Move Over, Roger Maris: Breaking Baseball's Most Famous Record

Abstract

The race between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa to break the major league season home run record captured the attention of sports fans (and even non-sports fans) during the summer of 1998. In this article the game-by-game home run performance of each of these players is provided, along with some team statistics for each game. This dataset provides a rich set of possibilities of analyses in both introductory and advanced statistics courses, including graphical exploratory displays, categorical data analysis, analysis of variance, logistic regression, and smoothing methods for Poisson and binomial data.

• Contingency table
• Exploratory data analysis
• Smoothing
• Sports statistics