New Visualizations: The Black Aces

 

As I've thought about what to create based on the Black Aces paintings that I made earlier this month in memory of "Mudcat" Grant, I've become intrigued by the opportunity to include visualized statistics on the back of the baseball card, instead of the quantitative data that we're so used to. I like it because it shows the relationships between the achievements of notable players--and in many cases, far more players than it's possible to show on the back of a typical baseball card.

One of the challenges I'm facing right now is that the text needs to be more readable, so in my next set of cards I'm going to be experimenting with font sizes and other attributes so that the text can be larger.

For this set of data visualizations (which you can see here on my Tableau Public site), I wanted to show the relationship between the Black Aces and the other 350-plus 20-game winners in the major leagues since 1947. Here, the analysis is based on the number of games won in the season, represented by the size of each circle. 

There are four classes of pitchers noted here: retired pitchers in gray; Hall of Famers in gold; active pitchers in blue; and Black Aces in red, with the three most recent pitchers, C.C. Sabathia, Dontrelle Willis, and David Price in a lighter red. (I wanted to set off the Black Aces vividly--please comment below if you have particular thoughts on the color legend.)

So Denny McLain's 31 wins in 1968 is the largest dot, while the 150 seasons of 20 games are noted by small dots. I may try to do another view where I can show the number of 20-game seasons by each pitcher.

What's most striking about the Black Aces seasons when you look at them arranged as a scatterplot is that they, in many cases, had Hall of Fame-caliber seasons. (Winning 20 games in any case is a notable achievement, especially now in an era of specialization when pitchers don't often go more than about six or seven innings in a start. That's also apparent from the fact that since the 1960s, it's been rare to see a pitcher approach McLain's win total.

I'm going to continue developing these visualizations for the Black Aces. In the meantime, if you're interested in buying a copy of my data visualization baseball cards, you can do so here on my Etsy shop. Also, please comment here, on Twitter, or on Tableau Public if you have ideas about data visualization for baseball cards!