baseball stoopidstats -- 2017 edition, number 4

In an earlier post -- "baseball stoopidstats -- 2017 edition, number 1" -- I presented the results of looking at the cumulative win totals and "games over .500" for every major league baseball franchise, as well as ranking the franchises by win total. In that one file I also grouped franchises by location and by state (or state-like entity).

I have now added to that file, including groupings of the teams by name. All franchises that were "Senators" are now grouped as one. Likewise, all "Orioles." But the "Angels" (1961-2004 and 2017) are separated from the "Angels of Anaheim." It wasn't a whole lot of work to add this to the file, since the data were already included in the file.

FWIW, the file is here.

A word on methodology is called for. In the early days, team nicknames weren't as clearly defined and official as they are now. As a result, there's some subjectivity. I did an end-run around all that by accepting baseball-reference.com's judgement. There have been 119 franchise nicjknames in baseball history, as compared to 115 franchises.

Here are a few fun facts, for what it's worth:

• The name with the most wins is "Giants" (10,981).
• Among team names that are now defunct, "Senators" has the most wins (5,330).
• Among active team names that are part of the American League, "Athletics" is ahead (9,714).
• Among active team names, the one with the fewest wins is "Rays" with 855.
• In 2017:
• "Rangers" passed "Padres" to move into 23rd place.
• "Rockies" passed "Marlins" to move into 29th place.
• "Rays" passed "Colonels" to move into 40th place.