Finally, thanks to the brilliance of the CartoDB platform and abetted by the beautiful Stamen Design watercolors theme, I have a map that tracks the debut of thousands of major league ballplayers from 1871 to 2013 (2014 data will be added at a future date). This is one I’ve been cooking up for awhile, but couldn’t get to as a top priority, given that it required some late night time fixing geo codes for hundreds of towns in places like the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Japan, and Venezuela. All that was finally completed, giving me a dataset with a high degree of integrity – probably 99% accurate.
Have a look at the finished map – going to full screen mode will let you appreciate it even more:
This is the first in what could become a series, as the same information could be displayed in a variety of other formats such as bubbles, choropleth (filled maps), or clusters.
What to say about CartoDB? It’s absolutely brilliant in both concept and execution, and the founders seem willing to make strategic modifications on the fly. For now, I’m working with the free version (limited data capacity), but in time, may want to step up, given the capabilities of the software.
Here’s a look at what I’m talking about, so you can get a feel for the user interface – very clean and easy to navigate. First, the entire window for the current project:

CSS styling is also available for those wishing to tweak their maps, with the wizards providing the initial styling:

You can even limit your data using the available SQL window, a great option for users (like myself) who are well acquainted with SQL:

Finally, a simple toggle at the top of the window lets you move seamlesly between the map and data views. Here’s a quick look at the data for this project:

I should mention that working with the data is just as easy as styling the map or using the wizards. I have been able to quickly change string values to dates, and to geo-reference the data using the latitude and longitude fields in my text file. Anyone with experience working with Excel or any number of database platforms knows that converting field types is often very challenging, and sometimes comes with the risk of losing the data in that field. Not so with CartoDB, as it easily converted the date values to timestamps suitable for the torque (timeline) mapping wizard.
You should be seeing more work from me using CartoDB, and it won’t be limited to just baseball data.



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