Baseball wins

On a note of baseball wins of a team per a full season. Grabbed the data of last 5 seasons, here's the statistics on wins per season.

Mode: 88, 75 (8x)

Minimum 57
First Quartile 73.750
Median 82.000
Third Quartile 89.000
Maximum 103
Mean 80.987
Range 46
Midrange 80.000
Interquartile Range 15.25
Standard Deviation 10.466
Average Deviation 1.013
Quartile Deviation 7.625

Observations. The median and mean reach about 81. Or of half the games in a full season (162). That's pretty neat. There is significance to this, I forgot, so I googled.

Ultimately, if your mean and median are the same, what it tells you is
that your data are arranged symmetrically around the median.

But when I go to make the histogram this is not the case. I set the bins to be 5.8 apart, but it I'm not sure how it balances out.  (maybe that small dif bet mean, mode explains this). Oh how I hate you how unintuitive it is to make histograms in excel/ open office. I lost numbers in making this histogram. The outliers are the 2003 Tigers with 43 wins, and the 2001 Mariners with 116(!) wins. If this data was truly normal, the Mariners would be in the 99.5> percentile. Truly one of the teams to go in the history books. Shame they got upset in the ALCS by the Yankees.

The only real neat trick is to get end of the year wins of any team (-minus) half the games of a full season (82). Divide that number by 10.5 (this is the standard deviation from above). Do that with two teams to compare, or the whole cast of 30. We can only qualify items by having reference points or by comparing; a single score means nothing. The calculated score is a normalized number, z score. 

tl;dr - pick 2 teams. compute (current team wins - team wins at 0.500 record) / 10.5 compare.

I originally wanted to compare "parity" between leagues by checking wins. Then I realized different leagues have different goals. In baseball it's not to win championships, it's to get the most amount of wins. (under the assumption that tickets brings in the most amt of cash to clubs, and that winning games draws in more people, to maximize revenue). In basketball, it's to win championships, not necessarily win the most amount of games possible. (Under the assumption that the boost of sales from a championship will help more for a league w/ shorter season). This means basketball will inherently have a larger spread of teams of wins/losses since the goals are different. Regular season games mean nothing to basketball, so it's championship or bust. And bust is how some franchises operate, tanking seasons for draft picks. There's not enough games for even poor performing teams to break even. 

Damn interesting. Another inherent difference is the relevance of attendance. NFL is 16 games regular season. NBA is 82 game regular season. Baseball is 162 game season. 

Lakers pull 2 million profit per home game. They play 41 home games. 19,000 seats. Estimate $105 per seat. Payroll is about 91.5 million. So they spend about 89% of ticket revenue on players.

Yankees. 81 home games. 46,500 seats. Payroll is about 201 million. If they go by the same margins of Lakers, Yanks pull in 226 million (that is 89% of tickets rev to players)**. Estimate $60 per seat. 

Worth noting, the $ per seat. If they were sports of same value,i.e. popularity of sport the same the est. avg. seat should sell about the same. This is only comparing the two most successful clubs. No way of telling how the rest of the leagues are. But for health of sport, I guess, sure. Baseball makes a load a money since they essentially run the length of two seasons. It's not going away.

**I'll argue this figure of (89%~90%) since it's 30 clubs fighting to maximize this figure in baseball and 30 clubs in NBA. It should be around there.