Hi,
I've noticed for years that in sports it always seemed that half a sports league was below 50% in wins vs. losses and half the league was above 50% (and there are always teams at exactly 50%).
I thought about it and it made sense since every game played has a win and a loss as a result and every team plays the same amount of games the average win% for any sports league should always be 50%.
And yet somehow I got different results.
I'm performing amateur baseball statistical analysis and I was looking at the St. Louis Cardinals win%.
In most sports the win% is expressed as a decimal. The Cards have been consistently above .500 in the time span I was looking at.
But then when I did the math on the average win% of any given team in baseball I did not always get .500.
In a normal season the numbers fluctuated by hundredths of a percent. I'm not quiet sure why it's not exactly .500. It's pretty darn close (most seasons did come out to .500 by rounding).
There are however a handful of instance in MLB history where an extra game needed to be played to determine a tiebreaker for two teams trying to make the playoffs.
Normally I had been adding up all the wins and dividing them by the total games played in the season.
Here I couldn't do that because two teams (and in one season four) had a different number of games played than every other team.
So I added up every other teams wins and divided them by the total games played by those teams and got a number just under .500 every time.
Since the two teams were competing at the upper half of the league they usually had more wins and therefore they're combined win% was always above.500.
Adding them together and dividing by two did not bring them back down to.500 give or take a hundredth or two.
I'm looking for an explanation for this as well as possibly help with my math here if I made a mistake.
Sorry for the long winded post.
I'm happy to email someone willing to help the numbers I'm working with and any other information they need.
Thanks in advance!!
I've noticed for years that in sports it always seemed that half a sports league was below 50% in wins vs. losses and half the league was above 50% (and there are always teams at exactly 50%).
I thought about it and it made sense since every game played has a win and a loss as a result and every team plays the same amount of games the average win% for any sports league should always be 50%.
And yet somehow I got different results.
I'm performing amateur baseball statistical analysis and I was looking at the St. Louis Cardinals win%.
In most sports the win% is expressed as a decimal. The Cards have been consistently above .500 in the time span I was looking at.
But then when I did the math on the average win% of any given team in baseball I did not always get .500.
In a normal season the numbers fluctuated by hundredths of a percent. I'm not quiet sure why it's not exactly .500. It's pretty darn close (most seasons did come out to .500 by rounding).
There are however a handful of instance in MLB history where an extra game needed to be played to determine a tiebreaker for two teams trying to make the playoffs.
Normally I had been adding up all the wins and dividing them by the total games played in the season.
Here I couldn't do that because two teams (and in one season four) had a different number of games played than every other team.
So I added up every other teams wins and divided them by the total games played by those teams and got a number just under .500 every time.
Since the two teams were competing at the upper half of the league they usually had more wins and therefore they're combined win% was always above.500.
Adding them together and dividing by two did not bring them back down to.500 give or take a hundredth or two.
I'm looking for an explanation for this as well as possibly help with my math here if I made a mistake.
Sorry for the long winded post.
I'm happy to email someone willing to help the numbers I'm working with and any other information they need.
Thanks in advance!!
