Statistics and Baseball

Today we looked at the current Cleveland Indians roster to learn about the nationalities and ages of MLB players.

• We learned about nationality of Indians players by a frequency table and a bar chart. Approximately 20% of the Indians are international from Latin-American countries.
• Using a stemplot and 5-number summary, we looked at the ages of the Indians. The Indians average age is about 30, ranging from early 20's to late 30's.

There has been talk about the increase in home run hitting this season. (Albert Pujoils, for example, has 19 home runs and is on target to hit 81 this season.) To start looking at this question, we looked at the number of home runs hit per game for the 2005 season.

We learned

• the median number of home runs hit per team in 2005 was exactly 1. (That means you would expect to see two home runs in a game that season.)
• the distribution of hrs/gams was somewhat right-skewed and Texas' value may be an outlier

For future work, we'll see if the rate of hitting home runs has increased in 2006. Also, we'll see if there is a relationship between the home run hitting of teams in 2005 and 2006.