What I want/need to visualize

Today I am thinking/planning exactly what I need to come up with visualizations for. I am excited about the vis that i posted the other day, but I want to continue along this path and create a series of these addressing different game aspects before I commit to a couple and carry them out with full interactivity.

First I began by trying to break down what I have and what I can visualize. After considering all aspects of data, I think that my focus will be on visualizing seasons and games. Seasons will be a macro view of 152 games, while individual games will be a micro view of every event that makes up a season. In this regard I am addressing four levels of data:

Season View:
The season overall
The season day to day

Game View:
A game overall
A game pitch by pitch

Within a season view, here are some of the things I would like to show/have thought of:
- Linear progression towards a final record (wins positive, losses negative) showing winning/losing streaks through the season (April to October)
- Home vs Away performace. Did a team play better significantly at home or away? This could be shown in a number of ways and will be interesting to explore.
- Travel. I'd love to explore how a team travelled throughout the season. This has really great visualization potential, and honestly would really interest me to see just how much they are really traveling. Its easy to watch a game on tv and take for granted the amount of actual travel it takes to play games all over the united states over almost 6 full months of basebell, not includign the playoffs.- Standings. Where does that team stand compared to other teams in their division or in the wild card race at any given moment in the season? This would be great to show the actual races that teams were involved in rather than just if they won or lost. This could probably be combined wtih the first vis. Interactivity would be great as well in this vis.
- Stats. Where does the team stand in relation to the rest of the league in stats like Batting Average, On Base Percentage, ERA, etc etc. This would be interesting to see, as these stats are traditionally talked about in terms of players rather than team averages. This would also be another view that would be very interesting to see change over the course of a season.

Here are individual game visualizations I'd like to tackle in some way:
- Continue with showing overall view of full game
- Player rankings in different categories, both combined and per team, showing who performed best and who performed worst.- Pitching views. This I need to really explore, so far I have concentrated more on the viewpoint of the batter, I wonder how different it would be if I switch to the viewpoint of the pitcher. I think that this could be a much more focused, simplified vis that offers a wealth of data. Also could make for a very interesting audio experience if played out.
- Batting Positions vs innings. The vis I posted earlier shows this but I think it would be interesting to explore the patterns that this could be represented by a bit further.
I think this is everything I can come up with right now, I thought today would be good to do a great brain dump since I don't have a lot of time to commit to more intricate graphics work, and I needed to do this anyways. Just putting these down and getting going has allowed me to come up with a lot of things I haven't considered to this point, so I think that it was pretty successful. I could probably come up with more but I think that this list is more than enough to keep me busy for a bit. I'll have to think of how I could express each of these and continue from there in the next coming days. I think tomorrow I will do sketches for each and see where they lead. I also would like to begin to think in terms of expanding this data beyond the screen to a more physical representation, and what this could mean for my thesis.
OK I think thats it, if you read this far all the way through I'm sorry this is more of a conversation with myself than anything else but it helps me a lot.

-Steve