On Wednesday, October 27th 2004, the Curse of the Bambino was finally lifted off the City of Boston and its long-suffering baseball fans (see Appendix A for more on the Curse). For the first time in 86 years, the Boston Red Sox were the world champions of baseball.
There is no arguing that the 2004 Red Sox were a good team that played excellent baseball throughout the season. The team was led not by talent cultivated through the Red Sox’ farm system but by high-priced, free-agent acquisitions such as Pedro Martinez, Manny Ramirez, Keith Foulke, Curt Shilling and David Ortiz. The average age for a Red Sox team member was 31.1 years, the oldest team average in the league. Additionally, the cumulative payroll for the 2004 Red Sox was the second highest in Major League Baseball at $125,208,542 or $4,173,618 per player. The previous two statistics describe some of the off-field demographic makeup of the 2004 Red Sox. In additional to being a veteran and well-paid ball club, the Red Sox performed well on the field as well. The team batting average (number of hits divided by number of official at-bats) of the Red Sox was tied for the highest of the 30 Major Leagues teams at 0.282. In terms of pitching statistics, the Red Sox were in the top third of earned run average (E.R.A.; the number of earned runs allowed per nine innings of play). Fielding average (number of successful fielding attempts divided by total number of fielding attempts) is the only major statistic where the Red Sox were significantly below the mean, ranking in the bottom quartile.
I am interested in analyzing the Major League Baseball data from the 2004 season to determine the factors that best predict success (measured by the number of team wins). I am especially interested in analyzing the relationship between wins and payroll. I am most curious about this relationship because this relationship can be controlled by the ball club’s management. On-field performance is less controllable by the team’s management because it has a higher ‘human performance’ element. Furthermore, I will obtain the linear regression equations for the various variables and detailing the additional amount of wins for the marginal amount of the independent variable. In addition to analyzing the relationship between payroll and wins, I am also interested in analyzing the relationship between other major statistical categ...
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...s out the level of payroll was not a significant variable for predicting the number of wins. Although the Boston Red Sox had a high payroll, I conclude that their success was much more related to their superior hitting and pitching during 2004 than to their high-payroll.
Appendix A
The Legend of the Curse
In 1918 the Red Sox won their 5th World Series, the most by any club at that time. One of the stars of the Boston championship franchise was a young pitcher by the name of George Herman Ruth, aka The Babe or The Bambino.
In 1920, however, Red Sox owner Harry Frazee needed money to finance his girlfriend's play, so he sold Babe Ruth's contract to Colonel Jacob Ruppert's New York Yankees for $100,000 (plus a loan collateralized by Fenway Park).
Since then, the Yankees, who had never won a World Championship before acquiring Ruth, have gone on to win 26, and are arguably one of the greatest success stories in the history of sport.
Meanwhile, the Boston Red Sox have appeared in only four World Series since 1918, losing each one in game seven. Many consider Boston's performance after the departure of Babe Ruth to be attributable to "The Curse of the Bambino."
Through out the 1950s the Yankees experienced highs and lows but team remained arguably the ball club in all of Major League Baseball. In the 50s the team showed off tough unwavering determination to win even when some of their best players were missing from the line up. Although The Yankees didn’t win a World Series each year of this decade it is still hard to argue that they didn’t maintain their reign over professional baseball. At the start of the Yankees organization the team established one of the most storied and legendary histories ever in baseball and has built on it and will continue building on it for many days to come.
The game of baseball has changed ever since Babe Ruth has joined the league. He has changed the game with the amount of power he brings to the plate. Right now with the Yankees, he has showed how amazing he is and has helped make the Yankees popular by winning a few World Series and breaking many homerun records. For Babe to come into the league, it took a little help to get noticed.
At this time in baseball history, the Chicago White Sox had the best player in the game on their team. Joe Jackson was simply known as a future Hall of Famer and the best to ever play at this time (Chadwick 35). He proved this by hitting .351 all season which led the Majors as well as hitting .356 his whole lifetime as a player which is still one of the highest averages today (Chadwick 36). However, the White Sox were no one man show they also had the top two pitchers in the league in Eddie Cicotte and Lefty Williams (Chadwick 35). By 1919, the White Sox had already made the World Series two times in a row. They had won the 1917 World Series, but lost in a heartbreaker in the 1918 World Series (Chadwick 35). It...
Baseball statistics are meant to be a representation of a player’s talent. Since baseball’s inception around the mid-19th century, statistics have been used to interpret the talent level of any given player, however, the statistics that have been traditionally used to define talent are often times misleading. At a fundamental level, baseball, like any game, is about winning. To win games, teams have to score runs; to score runs, players have to get on base any way they can. All the while, the pitcher and the defense are supposed to prevent runs from scoring. As simplistic as this view sounds, the statistics being used to evaluate individual players were extremely flawed. In an attempt to develop more specific, objective forms of statistical analysis, the idea of Sabermetrics was born. Bill James, a man who never played or coached professional baseball, is often credited as a pioneer in the field and for coining the name as homage to the Society of American Baseball Research, or SABR. Eventually, the use of Sabermetrics became widespread in the Major Leagues, the first team being the Oakland Athletics, as depicted in Moneyball. Bill James and other baseball statisticians have developed various methods of evaluating a player performance that allow for a more objective view of the game, broadly defined as Sabermetrics.
while ravaging the Red Sox. While the Red Sox' five World Series titles were a
102 years ago Babe Ruth played his first major league professional baseball game.Babe Ruth is a famous baseball player known by the number 3. He was a left handed pitcher for the Boston Red Sox in July of 1914 and pitched 89 winning games before in 1920 when he was traded to the New York Yankees. After Babe Ruth left the Boston Red Sox, they didn’t win a World series until 2004. It was called “The curse of Bambino.”Babe Ruth was also known as “Bambino” which means baby boy in Italian.
The Great War rages on. An influenza epidemic claims the lives of several Americans. But, the Boston Red Sox have done it again. Last night, in a 2-1 victory over the Chicago Cubs at Fenway Park (thanks to Carl Mays' three-hitter), the Boston Red Sox won their fifth World Series championship--amid death and disease, a reason to live ... Babe Ruth and the 1918 Red Sox. If I die today, at least I lived to see the Sox win the championship. For, it could be a long, long, time before this happens again.
forging Hall of Fame careers. The Cincinnati Reds, on the other hand, had its share of stars,
team of the American League. Ruth was paid a salary of $600 to play in the
The history of the rivalry between the Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees can be traced to the beginning of Red Sox baseball on April 26, 1901, when they made their baseball debut as the Boston Americans. They played a team from Baltimore that would later be known as the New York Yankees.The Red Sox may have lost that first game, but went on to win the very first “modern” World Series” in 1903 and repeated as champions of the American League in 1904(Frommer, 2004). In 1910 the name Boston Red Sox became official and in April of 1912 they moved into Fenway Park which was a momentous period for the Red Sox. They again won the World Series and the American League pennant that year. The team was well rounded with great pitching, hitting and out fielding, enabling the Red Sox to go on and win repeated pennants and championships from 1915 to 1918. Then things started to change. Harry Frazee, from New ...
The blending of terror and romance in Gothic Literature was used in a unique combination to attract and entice the reader into the story. The terror in the literature helps the reader explore their imagination and form their own picture setting of what is happening. Using romance in the story also keeps the reader's attention because of the unknown and the curiosity of what happens next. The Gothic writing became popular after the Romantic period because readers were still a...
Nemee, David. “100 Years of Major League Baseball.” Lincolnwood, Illinois: Publications Infernational, Ltd, 200. Print.
“I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” Antithesis is defined as a rhetorical device in which two opposing ideas are put into a sentence to achieve a contr...
When the A’s came into town, the GM of baseball’s richest team, the New York Yankees, stated, “It’s like Coke and their secret formula – you don’t let the secret formula out” . Sabermetrics have become such a normal part of the baseball scouting process that now ex-Phillies GM Ruben Amaro was fired in part because of his refusal to adapt to this new reality. Michael Lewis himself has admitted, “the book probably cost the A’s an opportunity or two” . While this poses as a problem, Billy Beane continues to demonstrate another leadership skill he has up his sleeve: addressing change. Despite the fact that the A’s have lost those two MVPs, and many other All-Star quality players; despite the fact that everyone around the league is doing what the Athletics have been doing somehow Oakland finds a way to succeed with their relatively empty wallets. Oakland has catapulted itself back into the playoffs each of the last three years. Understandably, Billy Beane has kept his cards closer to his chest, and exactly what he has done to promote this new era of success is less transparent. One could point to the hiring of Bob Melvin, who won the 2012 AL Manager of the Year with the A’s, as Billy Beane once again brilliantly noticing a diamond in the rough. However if you take a closer look, you
The 1919 World Series occurred between the Cincinnati Reds, and the Chicago White Sox. During this eight game battle, the Reds beat the Sox five games to three in a best of nine game series. The World Series is typically a seven game series played between the best team in the American League, and the best team in the National League. In order for a team to get into the World Series, they must first win their division, then win in the playoffs. This was the first time the Reds won the World Series, unlike the Sox, who had won two prior to 1919. The 1919 World Series is believed by thousands of baseball fans to be fixed.