November 22, 2009
Order Now The Hardball Times Baseball Annual 2010 is now in development and will ship in mid November! This year's book will feature articles by THT's staff as well as Bill James, Tom Tango and Craig Wright. If you use this link to purchase the Annual, you will be in the first group to receive it and you'll be supporting THT. 
Rich Barbieri
John Barten Brian Borawski Craig Brown Evan Brunell David Gassko Jonathan Hale Brandon Isleib Chris Jaffe Max Marchi Bruce Markusen Harry Pavlidis Jeff Sackmann Dave Studeman Steve Treder Bryan Tsao Tuck! Dan Turkenkopf Colin Wyers Geoff Young John Brattain And here's the full roster.
Or you can search by:
Gear up for baseball season with Chicago White Sox tickets and New York Yankees tickets. LA Angels tickets, Houston Astros tickets, and Atlanta Braves tickets are hot sellers! You can get Boston Red Sox tickets, San Diego Padres tickets or Chicago Cubs tickets for your favorite baseball fan. Coast to Coast Tickets has the best MLB tickets like Minnesota Twins tickets, LA Dodgers tickets, Milwaukee Brewers tickets, New York Met tickets and St. Louis Cardinals tickets. Find premium Chicago Cubs tickets and other Chicago tickets at JustGreatTickets.com. Chicago Cubs Tickets Chicago Tickets  All content on this site (including text, graphs, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. |
I need your feedback!by Dave StudemanSeptember 25, 2009 I'm working away on the Hardball Times Annual 2010 (have I mentioned that lately?) and I'd appreciate your feedback on something. Past Annuals have included a graph of each team's runs scored and allowed, as well as games won, on an average ten-game basis. It's supposed to be an easy way to visualize the season. I don't know if many people actually like it, but I think it works pretty well (particularly when we add the big events of each year on the bottom). The graph is kind of complex, but I'm thinking of adding something to it. In addition to all the runs and wins lines, I'd like to add a line that references each team's Drama Index during the year. The Drama Index tells you how dramatic each game was along the way and adds context to the runs scored and allowed info. By the way, the Annual will also include Championship WPA for all players. Championship WPA is basically a combination of WPA and the Drama Index, though the version will be publishing was created by Sky Andrecheck. So I want to put this extra info on a black and white graph (got to be black and white for the book). Here's what it looks like for Minnesota, the only team providing any drama at this time of year:  What do you think? Good info to see on the graph? Too confusing? Don't care about it? Dave was called a "national treasure" by Rob Neyer. Seriously. Comments about this article can be sent to him through the miracle of e-mail.
Tim Stoeckel said...
I think it’s a good addition to the graph, too. Placing it at the bottom of the graph, as you’ve done, sets it clearly apart from the other info; thus it is not confusing. However, it does give the impression that none of Minnesota’s games were very dramatic because the drama index lies entirely below the graph’s horizontal dashed line. Maybe you could add another, separate horizontal line running through the drama index part of the graph. Posted 09/26 at 01:27 AM
Detroit Michael said...
I love your articles, and I’ve placed an order for the book again. I’m glad that Championship WPA will be availble (although having it somewhere on line ASAP after the regular season ends would be better). And ... I don’t care what the graphs look like. Sorry for the lack of interest there. Posted 09/26 at 01:54 PM
Mike Treder said...
Dave, I’ve never liked the season graph all that much to begin with, but I actually think the Drama Index makes it a lot more compelling. What I’d really prefer is if you took out the RS/RA lines altogether and just focused on the drama aspect vs. W/L results. Of course, that’s going in a whole different direction, but it seems more interesting to me than just the dry numbers. Posted 09/26 at 10:21 PM
Dave Studeman said...
Good feedback. I’ve made some changes based on your comments, such as widening the line in the legend and adding the average to the Drama Index. Mike, I don’t know what you mean about drama vs. W/L results. Can you expand on that? The point of the graph is to show each team’s W/L results vs. offense and defense, so you can see which one was more (or less) responsible for winning and losing at any point during the year. I obviously like it—it’s a nice overview of a team’s story—but I’m open to other suggestions. Posted 09/27 at 06:50 AM
Mike Treder said...
Including both RA/RS and DI just seems to complicate and clutter up the graph too much. But what if you took out the former and also added some pointers indicating significant changes to the team during the season—trade, injury, manager change, clubhouse fight, etc.—that may illuminate the real drama from a fan perspective. Posted 09/27 at 07:23 AM
Dave Studeman said...
Thanks, Mike. In the book, we put those pointers below the graph, on the same time continuum. Posted 09/27 at 01:15 PM
Page 1 of 1
Commenting is not available in this weblog entry.
Do you have a general question or comment for one of THT's writers? Send it in to our weekly mailbag We also welcome unsolicited op-ed pieces of approximately 500 words for consideration. We reserve the right to edit for length, clarity and consistency of style. Please include your whole name and location to be considered. If you have a comment about this specific article, please email the writer. |
I want to see it on the graph, but I can’t make heads or tails of anything past the solid black line. I would recommend making the dotted gray line reflected in the key instead of just one tiny slash. Make it CLEAR what the dotted line is, then you are OK.