Walls of data will never be fun to read. There is nothing that gets my eyes glazing faster than strings of numbers in an unbroken block of text. No matter how interested I am in the subject, after staring at a certain amount of data I can feel my attention wavering. Ironically, one of my favorite sports is mostly a constant stream of numbers.
Baseball is a very statistics heavy sport. Already slow paced and calculated, the league definitely understands that simply presenting the hundreds of stats they collect over a season is going to limit their audience. Aiming to reach people who aren’t big on numbers or the romanticism of a slow summer sport, they rely heavily on data visualization. Data visualization helps to tell stories by curating data into a form easier to understand, highlighting the trends and outliers. A good visualization tells a story, removing the noise from data and highlighting the useful information.
“Your data is only as good as your ability to understand and communicate it”
via baseballsavant.mlb.com
A common data visualization tool is a chart for batting statistics, which on paper don’t sound like much but when you can see them in the terms of the baseball diamond, you get a better sense of how far these players are hitting these balls and how often they’re doing so. Hit types are recorded and displayed in a A common data visualization tool in baseball is a chart for batting statistics. On paper these stats don’t sound like much, but when you can see them in the terms of the baseball diamond you get a better sense of how far these players are hitting these balls, and also how often they’re doing it. Hit types are recorded and displayed in the above distribution chart. I can read that Aaron Judge has hit four 408-foot home runs and it sounds impressive, but you give me the visual of how far outside the field of play 408 feet is, and the point is really driven home. You can also use the chart to infer what types of hits players usually make, and where the ball usually ends up based on the trends of the data.
via baseballsavant.mlb.com
Another good example of data visualization is this swing/take chart. It gives the audience a clear understanding of where the strike zone is, and the different zones that surround it. It highlights the correlation between what type of pitch a player favors and is more likely to hit into play, as well as their weaknesses for pitches that they’re less likely to hit but swing at anyway.
via baseballsavant.mlb.com
As someone who pitched during her softball career, I’ve always been a huge fan of pitchers and what pitches they favor over others during their careers. Here is an example of a line chart tracking the percentage of the types of pitches used by Giants legend Tim Lincecum.
This graph is specifically interesting to me because it highlights the correlation between pitchers getting slower as they get older. The red line showing a significant drop off in Lincecum’s fastball over time, combined with a spike in his tendency to throw a curveball towards the end of his career, illustrates how a loss of velocity over the course of his career. If you can no longer throw hard, throw complicated. I think this line graph illustrates the journey a pitcher goes through as they adapt to the gradual breakdown of their arm over the course of their career.
The only stats I can think of that are more ridiculous and have a bigger cult following than baseballs stats are the numbers that go into buying and selling baseball cards. I have done a decent amount of research, having inherited (see: just taken) a collection of vintage baseball cards from my dad, and I still couldn’t explain, in good faith, how the market works. What I have learned from my casual investigation is that over the course of the 2020 quarantine, there has been a significant uptick in baseball card sales. Experts attribute lockdown combined with stimulus checks, on top of record high unemployment rates, as to why there has been a renewed interest in buying and trading baseball cards.
Baseball cards were mainly used as advertisements for most of their history. They were given away in cigarette packs and packs of gum. It wasn’t until 1960 that the cards we have now were produced by card companies Topps and Bowman. Collecting baseball cards became a trend in the 1970s, and for two decades the baseball card market stayed at a steady constant.
In the 1990s the market became saturated with cards, and the cards lost a lot of their value and appeal. The market had been slowly climbing since then – there was a spike in the early 2000s that experts have tied to the Pokémon card phenomenon – but with many looking for new forms of income during the pandemic and everyone receiving money from the government, the baseball card market saw a huge jump in sales in 2020.
The Topps Company, 10-K filings from 1997-2007, accessed via SEC EDGAR.
I mostly focused on the section of public sales records Topps Co. put out around 2007. The story I tell with this visual data is the volatility of this market. It’s all based on what is happening culturally at the time, and the scarcity of the product. I own so many of these cards and most of them are basically worthless because of how common they are. The buy and resell, the supply and demand – a lot of it is dictated by trends. Sales usually stay in an average range but phenomena like popular card games or new forms of virtual currency cause sales to spike erratically. I feel I even manipulated the data a bit in my visualization because, even though 2000 and 2005 show an increase in sales in my graphic, the 2020 increase is significantly bigger. I thought making it such an obviously bigger pile would drive home how crazy this spike is; it’s the first time in almost ten years Topps’ sales are being publicized.
Even the most numbers-first people have to admit that visualized data will always be easier on the eye than pure figures. Charts and graphics will always be more interesting and more memorable. A picture is worth 1,000 words and in this case using actual cards to show how the baseball card economy ebbs and flows gives the viewer a tangible product to think about, and maybe even remember feeling in their own hands, while understanding the data.
Cracknell, R. (2021, April 7). Topps to Become Publicly Traded Company Once Again. Beckett News. https://www.beckett.com/news/topps-is-going-public/#:~:text=In%202020%2C%20Topps%20had%20sales,came%20from%20physical%20trading%20cards.
Data Visualization Beginner’s Guide: a Definition, Examples, and Learning Resources. Tableau. (1983). https://www.tableau.com/learn/articles/data-visualization.
Information Visualization – A Brief Introduction. The Interaction Design Foundation. (2020, July). https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/information-visualization-a-brief-introduction.
Locklear, B. (2016, November 17). Topps Baseball Cards: A 25-Year Digital Rollercoaster. Technology and Operations Management. https://digital.hbs.edu/platform-rctom/submission/topps-baseball-cards-a-25-year-digital-rollercoaster/.
McCandless, D. (2020, November 21). What Makes A Good Data Visualization? Information is Beautiful. https://informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/what-makes-a-good-data-visualization/.
Visage. (n.d.). Data_Visualization_101_How_to_Design_Charts_and_Graphs.pdf. Hubspot.
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