Sports: August 2004 Archives
I created a spreadsheet that shows the current winning percentages of 26 Major League Baseball teams, alongside their rank in terms of total 2004 payroll. This allows you to easily determine any correlation between payroll amount and winning percentage.
Your choice of formats:
- If you have Internet Explorer, try the interactive version that lets you sort, filter, etc. (It might work.)
- If that doesn't work, try the Excel-generated "plain" HTML file that isn't very fancy but conveys the same information.
I am not enough of a statistician to draw many conclusions about what the data proves -- I'll leave that up to you -- but I can say that the Minnesota Twins appear to be the best bargain (4th in winning percentage, 19th in payroll), whereas Seattle and the Mets seem to be the worst bargains. I'm sure there is a simple mathematical formula to better quantify that, but I have no idea what it is.* Post a comment if you do.
*Soon after writing this, I realized the rather obvious point that such a formula is payroll/wins. Now that the season is over, I will update this post shortly to include this formula.
