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March 1, 2011

What’s the best measure of a team’s HR ranking? Three alternative measures.

5 comments

Joe Mako posted the following comment about my post on all-time HR rankings: “What about consideration for the year? Seems to me that comparing the total number of home runs of teams that have been around for a over 100 years to teams that have been around for just a few dozen years does not seem useful. Is there data that tracks the number of home runs by team per year? If so maybe the data could be normalized, or viewed differently.”

Three measures that are likely a better indicator include HR/Game, HR/Year, and HR/Win.  Colorado now comes in at #1 in all three categories, with Arizona in the top 3 in all three of these categories.  The Yankees, Giants, Cubs and Braves are all much, much farther down the list now.  Remember, normalizing the data can very often be your friend, unless of course you want to intentionally skew the data.

5 comments :

  1. Very interesting, thanks for these additional viewpoints. Now can we see these numbers over time? or how about a Tableau public workbook or the underlying data?

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  2. Nice. I was dying for this to be on Public, so I could click a team in one chart and see it highlighted in another. That way, I would be able to quickly gauge how the different rankings affect each team.

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  3. I tell ya, you and Joe just ask for everything. :-)

    I'll publish something, hopefully tonight. Real work is getting in the way today.

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  4. It's interesting that St. Louis is next to last in the standardized home run rankings.

    I believe the Cardinals have won the most world series chanpionships after the Yankees. That must reflect a different team philosophy or perhaps be a reflection of their ballpark.

    Enjoyed the charts!

    Wendell

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  5. Wendell,

    If you think about it, this makes perfect sense. The Cardinals, until recently when Pujols came along, were always a small-ball team. Remember the '80s with Vince Coleman, Willie McGee, Ozzie Smith, etc?

    They were always the model National League team.

    Thanks for the comments.

    Andy

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