Backyard Baseball 2003

It's a whole new season of great baseball action with the Backyard Kids and real pro players as kids. Backyard Baseball 2003 teams up with Major League Baseball to bring you kid versions of hard-hitting, base-stealing, tough-fielding players. Create the line-up, take the field and direct all of the action. Earn new pitching and batting power-ups and light up the scoreboard!
Customer Review: Pretty sweet.
This game is really good. It's compatible with multiple operating systems, which is why it was appealing to me, and most of all, it's "backyard" style play is very alluring. Just a great product overall.
Customer Review: Backyard Baseball Rocks
I have all the backyard games, I like this one the best.

This is a popular motto in many sports today: baseball, basketball, football, hockey, and more. In all of the previously mentioned sports, the winner is decided by who scores more goals, scores more points, etc. Scoring is the most exciting aspect of a sports game. It excites the crowd. It excites the players. It makes the managers happy. Every score is a general step in the direction of victory. So much emphasis is put on scoring, that defense sometimes goes unnoticed, I believe.

Statistics are tracked in every sport and analyzed deeply by critics of all kind. There are many different forms of offensive statistics: points, home runs, assists, yards gained, etc. In my opinion, these statistics tend to weigh the heaviest on the overall judged skill level of that player. For example, Lebron James and Kobe Bryant are considered two of the best players in the National Basketball Association and they also happen to be two of the top scoring players in the league, and rank highly as well in terms of assists and dunks.

There are very few defensive statistics in modern sports. Blocks, steals, sacks, etc. seem to be the most predominant. However, I feel that there is not much emphasis placed on these skills. It is definitely an upside if a player has great defensive statistics, but I feel like he is overlooked compared to a player with good offensive statistics

Therefore, since personal defensive statistics are overlooked so much, how is defensive ability measured effectively? I think the backbone answer to this question is the amount of runs or points given up by a team. Think about it...good defense should prevent the other team from scoring points, thus allowing your team the better opportunity of outscoring them.

This leads me to my question, and curiosity about the well-known quote and motto previously mentioned. With so much emphasis in sports put on offense and scoring, Does Defense Really Win Championships?

I decided the best way to measure this was to break down the runs or points given up per team in all four major sports (baseball, basketball, football, hockey) and see whether or not there was an actual relationship between team success (amount of wins) and overall defense (in terms of surrendering runs or points).

I decided the best method to do this would be to use a statistical technique that I have learned about and used in cost accounting called 'regression analysis' which provides quantitative measures of precision and reliability, It takes all outliers into consideration and comes up with a value from 0 to 1, called the R-squared value. A scatter plot graph is created in which two variables (in this case the x-variables are runs/points/goals against and the y-variable is the amount of wins) are used to make up the x and y axis. Once the graph is completed the values are entered into software (Microsoft Excel was used in this case) in which the R-squared value can be computed. The closer R-squared is to 1, the higher the relationship between the two variables. Basically an R-squared value of 0.955 would tell me that if a team gives up a small amount of runs/points/goals it will almost definitely have a large amount of wins. On the contrary, if the R-squared value came out to be 0.100 it would mean that if a team gives up a small amount of runs/points/goals it can have any random amount of wins which would be almost totally dependent on factors other than runs/points/goals.

After gathering statistics for all four major sports, I came up with R-squared values as follows: NBA (basketball) 0.293, NHL (hockey) 0.637, NFL (football) 0.528, and MLB (baseball) 0.425. These numbers are all well above zero, but in my opinion, are not close enough to 1 to make a just argument that there is a strong relationship. There is no critical value to compare the r-squared values to in order to come to an educated opinion.

In conclusion, after performing regression analysis on all four major sports, I believe that defense is a major factor in determining the success of a team, but there are many more factors that are needed to be guaranteed success. After saying that, I will stand behind the quote "Defense wins championships". If I were the coach of a professional sports team however, I would not rest my head on defense. A little offense might help too.

Statistics used to perform the regression analysis were obtained from the following web sites:

http://mlb.mlb.com/mlb/standings/index.jsp?ymd=20071001

http://www.nba.com/statistics/sortable_team_statistics/sortable1.html#top

http://www.nfl.com/standings?category=league

http://www.nhl.com/nhl/app?service=page&page=StandingsPage&type=CON