New Vis Work

I've been working all weekend on putting down a solid visualization of baseball games that gives an informative overview of exactly what happened in a game in the least amount of space available. I want to give a variety of ways to view a game in order to get the most out of it, but first and foremost I want to provide a simplified overview of all game events that shows the flow of the game and allows people to see exactly what happened.


I started by trying to classify events and think of how that I can rank them each in a way that will allow me to show them in a linear way that both unifies them per team as well as shows the magnitude of each event. In this idea I thought about the major possible events and ranked them according to the impact they have on the game, form the perspective of the batting team.

Tier 5: Homeruns,
Tier 4: Triples
Tier 3: Doubles
Tier 2: Singles
Tier 1: Walks/Stolen Bases
Tier 0: Outs


I had to revise this several times after experimenting with it, mostly due to issues wtih classifying walks/stolen bases and singles. At first I thought that I could get away with putting them in the same tier, since they all result in the player moving up one base. I then realized that there is a clear difference between the two. While walks and stolen bases both advance the runner towards scoring position on the diamond, singles put the ball in play, which can result in RBIs. Walks can sometimes result in an RBI if the bases are loaded but even this is restricted to one run, while a single can drive in up to three runs.

After coming up with this classification, I began to work on a circular visualization of events that classified them according to a number of criteria. While in concept this made sense to me, in reality it turned out to look somewhat interesting but really show a lot of nothing with a simple look. I also attempted to create an organic shape from this visualization just to see what it looked like, and while this too proved interesting I dont' think it was very successful in showing anything.

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PastedGraphic-1.pdf (95 KB)
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PastedGraphic-2.pdf (39 KB)
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I then moved on to the next logical step, visualizing things linearly. I continued with my key of dashes and colors, and while linearly things made a bit more sense it was still not working very well IMO. I experimented with representing outs as negative events at this point as well but I don't think it read the way I intened.

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PastedGraphic-3.pdf (39 KB)
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PastedGraphic-4.pdf (45 KB)
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At this point I also created a more organic flow diagram from these charts. I think this actually worked out really well and is a great overall representation of the flow of the game. While it doesn't really show exactly what I wanted from the first overall view of the game a user is presented with, I think it is a great sub-view and something that I'm going to continue to investigate

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PastedGraphic-6.pdf (47 KB)
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This is where I realized I was sorta getting caught up in doing the same thing over and over, so I decided to give it a rest and move on the next day.

Today I started working again and had some major breakthroughs. I spent a lot of time working on various visualizations, trying to bring down the amount of data ink used (as per reading Edward Tufte) and began to really simplify everything. I did a lot of different experimenting, and came up with a visualization I think finally works pretty well. I did some quick testing with a few casual baseball fans I know (obviously need to do more user testing but something is better than nothing and I just finished it!) and I was pleased that they could easily recreate the narrative of a game themselves after a very brief explanation which wasn't repeated.

Click here to download:
PastedGraphic-8.pdf (132 KB)
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I then worked on some alternate views for this data, all of which I think could compliment the simple overall view

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PastedGraphic-9.pdf (119 KB)
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PastedGraphic-10.pdf (91 KB)
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PastedGraphic-11.pdf (96 KB)
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All of this needs more work I know, but I put in a crapload of time this weekend and I think that I am definitely making progress. I also worked with a real data set vs just making things up, which was a bit of a pain in the ass at first but really helped me a lot in the long run. I hsould have been working like this before and I'm glad I am doing it now.
Thats it for now, I also did a good amount of work on the otehr sections of the application but I don't feel like they are ready to show yet so that will be another post.

If you read this please check everything out and let me know! I don't know how easy it will be to match things up in line with the way posterous posts images, so if they are in a gallery and not separated I'll also be posting this on my blog (http://www.vargatron.com/blogatron/) so feel free to check it out there

Thanks!

-Steve