I really do not know much about basketball. I did not realise that the finals had been going on. But, rest assured, they were. The Washington Post looked at whether or not LeBron James had the best finals match performances since 1985. It turns out, not so much. For those of you from the Chicago area, you may instead take solace that one of those guys from that Chicago team represents well.
The top five performances since 1985
Credit for the piece goes to Todd Lindeman and Richard Johnson.
If you did not hear about it the other day, the head of FIFA resigned. That is kind of a big deal because football (in the rest-of-the-world sense of the word) is kind of a big deal. But the organisation that runs it is generally seen as wholly corrupt. So this BBC piece takes a look at the revenue and spending—at least so far as we know about it.
Sort of a Sankey diagram
Credit for the piece goes to the BBC graphics department.
There was an interesting article in Forbes on Monday that looked at baseball’s popularity. In short, the commonly believed argument is that baseball is becoming less popular vs. sports like football, basketball, &c. Hence, one of the reasons for the pace of play changes. However, last Wednesday, there were three nationally televised playoff games—two in basketball and one in hockey—and one nationally televised baseball game, Mets at the Cubs. The logic of the common argument would have non-playoff baseball falling behind the playoff games. But, in 14 of 24 media markets, the local baseball games drew more television viewers than playoff basketball or hockey, or even national baseball games. Unfortunately, the article in question used some really poor graphics to communicate this story. So, I decided to spend my Monday night making it clearer for you. Compare a snippet of the original to mine. You make the call.
The original chartHow the local baseball game did against the national sports games
Credit for the original piece goes to the Forbes graphics department.
I really am only a one sport kind of guy. Basketball is not that sport. However, similar to baseball, it is a sport that plays many games and has many in-game actions, which allows for data collection and analysis. This Washington Post piece looks at the season for some player named Bradley Beal. Ask me to interpret the data, and that’s a different story. But, I am sure it will make sense to you basketball fans out there.
Whence good and bad shots came
Credit for the piece goes to Todd Lindeman and Lazaro Gamio.
Happy Friday, everyone. Foul balls are the souvenirs of fortune at baseball games. (Home runs as well I suppose.) You can’t buy them, you can only hope to be one of the lucky few who catch one. So the Boston Globe ran an article with an integrated interactive piece that told the story of a select few foul balls caught by fans at ten games at Fenway. But from the data visualisation side, they plotted where each foul ball landed. But, the real gem is that they then had a few small multiples showing where various Boston hitters tended to deposit their fouls.
Ten games’ worth of foul balls
Credit for the piece goes to Stan Grossfeld, Rachel G. Bowers, and Luke Knox.
Hitting a baseball is hard. Really, really hard. You’re good at it if you fail 7 out of 10 times. Part of the way you get good at hitting baseballs is by recognising the spin or rotation of the red seams on the white outside of the ball. This article from CBS takes a look at five common pitches and what they look like to the batter.
I have certainly never been able to see these
Credit for the original piece goes to an unknown person, I don’t think it was the article’s author.
For most of us, baseball, the 2015 edition, began yesterday. For the Red Sox, it was an 8–0 victory over the Phillies in which Boston’s Clay Buchholz kept the ball down in the strike zone, where it is tougher for batters to make solid contact. Whereas Cole Hamels of the Phillies kept the ball up in the zone and thereby let the Boston lineup hit four home runs in five innings. (Boston added a fifth, a grand slam, in the ninth inning.)
But low strikes are nothing new. In fact, umpires increasingly have been calling low strikes as seen in this chart by FiveThirtyEight in an article looking at 2015’s trends in baseball. (Interestingly they also chart something on Cole Hamels.) It is not the most complicated chart, but it does serve as a reminder that for the next six months, baseball is back.
Baseball is my sport. I love it. Some of my favourite games are the four-hour long matches between my Red Sox and the scourge of the Earth, the Yankees. Games can take a long time for a number of reasons. But in an increasingly fast-paced world, critics argue that younger generations do not have the patience for even three-hour games. So Major League Baseball this year is actively trying to reduce the time of games through pace-of-play improvements. To do this, they are looking at and collecting more of baseball’s copious amounts of data.
Unfortunately, ESPN in an article about the improvements for this year took the data and did nothing with it.
For the love of god, why?
Above we have survey results. I want to vomit in my mouth. Wait, hold on…sorry about that, I am back now. Some organisations have done some really nice visualisations with baseball data, of which we have a lot because the sport plays 162 games per year. We surely could be looking at more timing data. But, instead we get three-dimensional pie charts from ESPN. The rest of the article is not much better, though their styling of bar charts still leaves things to be desired.
Credit for the piece goes to ESPN’s graphics department.
As we established yesterday, baseball is rumbling back to life with Spring Training. That means it is time to start buying tickets for games. But if, like me, you have never caught a foul ball or home run, you may want to sit in a location where you can optimise your chances. Where is that? Well, now we have an app for that, Ideal Seat, as covered by Time. It uses interactive maps of stadiums and data on where hit balls land to generate an average number of balls per game—an average of about 30 foul balls per game.
To continue with the sports theme from yesterday, today we have an interactive map from Twitter that looks at NFL team popularity. The methodology is simple, where are the users following the various football teams and map that out by county. The overall blog post features a country-wide map, but then narrows down into a few particular stories. The image below is from the divide in the state of Pennsylvania between Eagles fans and Steelers fans.
Philly vs. Pittsburgh
Credit for the piece goes to Simon Rogers and Krist Wongsuphasawat.