For this assignment I chose to look at the Baseball Statistics data. I tried a few different data visualization tools including Palladio and Raw, which found problems with the data, suggesting the need for something like OpenRefine; Tableau, which didn’t offer the kind of direct comparison I was looking for; and Plot.ly, which I ultimately decided to use. In order to create a data visualization that wasn’t a chaotic jumble of lines I decided to focus solely on the home run records of the SF Giants and the LA Dodgers, two National League rival teams located here in California.
This line plot shows both teams’ home run records from 1901-2009, with the Giants in orange and the Dodgers in blue as indicated by the key on the right. You can visualize the successes of the teams in hitting home runs throughout their long-held rivalry, directly comparing their records with ease versus looking back and forth at the numerical data on a spreadsheet. Quickly glancing at the chart, you can see that though the teams have for the most part kept consistently close to each other in their home run tallies, the Giants look to have maintained the higher count for more years, a conclusion which would have been more difficult to make just looking at the data. The graph allows you to easily see the trends not only for each team but also the sport in general since it offers over a century’s worth of data, raising questions as to why certain years saw such low or high home run counts.