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Sports Misery Index #45

Closed spm2164 closed 8 years ago

spm2164 commented 8 years ago

The inspiration for this piece comes from the fact that I'm from Cleveland, and Cleveland just this year won its first major league championship since 1964. Also, from articles like this from ESPN or this from some rando at Forbes where they attempt to track the same thing. They basically assign points to a city based on consecutive team seasons spent without winning their respective championships, and then reset the count to zero whenever any team from a city wins a championship.

My deal with this is that

  1. Not all seasons are created equal. A season in which your team goes to the playoffs is better than a season where your team is in last place. And
  2. Cities with multiple teams do no necessarily have overlapping fan bases. Just because the Cleveland basketball team won the championship, doesn't mean that all misery is dispelled. Football fans that do not care about basketball still have nothing since 1964. This is especially apparent in a city like Chicago with multiple teams in one sport. The Cubs haven't won the World Series in over 100 years but the White Sox last won one in 2005, and Cubs fans are almost never White Sox fans. The total sports misery of the city should still reflect that reality.

My methodology will be similar to ESPN, assigning points to seasons in which teams do not win championships and grouping them by city, and then attempting to increase the sophistication of the results. First, taking into account the contribution of each team in a city to the total city misery, and then adjusting that amount by qualitative measures like made it to playoffs, bottom of the league, etc.

M0nica commented 8 years ago

I think it would be interesting to incorporate losing/winning streaks into calculating how great a team's season is.

palrogg commented 8 years ago

Do you plan to have a column for team salaries or club budgets (if data is available)? Maybe it's too time consuming, but it may allow to do some grouping / plotting...

spm2164 commented 8 years ago

Yeah, if I kept working with this data, I could probably do things like weighted streaks over seasons or even in season, or budgets vs results. Currently, I'm just on the outcome of each season as an aggregate of misery over time.

spm2164 commented 8 years ago

So I came up on a time crunch with this project, as it turned out rather larger than I anticipated. Go figure, parsing the data for all the professional teams in all the professional sports in all the cities for all time wound up being pretty large. Anyway, I have a few things, mainly with baseball, that I can put up by the end of the day. It will be a more finished version of this:

mlb_misery_index

In which I show that the worst MLB team to be a fan of is actually the Philadelphia Phillies, as they have had countless seasons where they are just the absolute worst, and their recent success has only partially scrubbed away this shame. Meanwhile, New York Yankees fans are the most spoiled, and no one was surprised.

playfairbot commented 8 years ago

Hi there, I'm the Playfair Bot! Would you mind posting the appropriate checklist in the main body of your issue? You might have posted it as the first comment, but it turns out it works way better in the actual body of the issue - just go up to the veeery top right and click the pencil icon to edit. You'll probably want to edit the comment to copy the checklist, then edit the original issue to paste it in. Thanks! :pray:

playfairbot commented 8 years ago

Closing since pull request #149 has been accepted