Births and Deaths in the Study Cohort

Abstract

The study cohort consists of more than 5200 former Major League Baseball players who played any time between 1947 and 1986. This includes more than 4200 non-Hispanic white, nearly 600 African-American, and more than 400 Hispanic players. This chapter contains a basic description of the study cohort that focuses on year of birth and vital status broken down by the 3 race/Hispanic origin groups. Over 38% of the study cohort passed away by January 1, 2018. Unadjusted vital status results depicting a higher percentage of non-Hispanic whites who passed away provide misleading results because non-Hispanic whites tend to be older than Hispanic and African-American players. Once vital status is controlled for year of birth, the mortality results for the 3 study groups change; non-Hispanic white players tend to have a mortality advantage compared to their African-American and Hispanic player counterparts. These vital status results, however, are very preliminary since they do not consider time to all-cause mortality. This will be undertaken in Chap. 6. In addition, other important variables that potentially influence the relationship between race/Hispanic origin and mortality, or add independently to the prediction of mortality risk, will be analyzed in subsequent chapters.