My Work – Coffee Spoons

Revisiting My 2025 Red Sox Predictions

Back in March I posted my predictions for the 2025 Boston Red Sox on my social media feeds. I chose not to post it here, because the images had no real data visualisation and the only real information graphic was my prediction of the playoffs via a bracket. I did, however, write about how the Sox may have found their second baseman of the future in Kristian Campbell.

That prediction looks not so hot. The Sox optioned/demoted Campbell to the minor leagues in June and he has not been seen in Boston since. I still think the kid has long-term potential with his bat, but his globe worries me. It never really came around as I hoped.

But what about all my other predictions for the 2025 Red Sox and baseball more broadly?

Well, since today is Day One of the Postseason, I have nothing to report other than that my prediction of a Red Sox–Phillies World Series wherein Boston wins remains possible. Though the bracket itself, not so much. And as for the awards, we still have to wait and see on those too. The rest of the graphics, which had my predictions for select players and statistics, well, those we can look at here today.

We can start with the divisional standings.

The AL East turned out pretty differently than I thought it would. Baltimore’s young prospects did not have a great year and their rotation was even worse than I thought it would be—and that was not very good, I just thought their young bats would make up the difference.

Similarly, I thought the Yankees would fail to survive some bad injuries to start the year. Unfortunately they did and they host the Red Sox this evening in the Wild Card series.

Toronto finally put it all together after years of failing to do so and Tampa Bay did the opposite, had a bad year where everything fell apart after years of finding a way to put it all together.

In the NL East, the Braves just got hurt and never recovered. But that they were worse than even the Marlins in Miami surprised me. Without Atlanta atop the division, the Phillies and Mets made sense and in that micro-ranking I was spot on.

The West Coast divisions were similarly jumbled. I really thought Texas would dominate, but injuries and poor performances crippled their year. I had thought Houston lost too many big pieces from their roster to remain competitive. And in that I was largely correct as they sputtered out in the final week. As for the Angels and Athletics, the less said about them the better.

The NL West largely went as I expected. The Dodgers did not really dominate the way I and many others expected them to, but they performed well enough to win the division. I thought Arizona, San Diego, and San Francisco would slug it out all year and they largely did, though San Francisco was a bit more disappointing than I thought. And the Rockies were just bad.

As for the two central divisions, what can I say? No notes.

Ultimately I thought Boston would be a better than they were at year’s end. Though they dealt with serious injuries all year and the kids were forced to come up and reinforce the roster a bit too soon then they too all got hurt.

So let us start with the hitters.

The big, glaring, obvious point here is that in the middle of the season, the Boston Red Sox traded away their best player, at least their best hitter, in Rafael Devers. I thought then it was a stupid move. I think now it was a stupid move. In a few years, if I were a betting man, I would bet I still think it a stupid move. Boy did they really miss his bat in this lineup, especially when Roman Anthony, one of the aforementioned kids, went down with a month and a half left to play in the season.

Triston Casas fully ruptured his patellar tendon before he even played 30 games when I and many others counted on him to be our slugging first baseman. Instead of 35 home runs, he hit only 3.

Alex Bregman was hurt for about two months and Trevor Story was ice cold for about the same. Campbell was demoted like I said and Roman Anthony’s callup was later than I thought it would be and then he got hurt. Only Duran really performed as I expected.

The team also started the year running and being aggressive on the base paths, but that stopped during the summer. David Hamilton had an awful season and through the middle months was playing in AAA, only returning to the major league club because of the injuries ripping through Boston’s roster.

As for the two rookies I thought would play. most of the year, Campbell’s triple slash fell short of my predictions. Hence his demotion. Roman Anthony’s bat exceeded my expectations, though he was hitting more grounders and ground ball singles than I would have hoped, leading to a lower slugging percentage.

Finally we have the pitching.

Good lord did things go horribly awry.

Houck was bad then blew out his elbow and had Tommy John surgery, meaning he missed 2/3 of this season and will miss all of next year.

I never wanted Buehler, but thought he would be even more serviceable than he turned out to be. He was just awful. Of the expected rotation, that left just three guys: Garrett Crochet, Brayan Bello, and Lucas Giolito.

Crochet was as advertised, a true ace. He led the American League in innings pitched and all of baseball in strikeouts. He dominated. Period. Bello started the year injured as did Giolito, so whislt Bello did eventually hit the innings I expected him to, Giolito did not. Nor did either player reach the strikeout totals I thought they would, though with Bello that may be more due to a change in approach. It seemed as if last year the Sox wanted him to be a strikeout guy. He has shown flashes of it in the past. But this year he really seemed to buy into the ground ball and weak contact guy.

Then in the bullpen and in the ninth inning Aroldis Chapman was just as dominant as Crochet was at the start. Unfortunately, Justin Slaten had some elbow issues with some kind of a bone spur and he missed significant time. Though in his limited innings he looked as dominant as I hoped. Fortunately he just came back in time for the playoffs.

All in all, a good year for the Red Sox.

As for what happens next, well this time I will leave you with my playoff predictions, though I have edited them to actually include the teams that really did make them.

Let’s go Red Sox.

Credit for the pieces is mine.

2025 Red Sox Draft Breakdown

Monday and Tuesday, Major League Baseball conducted its amateur player draft, wherein teams select American university and high school players. They have two weeks to sign them and assign them. (Though many will not actually play this year.)

Two years ago the Red Sox installed Craig Breslow as their new chief baseball organisation. He has cut a number of front office personnel and reorganised the Red Sox front office, leading to a number of departures. Crucially for this context, a number of the scouts who identified key Red Sox players like Roman Anthony were either let go or left. The team then focused on analysts and models.

My questions have thus been focused on how this might change the Red Sox’ approach to the draft. A running joke in Sox circles has been how every year the Red Sox draft a high school shortstop from California. But this year, the Red Sox’ first pick was Kyson Witherspoon, a starting pitcher from Oklahoma.

The graphic above shows how Witherspoon was ranked by the media who covers this niche area of baseball: a consensus top-10 pick. And yet the Sox selected Witherspoon at no. 15 overall. This has been another trend of the Sox over the last several years, where other teams select lower-ranked players and leave higher-ranked players available to the Sox and other mid-round selectors. Similarly, fourth-round pick Anthony Eyanson, ranked roughly 40–65, remained on the board and so the Sox took him at no. 87.

As someone who follows the Sox system, they need quality pitching prospects as they have very few of proven track records in the minors. Witherspoon and Eyanson provide them that, at least the quality, the track records have yet to develop. Marcus Phillips, seemingly, presents more of a lottery ticket. His ranking spread so far, from 13 to 98, it is clear there is no consensus on the type of talent the Sox took in him.

Godbout is a middle-infielder with a good hit tool, but light on the power. Clearly the Sox believe they can work with him to develop the power in the next few years. But all in all, three pitchers in the first four rounds.

Now, the additional context for the non-baseball fans amongst you who are still reading is this. Baseball’s draft does not work in the same way as those of, say the NFL or the NBA. One, the draft is much deeper at 20 rounds. (In my lifetime it used to be as deep as 50.) Two, teams (usually) do not draft for need. I.e., unlike the NFL where a team , say the Patriots, who needs a wide receiver might draft a wide receiver with their first pick, a team like the Red Sox who need, say, a catcher will not draft a catcher. A key reason why, it takes years for an MLB draftee to reach the majors if he does so at all. Whereas an NFL draftee likely plays for the Patriots the following year. In short, there is often a lag between the draft and the debut—unless you are the Los Angeles Angels. Thus you address your current positional needs via free agency or trades, not the draft. (Unless you are the Angels.) For the purposes of the draft, you therefore draft the “best player available” (BPA).

Some systems, however, are just better at doing different things. Some teams do a better job of developing pitchers, others of developing hitters. Some of developing certain traits of pitching or hitting. Some teams are just bad at it overall. The Sox have, of late, been very good at developing position players/hitters. They have been pretty not-so-great at developing pitching. Hence, when Breslow said he could improve their pitching pipeline, the Sox jumped at the chance to hire him. (It also helps everyone else they interviewed said no, and a number of candidates declined to even be interviewed.)

In part, the failure to develop pitching could be a failure to identify the correct player traits or characteristics. It could be the wrong methods and strategies, improper techniques and technologies. But, if we look at the recent history of Red Sox drafts, it could be, in part, also a consistent lack of drafting pitching. After all, the 26-man MLB team roster comprises 14 pitchers and 12 position players. (Technically it is a limit of 14 pitchers, but teams seem to generally max out their pitcher limit.)

You can see in my graphic above, since the late 2000s, the Red Sox, with few exceptions, ever drafted more than 50% pitchers. This period of time coincides with the ascendance of the vaunted Sox position player development factory and the decline of the homegrown starter. (Again, the obligatory reminder correlation is not causation.)

Nevertheless, in the last few years, we have seen the drafting of pitchers spike. In the first two years of the new Breslow regime, pitchers represent more than 70% of the amateur draft. (There is also the international signing period where players from around the world can be signed within limits. This is how the Sox have drafted very talented players like Rafael Devers and Xander Bogaerts. I omitted this talent acquisition channel from the graphics.)

Consequently, when a team states its strategy is to draft the BPA, but over 70% of all players selected are pitchers, I wonder how one defines “best”. Are the Red Sox weighing pitching more heavily than hitting? Is this an attempt to address a long-standing asymmetry in talent? In the models teams like the Red Sox use, are pitchers worth, say, 1.5× more than hitters? I doubt we will ever know the answer, though the team maintains they draft the best player available.

Ultimately, it may matter very little for the Red Sox in the near-term. The sport’s best prospect, Roman Anthony, is just starting to man the outfield for the Sox. A consensus top-10 prospect, Marcelo Mayer, has also just debuted. A top-25 prospect, Kristian Campbell, debuted on Opening Day. Two second-year players round out the outfield in Ceddanne Rafaela and Wilyer Abreu. A rookie catcher is behind the plate. The Sox may not need serious high-end positional player talent in the next 3–5 years. (Though it certainly helps when trying to trade for other pieces.)

But a two-year lull in drafting high-end positional player talent, on top of the previous two years’ first-round draft picks, catcher Kyle Teal and outfielder Braden Montgomery, being traded for ace Garrett Crochet, means the Sox may well have a several-year gap in positional player matriculation to the majors. That might matter.

Baseball, unlike the NFL and the NBA, is a marathon, however. So perhaps this is all a tempest in a teapot. Let us check back in five years’ time and we can see whether this new draft strategy, if it is indeed a strategy, has cost the Red Sox anything.

Credit for the pieces is mine.

Living Longer by the Generations

Last weekend was Easter—for both the Catholics and the Orthodox—and I visited the Appalachian ancestral home of the Carpatho–Rusyn side of my family. Before leaving town I drove up to the old cemetery on a hill overlooking the old church and the Juniata River to pay my respects to those who came before me and without whom I would not be here.

At the end of the four-hour drive back to Philadelphia, stuck in traffic on the Schuylkill Expressway because of course, I realised I had never really looked holistically at the causes of death of my direct ancestors. Earlier this week I spent some time putting that together and then, of course, I realised I wanted to see if I could find any patterns in the data. So of course I made a chart.

If we go back a couple of generations, you can see my ancestors lived to a median age of their mid-60s. But by the time of my grandparents that has increased to almost 80. Of course, the sample size is far smaller for grandparents than great-great-great-&c.-grandparents. Nonetheless, the general trend of the median line is upward.

A few exceptions pull those lines in both directions, however. Catherine Sexton died at the age of 35 from heart disease and James Scollon in the same generation died at 36 from typhoid fever. Additionally, that generation includes a few ancestors who remained in present-day Slovakia in what was one of the most impoverished areas of Europe. Not surprisingly they died in their 40s and 50s. If I exclude those people, the average shoots back up to about 70.

I also decided to colour the minimums and maximums by gender, because as you can see there is a broad pattern of longer-lived women and men who died young. I want to dig more into that aspect of the demographics at a later date to see if that trend holds. I suspect it would because that is the historical trend, but you never know.

Credit for the piece is mine.

Happy Liberation Day

Yesterday I created a map detailing the new tariff rates released by President Trump on Wednesday. I was inspired by the curious inclusion of several small territories with almost no trade with the United States, and a few of whom are uninhabited. What follows is the graphic and the accompanying text I wrote as I wrote it.

I say that only because some people have not entirely caught the…let’s say tone with which I wrote.

All hail the new tariffs. Very obviously, foreign governments will be paying us lots of cash money. Places like Lesotho, with its so-called high rates of poverty, AIDS, and under-development, are clearly just fronts for the rich. Because their tariffs on us are turning them into the richest, most luxurious places on Earth.

Now I don’t know for sure, but some people say the shithole places like Nambia are really cash cows. Nerds tell me places like Nambia don’t exist, but their just idiots looking in the wrong wardrobe. Genius-level intellects like me can easily find Nambia on a map.

There are some very bad ombres out there, and I’m looking at you, Señor Diego Garcia. Some say you’re a thug with bad tattoos whom we should disappear to a secret black site. But the nerds keep telling me you’re not a person, just an island. That you’re not an illegal alien, but a British island where no civilians live, just US soldiers on a secret military base. But we need that money to pay for all the tax cuts for the rich. So we’ll just make our troops there pay Señor Garcia’s tariffs until he stops being lazy and pays us.

Then I’m looking at places like Christmas Island. That Santa Claus is really a bad guy. I know some of you like him—I like him too; he was good to me when I was a child. But all he does is export toys and joys. And that needs to be taxed. So I need Christmas Island to give us all their very real Christmas money.

Finally, I’m looking at Heard Island and McDonald Islands who’re trying to hide near the Antarctic Circle with all the other bad guys and their fortresses of solitude and vaults of swimmable coins. Sure, those nerds keep telling me these islands are uninhabited. But Amber Heard and Ronald McDonald are real people, in league with the Hamburgler, stealing all our rightful American money. The nerds say the islands are only inhabited by penguins. So if you want to say that Amber and Ronald are really just penguins, then we’re going to get all our sweet tariff money from the so-called penguins. Some of whom are emperors. Can you believe that? Emperor penguins? Emperors are rich. So we need to liberate those penguin dollars from the penguin monarchy.

Credit for the piece is mine.

The Red Sox May Finally Have a Second Baseman

Last week was baseball’s opening day. And so on the socials I released my predictions for the season and then a look at the revolving door that has been the Red Sox and second base since 2017.

Back in 2017 we were in the 11th year of Dustin Pedroia being the Sox’ star second baseman. That summer, Manny Machado slid spikes up into second and ruined Pedroia’s knee. Pedroia had surgery and missed Opening Day 2018 then struggled to return. He played 105 games in 2017 then only three in 2018 and then six in 2019. And thus began the instability. Here’s a list of the Opening Day second baseman since 2017.

2018 Eduardo Nuñez
2019 Eduardo Nuñez
2020 José Peraza
2021 Kiké Hernández
2022 Trevor Story
2023 Christian Arroyo
2024 Enmanuel Valdez
2025 Kristian Campbell

And, again, by comparison…

2007 Dustin Pedroia
2008 Dustin Pedroia
2009 Dustin Pedroia
2010 Dustin Pedroia
2011 Dustin Pedroia
2012 Dustin Pedroia
2013 Dustin Pedroia
2014 Dustin Pedroia
2015 Dustin Pedroia
2016 Dustin Pedroia
2017 Dustin Pedroia

But not only is it a lack of stability, it is a lack of production. Wins Above Replacement (WAR) is a statistic that attempts to capture a player’s value relative to an “average” player or substitute. A below replacement level person is less than 0 WAR. A substitute is 0–2, a regular everyday players is 2–5, an All Star is 5–8, and an elite MVP level performance is 8+ WAR. And, spoiler, the Sox have not had a 5+ WAR second baseman since Pedroia’s final full season in 2016.

Suffice it to say, the Sox have long had a need for a long-term second baseman. The graphics I created were meant to be two Instagram images in the same post, and so the the axis labels and lines stretch across the artboards.

The graphic shows pretty clearly the turmoil at the keystone. The two outliers are Kiké Hernández in 2021 and Trevor Story in 2022. The latter is easily explained. Story was signed to be the backup plan in case shortstop Xander Bogaerts left after 2022. (Back in 2013 I made a graphic after a similar revolving door of shortstops in the eight years after the Red Sox traded Nomar Garciaparra. Then the question was, would a young rookie named Xander Bogaerts be the replacement for the beloved Nomah. Xander played 10 years for the Sox.)

Kiké, however, is a bit trickier to explain. WAR weights value by position. A second baseman is worth more than a leftfielder. But shortstops and centrefielders are worth more than second baseman. And Kiké played a lot more shortstop and centre than he did second base, which likely explains his 4.9 WAR that season.

And so now in 2025 we had yet another guy starting at second. His name? Kristian Campbell. I saw him a few times last year as he rocketed from A to AAA, the lowest to highest levels of minor league player development below the major league. I thought he looked good and so did the professionals, because he’s a consensus top-10 prospect in the sport.

Going into Monday’s matchup between Boston and Baltimore, Campbell is hitting 6 for 14 with one homer and two doubles, an on-base percentage of .500 and an OPS (on-base plus slugging, which weights extra base hits more heavily than singles) of 1.286. Spoiler: that’s very good.

Boston beat writers are reporting the Sox and Campbell’s agent are in talks for a long-term extension.

It looks like the Sox may have found their new long-term second baseman.

Credit for the piece is mine.

My Irish Heritage

This week began with Saint Patrick’s Day, a day that here in the States celebrates Ireland and Irish heritage. And I have an abundance of that. As we saw in a post earlier this year about some new genetic ancestry results, Ireland accounts for approximately 2/3 of my ancestry. But as many of my readers know, actual records-based genealogy is one of my big hobbies and so for this Saint Patrick’s Day, I decided to create a few graphics to capture all my current research on my family’s Irish heritage.

In the current political climate wherein we hyperfixate on immigration, I started with my ancestors’ immigration to North America.

My graphic features a timeline marking when certain ancestors arrived, with the massive caveat I do not know when all my Irish ancestors arrived. I separate the ancestors into paternal and maternal lines. My maternal lines are only half Irish, and unfortunately most of them offer little in terms of early records or origins and so the bulk of the graphic lands on my paternal lines.

I did sort out that two–four lines began in Canada and included them with orange dots. (The one couple married in Ireland shortly before setting sail for Canada. The other two lines married in Canada.) I also added a grey bar representing the length of the Great Famine. I suspect a number of my ancestors arrived during the famine based on the fact they begin to appear in the records around 1850, but sadly none of those records state when they arrived specifically instead they just appear in the United States.

I also used filled vs. open dots to indicate whether or not I had primary source documents for arrivals. I.e., a passenger manifest, naturalisation papers, &c. that specifically details immigration information weighs more heavily as evidence than, say, a census record wherein a respondent can say he or she arrived in such a year. (Spoiler, census records are not infallible.)

The overall takeaway, most of my Irish immigrants, for whom I have information, arrived in the middle of the 19th century within a decade of the Great Famine.

The second graphic features even more difficult data to find. Whence did my ancestors come?

For those unfamiliar with Irish genealogy, finding the town or parish from which your ancestors hailed can be nigh impossible. To start, you need some kind of American-based record that gives you a clue as to where in Ireland to look—a county or city. From my experience, most records simply state places of birth as “Ireland”—not very helpful.

Then if you can get back to Ireland, the typical resource you might use in the United States, United Kingdom, and other countries is the census. And Ireland did record a census every ten years, beginning in 1821. Unfortunately 1861 and 1871 were destroyed shortly after the data was recorded. Then during World War I, the 1881 and 1891 censuses were pulped due to a paper shortage. Then in 1921, there was no census because of the whole Irish Civil War thing. Finally in 1922, during the Battle of Dublin in the whole Irish Civil War thing, the Public Records Office at the Four Courts, which held government records dating back hundreds of years as well as guns and ammunition, was blown up. And with the ammunition, so too was blown up the census records for 1821, 1831, 1841, and 1851. In short, genealogists only have access to census records for 1901 and 1911. (The 1926 census organised post-Civil War, does not become public until 2027.)

Then you have the whole unavailability of Catholic Church records, which is another long discussion about the conflict between Protestants and Catholics in Ireland. (Just a minor thing in Irish history.)

There are some civil public records available and they begin in the mid-19th century, which in many cases is just a bit too late for genealogical purposes.

Suffice it to say, Irish genealogy can be tricky and in 15 years of researching it myself, I have only been able to find the origins of 10 Irish immigrant ancestors. For context, to the best of my knowledge I have 18 Irish immigrant ancestors. Thus that map is very empty.

The second map of the United States and United Kingdom is more complete because more complete records. It maps the residences of my Irish and Irish-American ancestors. Initially I attempted to link all the towns and cities with arrows to show the migration patterns, alas it quickly became a mess at such a small scale. That remains a project for another day.

My Irish heritage is a thing of which I am proud, and I am glad to say my genealogy hobby has allowed me to explore it much more deeply and richly than a green-dyed pint would allow.

Credit for the pieces is mine.

A Refreshed Look at My Ethnic Heritage

Late last week I received an update on my ethnic breakdown from My Heritage, a competitor of Ancestry.com and other genealogy/family history/genetic ancestry companies. For many years, the genealogical community had been waiting for this long-promised update. And it has finally arrived.

For my money, My Heritage’s older analysis, v0.95, did not align with my historical record research—something I have done for almost 15 years now. That DNA analysis painted me with an 85% heritage of Irish, Scottish, and Welsh. Because I have spent a decade and a half researching my ancestors, I know all of my second-great-grandparents, 16 total. 85% means 13–14 of them would be Irish, Scottish, or Welsh. However, four of them are Carpatho-Rusyns from present day eastern Slovakia. And nowhere in my research have I found any connection to the Baltic states or Finland.

Compare that to the update.

Here we have a drastically reduced Irish component that, importantly, has been split from Scottish and Welsh, which now exists as its own genetic group. The East European group appears too low, but perhaps My Heritage identified some of my Slavic ancestry as Balkan—there is a sizeable Carpatho-Rusyn community in Vojvodina, an autonomous oblast in Serbia. Maybe Germanic too? That would start to push it near to 20%.

I do have English ancestry—my Angophilia must come from somewhere—though it is relatively small and I can trace it to the Medieval period. That includes more of the Norman elite than the Anglo-Saxon plebs and so seeing Breton register could be indicative of that Norman/Anglo-Saxon population mixture.

But how does My Heritage results compare to those provided by Ancestry and FamilyTreeDNA, two competitors whose services I have also used. And how does it compare to my actual historical document research?

My Heritage’s newest analysis certainly hits a lot better and is nearer to Ancestry, which aligns best with my research. I do have two questions for my second-great-grandparents. One surrounds Nathaniel Miller, one of whose grandparents (Eliza Garrotson) may not be English but rather Dutch from the Dutch colonisation of the Hudson River Valley in New York south of Albany.

The other question revolves around William Doyle. His mother is identified in the records variously as English and Irish. A family story on that side of the family also suggests one ancestor of English descent. And finally, a recently discovered marriage record for his parents details how his mother (Martha Atkins) was baptised and converted to Catholicism as an adult prior to her marriage. Not all Irish are Catholic, but the vast majority are and that would also suggest Martha was not Irish.

Taking those two questions into account, I have a small range of expected values for my English ancestry and a slightly larger one for my Irish and you can see those in the graphic.

When you compare that to the My Heritage results alongside the Ancestry and FamilyTreeDNA results you can see Ancestry aligns best with my research whereas FamilyTreeDNA aligns the least. My Heritage now falls squarely between the two. And so I consider their update a success. I think the company still has some work to do, but progress is progress.

Credit for the pieces is mine.

For Whom the Teamsters Poll Tolls

The Teamsters Union decided to officially endorse neither candidate in the 2024 US presidential election. Prior to their non-announcement announcement, however, the union surveyed its members and then released the polling data ahead of the announcement.

Of course, the teamsters represent but a single union in a large and diverse country. More importantly, the survey results reported only the share of responses for either candidate—and “Other”—so we have no idea how many of what number opted for whom. But hey, it’s another talking point in the final six weeks of the campaign.

Naturally, I decided to visualise the data.

The trend is pretty, pretty clear. The union’s rank-and-file clearly support Trump for president, with the exception of the teamsters in the District of Columbia. (Note, no survey was taken in Wyoming.) In fact, in only eight states plus DC did Harris’ support top 40%.

Credit for the piece is mine.

Three-dimensional Charts Are Back, Baby

I thought three-dimensional charts died back in the 2010s. Alas, here we are in 2024 and I have to discuss one once again. have been following the Titan Inquiry this week and the opening presentation included this gem of data visualisation.

To be fair, I do not know how many designers, let alone specialist information designers, the US Coast Guard had or made available to create a clear and compelling chart and presentation, but…this is not it. First I will go through a number of points and then, when I had written about half of the post this morning, I decided it would simply be easier to put a white box over the main chart area and just recreate the graphic myself.

Unfortunately, after digging around, I could not find the actual dive depth data the Coast Guard used and so I essentially traced out the chart by hand. Not ideal, but for proof of concept as to how this chart could have been improved…I think my reinterpretation ssuffices.

To start, the chart sits on the slide with a drop shadow. Drop shadows are not all bad. They create perceived depth between an object and it’s background. The interwebs love them. I have used them. But I do not understand why here the chart needs a drop shadow to sit on the slide. Especially since the shadow pushes the chart “above” the deck, only for the three-dimensional bar chart to push the data “below” the chart’s surface, which means the chart data is being represented on the slide surface.

Deep breath.

The chart background features some kind of coloured gradient that became pixellated upon export and import into the PowerPoint deck.

The type was too small that it too became pixellated and grainy to the point that the dive labels are illegible. I would argue labelling each dive beyond its number is unnecessary in the context of Titan’s final dive, but without having listened to the presentation I cannot say for certain.

Next we have the third-dimension. It adds nothing and creates more coloured areas—because the dimension is fake, this a two-dimensional representation of three dimensions—that distract the eye from the important dimension, the length of the bar.

After that, we can look at the axis labels. First, there are far too many. Second, the maximum depth labelling makes no sense. Sometimes, if a line or a bar exceeds the chart maximum once or twice by a small amount, you can let it poke above the top—in this case bottom—line. If you know the rules, you know when you can break the rules. Here, however, the maximum label is 3800 metres.

But Titanic rests at 3840. Ergo 13 different measurements will need to sit below the chart’s maximum—minimum, technically—axis line.

Deep breath.

If she rests at 3840 metres, just add 60 to the chart minimum and you will ahve a final axis label of 3900 metres. Look carefully, however, and you will see in the bottom left how after the final white line, the chart keeps going. Clearly, the designers knew the chart needed more space. This unlabelled minimum is probably 3900 metres given the 100-metre increments used throughout.

But, however, if you add 160 metres to the chart you have a nice, round, divisible number of 4000, which means you do not need to mark the depths in 100-metre increments. It means all the bars sit within the chart. It means fewer pixels on the slide to distract the eyes. (Especially if you drop the background colour.)

Furthermore, if you look carefully at the green boxes, which represent successful dives to Titanic, you can see how the bars break the dimensional rules and are actually flat two-dimensional bars. Perhaps this was only noticeable to me as I worked off the downloaded file at a high-level of zoom to try and figure out the depths as precisely as possible. Or perhaps it is an artifact of the pixellated export of the graphic. If the latter, more of a reason not to make the thing a three-dimensional bar chart.

Then we can get to the colours.

Deep breath.

To start, red-green colour blindness is a thing. I harp on this often and so I will not rehash everything here. No, it does not mean all green and red combinations will not work, one just needs to be careful with them. This one comes pretty close to not working so I would have avoided it.

Secondly, just look at the red. I mean, how can you not. It is very bright and draws your eye almost immediately to all those red bars, particularly the one nearly a fifth of the way in from the right edge. That one is next to one of the successful Titanic dives. My first thought? Oh, that was the final dive. Wrong.

Red means non-Titanic dives. Again, I have not listened to the presentation, but these would presumably be dives of relatively less importance than the Titanic dives. I would not have made the less important dives the one colour that stands out the most.

If you want to go green represents successful Titanic dives and red represents unsuccessful Titanic dives, that makes sense. I can understand the design decision. (Though you would still need to ensure the shades work with each other.) In that case maybe the blue bars represent non-Titanic dives.

Instead, here blue represents unsuccessful dives to Titanic, which of course means the final dive, which of course includes the inquiry’s raison d’être. Not only that, the chart’s background is also blue, which makes visually separating the bars from the background more difficult. This is particularly true at the sides of the chart where the gradient leaves the darker blue.

Finally we have a little orange box with some tiny type pointing out the final dive’s depth. That bit, more visible than the green and orange bars, was still lost to me behind the red bars.

And breathe.

All in all, a mess.

As I noted at the top, halfway through I decided this was such a mess I would prefer just to show how the chart could have been designed. It took a little over an hour to make the chart. Clearly I do not have the chart style guidelines for the Coast Guard, so I just chose a typeface I think worked and then picked some reasonable colours from the deck.

Call me biased, but my design substantially improves the chart. First, you can read the text. Second, the colours fit the brand, do not distract from and in fact highlight the final dive. If I started from scratch, I would prefer to use what looks like the full content area of the PowerPoint slide, but I simply traced over the existing chart. I.e., ideally the chart would have been a little bit taller. I did have to cut out the labels for each dive, but as I stated earlier, they were illegible.

Credit for the original piece goes to the US Coast Guard.

Credit for my reinterpretation goes to me.

Electric Throat Share

For the last few weeks I have been working on my portfolio site as I update things. (Note to self, do not wait another 15 years before embarking upon such an update.)

At the University of the Arts (requiescat in pace), I took an information design class wherein I spent a semester learning about the electricity generation market in the Philadelphia region. This became a key part of my portfolio when I applied for 99 jobs at the beginning of the Great Recession, had 3 interviews, and only 1 job offer.

That job offer lead me to Chicago and Euromonitor International where one of the first projects I worked on was a datagraphic about throat share, i.e. what drinks products/brands people in different countries drank. Essentially, I took what I learned about visualising the share of electricity generation in Pennsylvania to the share of drinks consumption across the world. Thus a career was born. Fast forward 15 years and I wanted to see how that electricity generation had changed. And I can do that because I used a public source in the US Energy Information Administration.

Anecdotally, Pennsylvanians know fracking for natural gas has been a boon to the former coal and steel parts of the Commonwealth, which really is a lifeline. But overall, Pennsylvania has long been known as a nuclear power state. More on that from a personal standpoint in a later post. Back in the uphill both ways to university day, I did not look at the United States overall. But now I can.

Largely this fits with the narratives I know. Coal has plummeted both in the Commonwealth and more broadly as natural gas has largely taken its place. No, that’s not great from a climate change perspective, but natural gas is definitely better than coal.

Renewables, nationally speaking, are now about 20% or 1/5th our net electricity generation. But in Pennsylvania, whilst this Monday morning might be a bright and blue sky day great for solar power, the nights are getting longer and we get a lot of clouds. We do have some hydroelectric dams—it helps to be a partially mountainous state. And, yes, we do have the wind farms along the Allegheny Ridge, one of the windiest spots along the East Coast, but for context one of the two nuclear reactors near to which I grew up is equal to almost the entire wind power electricity generation in the entire Commonwealth.

But for all the supposed growth in renewables, we just are not seeing it in Pennsylvania, at least not at a scale to supplant fossil fuels. And unfortunately, it is not as if demand is falling. And that might be why we are seeing quiet talks about reactivating some of Pennsylvania’s shuttered nuclear reactors. If you could bump that nuclear share of electric throat back up to 40% or even 50%, you could cut down that natural gas usage significantly.

Credit for the piece is mine.