In the 2009 baseball season, the team that finished the regular season with the best record in the National League was the Los Angeles Dodgers, with a record of 95-67. (For those of you who don't follow baseball, that means they won 95 games and lost 67.) At the other extreme was the Washington Nationals, whose record was 59-103, despite winning their last 7 games in a row. Between these two were 14 other teams, but the most average of them was the Milwaukee Brewers who finished 80-82. In the data named ADMS2320S10A1data.xls, on sheet "MC1", you are presented with data for each of these three teams' runs scored and runs allowed for each game.
The data are:
OBS Observation (i.e., game number)
RFL Runs For (i.e., scored by) Los Angeles
RAL Runs Allowed by Los Angeles
RFM Runs For Milwaukee
RAM Runs Allowed by Milwaukee
RFW Runs For Washington
RAW Runs Allowed by Washington
Note about Baseball
For those of you not familiar with baseball, there is no reason to worry about how the game is played. Like most team sports, the team with the highest score at the end of the game wins. In baseball, each time a team scores, it is called a 'run'. The two teams take turns attempting to score runs (with their hitting/offense) while the other team tries to prevent them from scoring runs (with their pitching/defense). To interpret the last line of data in the data file, the 162nd and final game of the season for each team, Los Angeles won 5-3, Milwaukee won 9-7 and Washington won 2-1.
On average, the 16 teams in the National League scored 4.5 runs and allowed 4.5 runs per game.
Required:
a) If you were creating a frequency distribution for any of the sets of data in provided, how many classes would you use? Explain fully.
b) Use the appropriate graphical techniques, along with the appropriate descriptive statistics, to describe the number of runs scored and runs allowed for each team.
c) How do the descriptive statistics used in part (b) differ for the three teams?
d) Suppose that a baseball executive is interested in how often each team's offense (i.e., run scoring) is (1) inept, scoring only 0 or 1 runs; (2) weak, scoring 2 to 4 runs; (3) good, scoring 5-8 runs; and (4) great, scoring more than 8 runs. What proportion of the time did each of the three teams score in each of these categories and graph them appropriately.
e) Repeat part (d) for runs allowed, except that the categories are: Allowing 0 or 1 runs is great, allowing 2 to 4 runs is good, allowing 5-8 runs is poor and allowing more than 8 runs is terrible.
f) Based on you analyses in parts (b) through (e), what are the strengths and weaknesses of the three teams?