My Smoothing Tribute to the Phillies

Last night was an exciting night.  My team, the Philadelphia Phillies, won the World Series for only the second time in their history that started in 1883.

So it seems appropriate to give a statistical tribute to the Phillies.

I collected the Phillies winning percentage (percentage of games won) for each season in their history.  Below I plot the winning percentage against the season year.

It is hard to see the general pattern in this graph, so it makes sense to smooth.  I could use Tukey's resistant smooth described in the EDA notes, but I'll illustrate the use of an alternative smoothing method called lowess.  Here is the R code to graph the scatterplot and overlay the lowess smooth.

plot(Year,Win.Pct,pch=19,col="red")

lines(lowess(Year,Win.Pct,f=.2),lwd=3,col="red")

title("PHILLIES WINNING PERCENTAGES",col="red")

abline(h=50,lwd=2)

I added the horizontal line at WIN.PCT = 50 that corresponds to an average season.

Looking at the graph, you should see why the Philadelphia fans are so excited about the Phillies winning this season.

1.  The Phillies teams generally have been crummy, especially between 1920 and 1950.  The team hasn't experienced much success.

2.  But there have been two recent periods where the Phillies have been successful.  One period was in the 1970's and the climax of this success was the Phillies first World Series win in 1980.  The second period is in recent history and of course the Phillies won their second World Series in 2008.