Above are side-by-side boxplots, comparing Babe Ruth and Mark McGwire\'s home-ru

Question

Above are side-by-side boxplots, comparing Babe Ruth and Mark McGwire's home-run numbers each season (across 15 seasons) of playing Major League Baseball. In your post do the following:

1) Write a few sentences describing the distributions (be sure to discuss shape, center, spread and outliers, if any).

2) Summarize the similarities and differences in their performance (give your best estimate of important characteristics realizing that you are "eyeballing" the numbers from the boxplots).

3) Imagine that you had the chance to coach an All-Star team and you had to choose whether to include Babe Ruth or Mark McGwire. Using the statistics to support your decision, tell who you would choose and explain why you would make that decision. (Pretend of course that Babe Ruth is still alive and that all the controversy surrounding Mark McGwire does not exist.)

Explanation / Answer

1) The boxplots of Ruth and McGwire's convey a lot of message. It is clear that the boxplot of McGwire's has more spread compared to that of Ruth. And there are some potential outliers for McGwire's compared to that of Ruth. However the average value for Ruth is bit more than that of McGwire's.

2) After observing the boxplots carefully, it is evident that there are many dissimilarities between the distributions of Ruth and McGwire's. The spread of McGwire's is higher implying less consistent compared to Ruth's. On the other hand, the central point of both the players are different implying one has better average than the other - average of McGwire's is around 39 and that of Ruth around 45. However both the players has some possibility of outliers in the distribution of scores.

3) In case of player selection between McGwire and Ruth, we should choose Ruth. This is because he has better average than McGwire's and with less spread. This means he will be more consistent in his performance compared to McGwire's and this will help the team ultimately.

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