Visual Baseball: Payroll Disparities
As you’ll probably notice, a lot of my visuals contain very few numbers. I’m trying to push the envelope in how to communicate what matters WITHOUT numbers, since the sport is currently so numbers-heavy. Here’s a visual I created during the ALDS to shed some light on the David & Goliath nature of the Twins Yankees match-up and the payroll differences between the two teams. As you might have guessed, font size is correlated to salary.
Kevin Dame is a writer and visual designer who brings sports information to life in new and meaningful ways. Visit his website and follow him on Twitter @kevintdame.
I like this a lot. It reminds me of the graphics Flip Flop Fly Ball has on their website. It would be nice to have a link to a higher resolution since the smaller names are impossible to read and in some cases difficult to discern colour, but that doesn’t really change the effect or meaning any.
I think the font size alone works pretty well for me without adjusting for length. Comparing Jeter and Sabathia, for example, the difference in font size jumps out at me much more readily than how their salaries compare. Rodriguez does dominate the graphic, but his font size is legitimately huge compared to everyone else’s. At least for me, the font size works pretty intuitively. Nice work.
I meant to say the difference in font size jumps out at me more readily than how their areas compare in the Jeter/Sabathia comparison on how I interpret the graph visually.
I agree with post #1, you should at least make the kerning of the letters relative to the players’ name, so Rodriguez has less space between the letters than Jeter to accommodate for the name difference.
You could probably tweak this by taking name size into account, so that the total area of the name represents the relative salary size. A-Rod’s size here is misleading because his name is just longer than Jeter’s and Teixeira’s.
Good. Now do one for the same two teams where the font size is proportional to what the player has achieved on the field in his career.
I think your Wang is *way* outta place.
That’s not where my anatomy textbook shows it, at all.