NAME:	1969-2000 Major League Baseball Attendance data
TYPE:	Census
SIZE:	838 team/seasons (records), 10 variables (fields)


DESCRIPTIVE ABSTRACT:
Data are from The Baseball Encyclopedia (1993) and Total Baseball (2001). 
They include the location, league affiliation (National or American), 
division affiliation (East, Central, or West), season of play, home game 
attendance, runs scored, runs allowed, wins, losses, and number of games 
behind the division leader for each major league franchise for the 1969 
through 2000 seasons. Other data (including opening dates for new stadia, 
and dates of work stoppages) were collected from Ballparks by Munsey and 
Suppes (2001) and InfoPlease (2001).

VARIABLE DESCRIPTIONS
This dataset was taken from The Baseball Encyclopedia (1993) and Total 
Baseball (2001). Location of the franchise represents the home city or 
state of the franchise. Season, league affiliation (National or American), 
and division affiliation (East, Central, or West) are self-explanatory. 
Home game attendance represents the reported number of fans in attendance 
for the franchise's home games during the corresponding season. Runs 
scored and runs allowed represent the sums of runs scored and runs 
allowed by the franchise over all games during the corresponding season. 
Wins and losses represent the total number of games won and lost by the 
franchise during the corresponding season. Finally, number of games the 
jth team is behind the division leader is calculated as

0.5*[(w1 - wj) + (lj -l1)]

where	w1 represents the wins by the first-place team
	wj represents the wins by the jth team
	l1 represents the losses by the first-place team
	lj represents the losses by the jth team

This is a measure of the distance between the division winner and the team 
in question at the end of the season.

Note: 
The JSE dataset MLBattend.dat contains the data in a fixed column format 
with a single row of data for each combination of franchise and season. 
The format for MLBattend.dat is described below.

DATASET LAYOUT:
Fixed column format with one data line per franchise per season

Columns  Variable
 1 –  4  Major League Baseball franchise
 9 – 10  League affiliation (National or American)
16 – 19  Division affiliation (East, Central, or West)
25 – 26  Season
32 – 38  Home game attendance
43 – 46  Runs scored
51 – 54  Runs allowed
59 – 61  Wins
66 – 68  Losses
74 – 77  Number of games behind the division winner

There are no missing values in this dataset.

STORY BEHIND THE DATA:

This dataset includes variables that could potentially explain 
variation in recent attendance for Major League Baseball franchises. 
Thus, these data are of interest to anyone wishing to study the 
relationships between attendance and various performance variables 
of the teams, and are potentially useful in applied statistics and 
economics/econometrics courses.

Additional information about these data can be found in the "Datasets
and Stories" article "Data Management, Exploratory Data Analysis, 
and Regression Analysis with 1969-2000 Major League Baseball 
Attendance" in the _Journal of Statistics Education_ (Cochran 2002,
www.amstat.org/v10n2/datasets.cochran.html).

PEDAGOGICAL NOTES:
This dataset has been used in an undergraduate/Master's level 
capstone course in data analysis offered by the University of 
Cincinnati's College of Business Administration. The students 
enrolled in this course are working toward either an undergraduate 
major or a Master's degree in quantitative analysis.

The purpose of the course (and use of the dataset) is to provide 
the students with a full experience in analyzing data through a 
comprehensive data analysis project. The class is divided into 
groups of three or four students, each of which is provided with a 
diskette containing a unique part of a dataset. These data include 
various instructor-induced anomalies such as missing values, 
repeated observations, and misplaced decimals. The subsets of the 
data that are distributed to the student groups do not overlap and 
do combine to form the complete dataset to be used for the course. 
None of these subsets contain data for all years to be utilized, 
nor does any subset contain data for every team. Students work 
cooperatively to clean their data and aggregate the results into 
a complete dataset. 

Throughout the course, students are instructed in exploratory data 
analysis, data management, topics in statistical modeling, and the 
role of a statistical consultant. Final grades are based primarily 
on the quality of the final model, a written report, and 
presentation of results given to an audience comprised of classmates, 
faculty, and Ph.D. students.

REFERENCES:
Munsey, P., and Suppes, C. (2001), Ballparks [Online]. 
(www.ballparks.com/baseball) 

Frees, E. W. (1996), Data Analysis Using Regression Models, 
Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall. 

InfoPlease (2001), [Online]. (www.infoplease.com/index.html) 

Reichler, J. L. (ed.) (2001), The Baseball Encyclopedia, New York: 
MacMillan Publishing Company. 

Thorn, J., and Palmer, P. (2001), Total Baseball, New York: 
HarperCollins Publishers.

SUBMITTED BY:
James J. Cochran
Department of Economics and Finance
Louisiana Tech University
Ruston, LA, USA  71272
jcochran@cab.latech.edu

--