A friend of mine has told me on numerous occasions that since 1960 the Yankees have not won a World Series while a Republican was President.  Upon hearing this my Republican friends (both Yankee and Red Sox fans) turn incredulous and say that this is ridiculous.  So I decided to investigate.  To be clear this is in no way shows causality, but just checks the numbers.

The data was easily attainable so it really came down to plotting.

The plot above shows every Yankee win (and loss) since 1960 and the party of the President at the time.  It is clear to see that all nine Yankees World Series wins came while a Democrat inhabited the White House.  The fluctuation plot below shows Yankee wins both before and after 1960 and the complete lack of a block for Republican/Post-1960 simply makes the case.

There are similar plots for the American League after the jump.

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Jared Lander is the Chief Data Scientist of Lander Analytics a New York data science firm, Adjunct Professor at Columbia University, Organizer of the New York Open Statistical Programming meetup and the New York and Washington DC R Conferences and author of R for Everyone.

I’m a few days behind on my posts, so please excuse my tardiness and the slew of posts that should be forthcoming.

A-Rod finally reached 600 homeruns a couple weeks ago.  While that may have relieved pressure on him, now people are looking toward Jeter’s 3,000th hit.  The Wall Street Journal ran a piece predictingthat Jeter should hit the 3,000 mark around June 6th next year.

They looked at his historical numbers and took into account the 27 other players to hit that number and determined that Jeter should get a hit every 3.66 at-bats next season.  I’m not sure what method they used to calculate 3.66, but I would guess some sort of simple average.  Then, based on how many hits he needs (128 at the time of the article), his average number of at-bats per game, the average number of games he plays a season and the Yankees typical schedule, they determined the June 6th date.

I don’t really have much to add other than that this seems like a solid method.  What do the sabermetricians think?  By the way, that looks like an awesome cast.

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Jared Lander is the Chief Data Scientist of Lander Analytics a New York data science firm, Adjunct Professor at Columbia University, Organizer of the New York Open Statistical Programming meetup and the New York and Washington DC R Conferences and author of R for Everyone.