Baseball is most likely the sport that utilizes statistics more than any other -- by both fans and those involved in the sport. Statistics have been recorded and published in pro baseball since the creation of pro leagues. This practice was started by cricket enthusiast and "father of baseball" Henry Chadwick in the 1860's (a 1876 example is to the left) and made common to fans in 1951, when researcher Hy Turkin published The Complete Encyclopedia of Baseball. Computers started analyzing baseball stats in 1969 and ever since, data visualizations of this data have become commonplace. Here are a few recent ones that I love:
In 2007, The New York Times published Paths to the Top of the Home Run Charts, a clean interactive visualization of leading home run hitters, plotting performance as a function of age. It is easy to compare the different players and to notice how Barry Bonds was the only player other than Babe Ruth to hit homers steadily regardless of age. This chart made me ponder how many more home runs The Babe might have hit had he not started his career as a non-hitting pitcher!
While not interactive, Flip Flop Fly Ball is a fan-tastic set of baseball graphs and charts. The colors, the typefaces and everything else about them is clean and easy to understand and as posters would make a great addition to any fan's room.
The most exciting recent development in baseball and statistics was featured in a front-page article in the New York Times on July 10. The article, titled With New System, Digital Eyes Will Chart Baseball's Unseen Skills, describes how digital cameras will now record the exact location and speed of the ball and every player on the field during a game, increasing the amount of data available to baseball junkies exponentially.
When baseball managers use this type of data to help their team, they are essentially performing business analytics, a key practice of any successful manager. My friend, Jack Mason, of IBM, explains this further in his recent blog entry.
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