In fantasy baseball, groups of 12 league participants conduct a draft in which they can "buy" any baseball players from any teams across one of the leagues (i.e., the American League or National League). These makeshift teams are compared on the basis of the combined statistics of the individual baseball players. Statistics such as home runs are awarded points, and each fantasy team receives a total score of all combined points for its baseball players, regardless of their real-life team. Many in the fantasy and real-life baseball worlds have wondered how success in fantasy leagues maps onto the real-life success of winning baseball games. Walker (2006) compared the fantasy league performances of the players for each American League team with their actual American League finishes for the 2004 season, the year the Red Sox broke the legendary "curse" against them and won the World Series. The data, sorted from highest to lowest fantasy league score, are shown in the accompanying table.
a. What are the two variables of interest? For each variable, state whether it's scale or ordinal.
b. Calculate the Spearman correlation coefficient for these two variables. Remember to convert any scale variables to ranks.
c. What does the coefficient tell us about the relation between these two variables?
d. Why couldn't we calculate a Pearson correlation coefficient for these data?