Ive been working on this for over a year now and I think I’m finally to the point where I’d like to get some opinions on it. This group is made up of smart, data-minded fans, so I figured it would be a decent place to start. My goal was to come up with a visualization that could easily show you the results of the game as well as some details about team and player performance. I keep score when I go to games, so I wanted to be able to discern most of the information I could get from a scorecard from a picture. Here’s the clean version and I’ll post a marked up version in the comments. Each batter is one rectangle and each “ring” of rectangles is an inning (starting from the inside, moving out). If an out is made, the bars turn right and continue on the next side of the ring. If the result of the plate appearance is not an out, the next bar is placed next to the previous one. If the batter eventually scores, a box is drawn around their plate appearance. The color of the bars represents the spot in the batting order occupied by that plate appearance (lightest gray = lead-off, black = 9th spot). Things you can see in this plot: 1. Winning/Losing Teams (count the outlined rectangles, you have the final score) 2. Walks allowed (white dots) 3. Extra base hits allowed (the more double dots, triple dots and diamonds, the more extra base hits) 4. How many pitchers were used and when (new pitchers are marked with a triangle on their first batter faced) 5. Early game vs. late game production (based on how close to center production occurs) 6. 0 out/1 out/2 out production (based on which side of the rings production occurs) 7. Top of the order production vs. bottom of the order production (based on color of rectangles where production occurs) 8. Offensive efficiency (lots of base runners without boxes = plenty of runners left on) Philosophical Choices: 1. As the game progresses, the bars get bigger. This follows the basic premise that as the number of outs remaining dwindles, each plate appearance feels more valuable. 2. I hope this doesnt sound too self-important, but not only do I think this type of plot conveys a lot of information, I think it is very aesthetically pleasing. I purposefully did not use letters, numbers, or colors to keep the look clean. I’m actually thinking about framing some of these for games that I’m sentimentally connected to. I don’t think it’s a stretch to have this hanging on the wall as art. If anybody is curious, I’m using R to pull play-by-play data from baseball-reference and constructing these programmatically. Eventually, I’ll have a website where you can select any game they have this information on and see this type of plot. It’s close to production, but I’m still cleaning it up. In the meantime, if you’d like to see one for a particular game, let me know. This is game 7 of the 2014 WS. Anybody have any opinions? Does anyone see value in something like this? Could you see yourself using these to digest the previous day’s games? Anything you’d like to see added or modified? Thanks for reading my long-winded post.
Posted on: Fri, 09 Jan 2015 17:08:18 +0000
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