Baseball = Data

WARNING: This post might be uninteresting to non-baseball fans

I sneaked away from Swivel HQ last week to catch a few baseball spring training games and to spend time with some family in Florida.  Going from foggy San Francisco to sunny Florida is always a nice treat and last week was no exception.

We were at the ballpark, in the sun, watching some of the most talented athletes around tune up their skills for the long 6-month Major League Baseball season that starts in just 3 days.  What could be better?  For a data geek like me what makes it better is being surrounded by data: people gathering data, people analyzing data and people talking about data. 

At a baseball game data come flying out of fans' mouths quicker than a 100 mph fastball: 'that guy only hit .253 last season, he's a bum', 'his ERA has been under 3.0 for the last 5 seasons', 'this guy had 100 RBI last season and is only getting started', and so on.  For many baseball fans, the numbers are the thing.

There are many folks and organizations that do fantastic work with baseball data.  Yet, just today while surfing around Swivel I found another great baseball data resource: a blog called baseballanalysts.com.  They have an awesome post that uses multi-dimensional scatter plots to analyze a few of my favorites pitchers (the Detroit Tigers are my team).

In fact, we have been working here at the lab on ways to tell stories with data in Swivel that are intuitive and compelling and the crew at baseballanalysts.com has given us a nice example of telling a complex story in an interesting way using graphs, raw data and prose.  Kudos!

Comments

[Sara Wood]

Spring training? I thought it was for Disney Land. It is all starting to make sense now...

[Brian Mulloy]

well ...it was a multi-purpose getaway (blush). Disney was part of it: the Atlanta Braves have spring training camp at Disney's Wide World of Sports Complex. :~)

[college baseball]

Even though the two leagues have been historically separate, that distinction has all but disappeared. In 1903, the two leagues began to meet in an end-of-year championship series called the World Series.