Question

I have a three part question based on a dataframe (df is example rows) of goals scored by soccer players in a season

 Player           Season  Goals
 Teddy Sheringham 1992/3   22
 Les Ferdinand    1992/3   20
 Dean Holdsworth  1992/3   19
 Andy Cole        1993/4   34
 Alan Shearer     1993/4   31
 Chris Sutton     1993/4   25

If I want to obtain the top scorer each year I can use

ddply(df, "Season", summarise, maxGoals = max(Goals),
      Player=Player[which.max(Goals)])

Questions:

1) It does not apply in this case but does this suffice if there are joint top scorers

2) I am also interested in the runner up for each season being extracted. I have played around with sorting on Goals descending and index 2 but have not found solution

3) Also how would I obtain a count value for each year based on number of Goals scored e.g Goals>20 should give 1 for 1992/3 and 3 for 1993/4 on the above data

Answer 1

If there are multiple best players, that expression will report only one of them (specifically, the first in the dataframe in that year).

For q2:

d = ddply(df, "Season", summarise, SecondPlayer=Player[order(Goals)[length(Goals)-1]])

For q3:

d = ddply(df, "Season", summarise, Count=sum(Goals > 20))