Baseball Is The Best Sport: Statistically Proved

(Disclaimer: only four sports are included, so at most I'm claiming that baseball is the best of the four. A game like golf, where you're not really counting up from zero and trying to get as high as possible, is really impossible to analyze using the technique of this post.)

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine noticed that a basketball team was losing by about sixty points. Well, okay, he appears to have misplaced the tens column by one; he said they were losing by 66 points, but it was actually 56 points. It was the Philadelphia 76ers, losing very badly to the Los Angeles Clippers, on February 9th. They ended up losing 123-78, a margin of a meager 45 points. He was shocked, though, that a professional basketball team could be losing by that kind of margin. (Note that this particular friend is really into sports, all sports actually, and is very knowledgeable about every sport, so his shock and disbelief is pretty meaningful.)

Responding to those comments, I began a statistical analysis of the relationship between average score and variance of score in the four major American team sports: baseball, football, basketball, and hockey. I completed that analysis a few minutes ago. (In between I was doing other things.) There are a number of interesting findings, but I shan't bury the lede: my initial intuition was very much correct that basketball scores vary a lot less in comparison to their average value than those of the other sports. Especially baseball. Baseball has the highest ratio of variance to average. Thus the title. You can see if you think I'm right.