It is baseball season again and Barry Bonds seems to have gotten off to another great start. His record setting season last year was exciting to watch! It is great to see him still here with the SF Giants.
A question that always come up among baseball fans when talking about about the great homerun hitters of all time is:
Who is the best homerun hitter of all time?
Many names come up.
Babe Ruth 60 in 1927
Roger Maris 61 in 1961
Mark McGwire 70 in 1998
Sammy Sosa 64 in 1998
Josh Gibson 75 in 1931
and Barry Bonds 73 in 2001
To investigate how good of a player Barry Bonds is we will compute some descriptive statistics:
Calculate the Mean and Median as measures of the center of the distribution of his career homeruns per year.
Calculate the Range.
To visualize the distribution of Bond's career homeruns we will graph the data using a Stem and Leaf Plot.
Now we are going to use the FREE online Statistics package WebStat to perform a comparison analysis of the four players: Ruth, Maris, McGwire, Sosa, and Bonds. To start WebStat click on "click here to fire it up!" After the software has loaded open the homerun data by going to
Data > Sample data sets > Home Runs
You will see 4 columns of data open in the spreadsheet. First check that the values in the dataset are correct (note that there will be some additions). We will have to enter the data for Bonds ourselves. To do this type in the homerun totals for Bonds down the fifth column.
We will perform two analyses of the data, graphical and descriptive.
Graphical Analysis: Make stem-and-leaf plots and boxplots.
Graphics > Stem and Leaf Plot. Select each player and click Calculate. Does there appear to be any outliers? Which player's distribution seems most concentrated around its center? Which player's distribution seems to be the most spread out? Who do you think is the best player?
Graphics > Boxplot. Select each player and click Calculate. Describe the boxplots? Who do you think is the best player? Output
Descriptive Analysis: Calculate the mean, median, range and standard deviation. Stats > Summary Stats. Select each player and click Calculate. What are the statistics for each player? What are the difference between them?