Visual Baseball: Introducing the Score Tracker
Hi there. Here’s my latest attempt to take something we’re all very used to seeing – scores – and communicate them in a different way. The concept is pretty simple: Red means your team won. Blue means your team lost. The size of the circles indicate how many runs were scored. And the amount of color you see represents how many runs your team won or lost by. Let’s take the Score Tracker for a spin:
Here’s a simple introduction to the concept and how these visuals work.
And here’s the Red Sox season at a glance. They’ve had nail biters in 8 consecutive games, including Monday night’s slugfest against the Blue Jays.
Use the “Click for More” link below to see a few other Score Tracker examples.
Here’s a comparison between the AL East contenders. Check out how many times the Rays have blown out their opponents. They’ve been dominant.
And finally, a closer look at the Red Sox wins and losses. When they’ve won, their margin for victory has been slim.
I’d love your feedback on the Score Tracker. Is it useful?
I like the divisional graphic of AL East.
I’d sure like to see the NL East.
What if instead of ordering games in order of date, you ordered the games in order of run differential?
I like it and it can definitely neatly show trends and close games versus blowout games.
I quite like it. Especially the team comparisons. For one thing, it just looks cool. But then there’s a lot of sense of what the games have been like, and that makes for thoughtful comparison.
I’m not sure how useful it is, but I do really like looking at it. The team comparison is the best. I’d like to see you put together one of these for each division every week. It might be a good way to see at a quick glance what teams have been doing.
It’s cool to look at, but honestly – the colors bother me. Red…red is bad, red is stop, red is a mistake. Red should be a Loss. Green should be a Win…or the Blue should be a win, that’d be ok too. I really can’t wrap my head around red as a win when glancing at it.
but maybe thats just me.
It took me a lot of back and forth between the definition of a circle and the actual sting of circles for a particular team to understand what was going on. Made it a slight pain in the butt, but one could probably get over it with some practice.
I agree with cephyn—it seems like a loss should be in red. I like this quite a bit, however. After spending a couple of minutes figuring out what the circles mean, you start to see some things.
I also liked the groupings of wins and losses together.
I’d love to see how big the brewers – pirates 20-0 game looks compared to the rest of the games.
I agree that I’m not a fan of red for wins and blue for losses. I don’t know what I’d suggest for an alternative, though—maybe white for wins and red for losses?
completely agree that the colors really throw me. Red is bad, so I see red as a loss. Sounds stupid, but I really strain to read reds as wins. I suppose I’d get used to it, but since I’m not the only one who has that preconceived bias….
It’s cool. But unlike your pitching rank-o-meter, which gives me a lot of new information at a glance, I’m not sure that this one adds a lot to my understanding of the game that I can’t get just as fast by looking at the actual data. In short, I would use the rank-o-meter but not the score-tracker.
But your stuff is wonderful, keep it coming.
I took some time to get used to drawing information from the size of the “ring” surrounding the circle, but once I did, I liked it quite a bit, especially in groups of wins, to see how dominant teams are.
I would love to see this same information as Chernof faces.
My first impression: the above is useful in comparing the pythagorean versus true W/L records. As for clarity (assuming my stated utility), I’d like to see the wins stacked on one side versus the losses on the other with, say, blowouts descending to nail-biters.
I fall on the side of Fat Ted, Dave & OB.
Overall, the visuals are very interesting, but it would seem best used for a side-by-side comparison between teams, or one team’s seasons stacked next to each other, with ascending/descending lines of wins and losses.
I’d be interested to see an in-depth chart of a variety of full-season records side to side – I think the contrast would really test the merit of the system.
That being said, I think what you’re doing is awesome, and I’d like to be the first to place an order for a wall sized poster of the White Sox ‘05 season. How much you want?
Mooch’s request for a wall-sized poster prompted another idea.
Suppose you tracked the division for all 162 days. Every day the teams would be placed in order, top to bottom, according to the standings, linked by a distinctive colored line for each team. So you would see the rise and fall and rise of the White Sox and the other teams across the season, with the Sox ending on top of the chart, with all the different colored balls linked together charting the whole season for each team. It would take a huge piece of paper to print, but it would be a really cool way to view a season.
GAY