I’m happy to note that the 2019 Game Summary visualization is now complete. This is season 65 in our series of summaries (1955-2019), providing line scores for every game played during the 2019 season. You can filter by starting pitchers, teams, dates, umpires, and much more.
Here’s a screenshot from the 2007 season:
So while you’re waiting for the 2020 season to get underway, check these out to fill your baseball fix – Game Summaries
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The 2018 game summaries have been updated, using data from the Retrosheet project. This is the latest update in a series that goes all the way back to 1954. As a user, you have the ability to filter on a wide array of fields, as seen below:
The summaries provide basic data about every individual game played in a selected season – the line score, winning and losing pitchers, home runs, and much more. Here’s an example:
To have a go at the 2018 summaries, or any other season, go to the Game Summaries page in the portfolio section of this site.
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I’m pleased to announce that the 2018 Retrosheet game log files have been uploaded to the VBP database. This data can be used to create analysis at the game level, with a wide array of data elements, including the following:
This data provides the input for the Game Explorer visualizations on this site, which will be updated shortly to include the 2018 season. If you haven’t seen them previously, the Game Explorers allow users to filter across many data attributes to retrieve specific results. Here’s a screenshot:
The next step is to create the 2018 version of the explorers, adding to the existing files covering the 1955-2017 seasons. I’ll keep you posted as soon as 2018 is available on the site. Thanks for reading!
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Thanks to some unusually cold and rainy weather, I’ve been able to focus on updating both my source databases as well as some of the visualizations built from the data. That’s a roundabout way of saying that the baseball Game Summary exhibits have been updated for both the 2016 & 2017 seasons. They can be found in the portfolio section of the site by following this link.
As a refresher, the baseball game summaries give you a sort of visual box score for every game played in a season, featuring the line score for the game, winning and losing pitchers, attendance, and much more information pertaining to each specific game. The real power comes from the ability to filter results to find all games that match specific criteria.
As you can see, there are many available filter options, right down to who the home plate umpire is for every game.
Here’s a quick illustration of how the filters can be used. We’ll filter 2017 results where Clayton Kershaw was the starting pitcher at home, and gave up 4 home runs (a very rare event!). First, we select Kershaw as the Home Starter, and then we open the Visitor HR filter, and select 4 (there’s just one instance). We can then apply these filters to see at which game this unusual event took place.
Closing the filter window, we see the single game box score returned by our filters:
Ironically, we can see that the Dodgers not only won this game, with Kershaw as the winning pitcher, but that they too hit 4 home runs (Home HR in the box score). We can also see that the Mets struck out 13 times (Visitor SO) and the Dodgers 12 times (Home SO). Must have been a wild day at Dodger Stadium on June 19th for the 43,266 in attendance!
As you can see, a lot of information can be gleaned using just a couple of selections to filter the data. There are nearly endless possibilities for using the filters to return the information that most interests you. So have a look at the game summaries and any other items in the portfolio section. Enjoy, and thanks for reading!
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To say that some of my website visuals were not quite up to date is a massive understatement. The latest version of the Game Summaries covered the 2009 season. The interactive pennant race charts ran through 2011, and the Batting Explorer exhibits end with the 2009 season. Not exactly current in any of these cases, and other examples abound. So what to do about it?
For starters, the underlying data so generously made available from the Retrosheet folks needed to be updated. Portions of this had been done over the last few years, but a bit haphazardly, as I came to find out over the last few days. Some tables were current through 2011, others through 2012 or 2013. In short, they were consistently inconsistent, and certainly not suited to creating the latest versions of the aforementioned visuals.
One of the best aspects of growing older (at least from a data perspective) is accumulating more and more code that makes it a bit less painful to update or repair database tables. I have managed to create and save dozens of code snippets that help me create, insert, update, select, and otherwise manipulate the data into a proper format for consumption by visualization tools. In some cases, this code made the process surprisingly easy, while other cases required dusting off the cobwebs to understand what my code was doing or not doing. In the end, the process worked remarkably swiftly, aided by the periodic Michigan microbrew, resulting in table updates that allowed me to tackle the pennant race and game summary projects, resulting in 23 new baseball graphics created in a 72-hour window.
Et voila, as the French might say, the Visual-Baseball site now has 18 new pennant race charts (3 years times 6 divisions) while the game summaries have five new entries covering the 2010 through 2014 seasons, and they all work as expected. The pennant race charts are built using D3 and NVD3 code atop .json data, while the Game Summary exhibits are created using Simile Exhibit, a semantic browsing tool, also sitting on .json data.
The pennant race charts look like this:
The charts are interactive in several ways – individual teams can be hidden from view, the chart is zoomable, and individual values can be displayed using mouseover capability. You can find the entire portfolio of more than 360 charts here.
Game summary exhibits cover 60 seasons and afford users many filtering options to search for games based on specific criteria – teams, pitchers, runs scored, and so on. Results can be viewed in a tabbed fashion or via a timeline. Here’s an example image:
The entire gallery is located here.
Have fun with both the pennant races and the game summaries, and make sure to check out a few of the other resources in the portfolio section. It feels as though the site is gradually becoming a unique resource for the visual interpretation of baseball data, whether it is in the form of conventional charts or more esoteric views such as the network graphs. Feel free to share any of the information on the site, and tell your friends and colleagues.
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