Question
Go to the baseball reference Website, located at http://www.baseball-reference.com/teams/, select a baseball team from the list of teams, and analyze the team’s historical win percentage.
From the e-Activity, discuss whether or not the winning history of the team you selected follows a normal distribution. Provide a rationale to support your response.
Sample paper
Normal Distribution
I have selected the Baltimore Orioles baseball team. The normal distribution curve is bell-shaped. Many data attributes take this pattern when the sample size is large enough. In normal distributions, the average represents the normal value while the deviations from the true value are errors. Small errors are more likely to emerge compared with big errors. As such, most scores will likely fall close to the mean. This gives rise to the normal bell-shaped distribution curve. The winning history of the team follows the normal distribution curve. This is because the probabilities of winning or losing will always fall close to the mean of the distribution. The basic tenet in normal distributions is that extreme observations become rare in the long run, with most observations falling close to the mean.
On plotting a scatter diagram for the distribution of the scores, I was able to obtain a bell shaped curve, which indicates a normal distribution. I selected the team’s historical win percentage from year 1917 to 2017. The mean for this data is 0.48503, while the standard deviation is 0.08713. This is a clear indication that the winning history of the team follows the normal distribution.
