MLB Payroll vs Winning percentage
Dave Cameron over at FanGraphs wrote an interesting article about 2012 payroll and wins. In it, he used a scatterplot, which I assume was made with excel. I’d like to try to persuade everyone to stop making graphics in excel. I’m probably a little bit biased, but R with the ggplot2 package is much, much better. (And it’s easy!) I present to you below, my entire argument for why R with ggplot2 is better than excel:
Here is the code for making this graph
Cheers.
Posted on September 11, 2012, in Baseball, R, Sports. Bookmark the permalink. 4 Comments.
Stats in the Wild 
What are these arbitrary color/dollar sign schemes you are assigning?
Roughly, they are high payroll teams, medium payroll teams, and low pay rolls teams. There are 30 teams and each is a group of ten.
You’re right. This graph is spectacular and much better than anything in MS Excel. Looking at this now after reading your weekly rankings – I’m confounded by one thing. Can a medium payroll team still win at the rate the Nationals and Reds are winning at with a tougher schedule? Don’t get me wrong, they’re solid teams – but as your rankings show, they’ve been the beneficiary of playing some of the worst teams in baseball. How good would they be if you put them in a new division? Conversely, the Yankees and Rangers play some of the best teams on a regular basis. Part of that is the difference between National League and American league and the amount of quality teams in each league, but it’s still something to think about.
Answering the question “What would the Reds record be if they played in a different division?” sounds like an awesome project. Let me think about that a bit.