The below is an example and is much better viewed in full screen
So for this assignment I knew that I wanted to do something with baseball data. Luckily for me, baseball data is plentiful and easy to access; my go to is Fangraphs.
It’s easy to visualize baseball data but difficult to do so in a way that can be revealing. Anyone can great a histogram of all the HR’s that have been hit in June or by left handed batters, but that data visualization doesn’t really serve to reveal anything. I was curious in how the data can inform me of something that I didn’t know before.
In the past ten years or so, or definitely since the release of the novel and movie Moneyball, the baseball world has been obsessed with sabermetrics which is the application of statistical analysis to baseball. One of the key statistics to come out of the sabermetrics movement has been BABIP which can be described in depth if you click the link in the sketch. For better or worse though, it’s essentially a comparative statistic that reveals how lucky a batter has been in a given stretch. There is a career BABIP that is only created after 1,000 at-bats, and a players more recent numbers are compared to his career numbers to see if he’s getting luckier than usual or not.
This sketch is the beginning of what I hope to be a bigger project which is generating my own Fantasy Baseball draft software. I’d love for users to be able to have these sort of visual comparisons for a lot more fields than just BABIP.