if there are simply more ejections as the season gets longer and the games become more important. Of course, the average outdoor temperatures rise accordingly – at least until September and October.
So far, the Cardinals seem to be able to remain cooler than their 2011 opponents. This is a 10-3 score of which they would surely rather remain on the short end.
| Cardinals | |||
| Date | Ejected | Team | Game time temp |
| 7/17/2011 | Ryan Theriot | StL | 86 |
| 6/25/2011 | Matt Holliday | StL | 77 |
| 5/23/2011 | Tony La Russa | StL | 64 |
| Opponents | |||
| Date | Ejected | Team | Game time temp |
| 7/30/2011 | Mike Quade | ChC | 77 |
| 7/1/2011 | David Price | TB | 72 (in dome) |
| Elliott Johnson | 79 (outside) | ||
| Joe Maddon | |||
| J.P. Howell | |||
| 5/22/2011 | Ned Yost | KC | 83 |
| Matt Treanor | |||
| 4/30/2011 | Fredi Gonzalez | Atl | 76 |
| Alex Gonzalez | |||
| 4/12/2011 | Kirk Gibson | Ari | 81 |
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