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Tableau MLB Team Dashboard (1901-1909) Is Live

Posted on by kc2519

The first MLB Team Dashboard is available on Tableau Public – Top 20 Teams, 1901-1909. The dashboard provides the data for my Top 20 MLB Teams countdown, which starts today with teams #20 through #16 from the same decade. Here’s a look at the dashboard:

Users can interact with the MLB Team Dashboard 1901-1909 in multiple ways:

  • By inputting a number between 1 and 20, to see the corresponding ranked team
  • By using the dropdown list to update the data in the distribution chart; runs, hits, doubles, and more can be shown at game levels
  • By hovering over any display item to reveal more information about that data point

The dashboard provides a fun, easy way to discover new insights about the top teams of the decade (based on the WAR162 metric).

Future dashboards will be rolled out roughly every two weeks; by early August we’ll have every decade through the 2010s covered. Enjoy using the dashboard, and watch for regular countdown updates.

Welcome to 2022!

Posted on by kc2519

I for one am looking forward to 2022 after a couple of interesting, often challenging years affected my desire to generate interesting analytics and data visualizations. The less said the better – simply excited to get back to updating some existing visuals and adding a host of new ones.

I’ll be doing a lot of work using the Exploratory toolkit which keeps improving by the day. It is simply a great tool for handling large (or small) data sets from start to finish; I especially love it’s data wrangling capabilities.

On the data source side, Retrosheet and the Lahman database will continue to feed my analysis and visuals; none of what I create would be possible without these great resources. Retrosheet data (used for game level and play level detail) is already updated through the 2021 season; part of this year’s plan is to add older years (pre-1955) to my local database. The Lahman data (season level) is typically available around February and I’ll be downloading it to my databases at that time.

Stay tuned for updates throughout 2022 – they should be a lot more frequent than the last two years. Happy New Year!

Recapping 2017

Posted on by kc2519

Observers of this blog will note that posts were scarce in 2017 – in fact this is the only one, and it’s being completed in 2018! This is the result of a variety of causes, including external projects, busy schedules, and focus that was shifted in other, unrelated directions. Still, 2017 was not without its moments.

For starters, I managed to create three data visualization courses for Packt:

Learning Data Visualization

Data Visualization Techniques

Advanced Data Visualization

Retrosheet data for the 2016 and 2017 seasons has also been downloaded, and is in the update process as we speak, which will enable some new visualization work (and perhaps a new book title) in 2018. Soon, annual season data from the Baseball-Databank and Sean Lahman will be available as well.

I’m also in the process of launching a new site at jazzgraphs.com, where I’ll use network visualizations to uncover the complex web of relationships between jazz musicians, labels, and recordings. Posters and a book are in the plans for 2018, so stay tuned.

Wishing all a happy and prosperous 2018, and I promise more content to come this year!