Category: Uncategorized

Welcome to 2022!

I for one am looking forward to 2022 after a couple of interesting, often challenging years affected my desire to generate interesting analytics and data visualizations. The less said the better – simply excited to get back to updating some existing visuals and adding a host of new ones.

I’ll be doing a lot of work using the Exploratory toolkit which keeps improving by the day. It is simply a great tool for handling large (or small) data sets from start to finish; I especially love it’s data wrangling capabilities.

On the data source side, Retrosheet and the Lahman database will continue to feed my analysis and visuals; none of what I create would be possible without these great resources. Retrosheet data (used for game level and play level detail) is already updated through the 2021 season; part of this year’s plan is to add older years (pre-1955) to my local database. The Lahman data (season level) is typically available around February and I’ll be downloading it to my databases at that time.

Stay tuned for updates throughout 2022 – they should be a lot more frequent than the last two years. Happy New Year!

Visual-Baseball Project Site Updates Continue

Updates to the Portfolio section of the VBP site continue, in an effort to reverse some lost functionality in the wake of one or more WordPress updates. The plus side of this setback is that the updates allow us to introduce a more easily maintained infrastructure with improved usability. Users can now search and scroll through content links while also accessing pages through an enhanced menu system.

Here’s an example of the new Portfolio menu:

Selecting one of the menu items will take you directly to a relevant page, now composed of a brief intro as well as an example of the visualization type, as seen here:

The lower half of each page will now have a searchable list format, with both a link and a description of the associated content. Users can also adjust the pagination settings to show the desired number of links to view at one time:

These enhancements should make it far easier to navigate the site and view the desired content. Once these are complete, I can begin to deliver new content; the 2018 game and season files will soon be upon us, and much of the content is itching for an update. In the meantime, enjoy what’s already here!