Winning Percentage Correlations

This is a follow up FanPost to the previous one on HR and World Series Champions. I wanted a direct statistical analysis for Team HR and "Winning". Since winning the World Series is a qualitative statistic I could not do a direct correlation against stats like Team HR Rank so I used Winning Percentage. I chose to analyze team rank for the following categories: Team HR, Team Run Scored (RS), Team Runs Allowed (RA) and Team Run Differential (RD) against Winning Percentage (WP). I only did the AL to remove league inequities and I only ran the numbers for the 2000's (2000 - 2009). This gave me 140 data sets. Listed in the table you will find the correlation coefficients for each year and then the coefficients for the entire set of data (10 years).

The negative on the correlation means nothing, just that low numbers (such as being ranked 1st - correlate to high numbers such as a larger winning percentage). So you would expect negative values. The goal would be -1 and the closer to that -1 the closer the correlation. Data after the jump  

So what we see is that Team HR is the worst correlator to WP out of the chosen statistics. Of course you could interview any Texas Rangers fan and find that out (Rangers were in the top 5 in HR 8 out of the 10 years including 4 Top 1 finishes) but nonetheless there does seem to be this interesting love affair with the Homerun.

Runs Scored and Runs Allowed are about equally correllative and by far better than HR but neither is great when held apart. I will say this however, teams that ranked very low in RS or RA tended toward the lower end of the WP scale where the data was skewed was toward the middle and even the upper scoring teams.

As most could have determined Run Differential is the most correlative statistic out of the chosen with an almost consistent 0.9 average.

Moral: If you score more runs than your opponent you are likely to win more games (Duh), however it really does not matter how those runs are scored, nor even how you come by a good run differential.

BTW, I tried to find a team fielding stat to include but could not come up with one that I trusted.

BZ