Blogs - Visual-Baseball Project

SABR Presentations Update

Well, the SABR presentations have been delivered, with a generally favorable reception. From here, I hope to see some interest from other members, and to take it beyond the bounds of SABR. The presentations really are the tip of the iceberg - so much more can be done with visualization. The tools are powerful, evolving and improving, and the data is readily available. The next steps...

Pirates 1960 Poster

I'll be sharing a poster presentation on the 1960 Pirates at the SABR national convention in Atlanta beginning 8-4-2010. As many of you know, the Pirates were surprise winners of the 1960 NL pennant and went on to defeat the powerful Yankees in a memorable World Series. My aim with the poster is to condense the Pirates season into a series of visuals that can help viewers to...

ManyEyes

If you haven't already tried it, get yourself over to IBM's ManyEyes project, and sign up for an account. It's a clever site that will help you through creating charts from your own datasets, without having to install any software. The site provides many types of charts, from the usual (bar, pie) to more sophisticated types. The only catch is that you don't want to use...

About the Project

Hello. Ken Cherven here, founder and web developer of the Visual-Baseball Project. Welcome to the site. The following paragraphs summarize my thoughts on the future of baseball analysis, and how the Visual-Baseball Project can help to define that future. Baseball is a game of numbers - line scores, box scores, batting averages, OPS, ERA, and on and on. For many baseball diehards, these...

Why Visualization?

Visualization. Visualization. Visualization. Got it? More visualization in the realm of baseball analysis is clearly the end goal of the Visual-Baseball Project. The question is why we decided to pursue and promote visualization, at the expense of other potentially worthwhile goals. Well, here's a short list of the reasons: Demographics. Visualization is absolutely essential to...

Welcome to the site

Thanks for visiting the new Visual-Baseball Project site, fully re-designed to take advantage of the latest version of Liferay, as well as updating some of the other pieces of the site. First off, I wanted to make sure the site had a better ability to act as a community site, where users can exchange information, files, etc. While Liferay can certainly do some of this, document and file...

About the Project

Baseball is a game of numbers - line scores, box scores, batting averages, OPS, ERA, and on and on. For many baseball diehards, these numbers are second nature, particularly those in the over-50 demographic. After all, we grew up on baseball data presented this way - baseball cards, baseball encyclopedias, and The Sporting News, all providing a wealth of numbers in small font sizes, line by line by line.

Now times have changed. We have the tools available to create all sorts of tables, charts, graphs, and other visually oriented displays. Endless rows of data no longer carry the same weight they once did - younger generations have grown up in a world where graphics (good and bad) are a way of life. Pictures are increasingly used to tell stories, and the traditional rows of data have been relegated to a supporting role, feeding charts and tables.

This is why the Visual-Baseball Project exists. Through the intelligent use of data and graphics, we have the opportunity to shape the way baseball analysis is delivered to the end user. This effort needs to come from a community of passionate baseball analysts, committed to creative displays that maintain the integrity of the data.

We invite you to join the community; you need not be a professional analyst, graphic designer, or statistician to be a part of our efforts.

All we ask for is the desire to see baseball analysis move forward, taking advantage of the wealth of tools available to create visual displays that are both intelligent and esthetically pleasing.

By Ken Cherven 7/1/10