Question 12.2

12.2 Babe Ruth. Here are Babe Ruth’s home run counts for his 22 years in Major League Baseball, arranged in order from smallest to largest:

0 2 3 4 6 11 22 25 29 34 35
41 41 46 46 46 47 49 54 54 59 60

Draw a boxplot of this distribution. How does it compare with those of Barry Bonds and Hank Aaron in Figure 12.2?

12.2

image

The median (38) and the third quartile (47) for Ruth are slightly larger than for Bonds and Aaron. The distribution for Ruth appears more skewed (left-skewed) than for Bonds and Aaron. If one examines Ruth’s career, one finds that he was a pitcher for his first six seasons, and during those seasons, he did not have many plate appearances. Hence, he has six seasons of very low home run counts, resulting in a left-skewed distribution.