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:
4 responses to “MLB Payroll vs Winning percentage”
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What are these arbitrary color/dollar sign schemes you are assigning?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Stats in the Wild 
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