Statistics and Baseball

Today, as a review, we gave tribute to two players featured in the movie Field of Dreams -- Shoeless Joe Jackson and Moonlight Graham.

• We reviewed Jackson's baseball career. He was a great hitter, but his career was cut short by his alleged involvement in the Black Sox scandal. Did Joe really help his team lose games in the 1919 World Series? His exact involvement in the scandal might never be known.
• Since Ty Cobb and Joe Jackson were hitters during the same period, it seemed worthwhile to compare the OBPs of the two players. Although Jackson's OBPs were high, Cobb tended to hit for a higher OBP -- about 26 points higher.
• We looked at the relationship between Jackson's season double totals and his triples totals. There is a positive relationship and you can make reasonable prediction about the number of triples he would hit given the number of doubles.
• We also looked at the major league baseball career of Moonlight Graham. He only played a single game and never came to bat.

We concluded by watching segments from Field of Dreams. Joe Jackson gets an opportunity to play more baseball and Moonlight gets to bat against major leaguers. It was a successful at-bat -- he hit a sacrifice fly to score a runner from third base.