Friday, August 26, 2011
More Chernoffs
Posted by Kevin LaiFor your enjoyment on a lazy Friday, here's some more Chernoff Faces. The only difference from last time comes in the hair. Stolen bases and Fangraphs' Baserunning metric were used in defining the height and width of the hair, while the "style" of hair had to do with the player's fielding abilities (also used Fangraph's Fielding metric). An up-do (if you will) means they've got a slick glove. Hope you enjoy. Stats are from Fangraphs, and are as of Thursday.
Size of the face—I used wOBA (height of the face), wRC (width of the face) and WAR (general shape of the face) to dictate the size of the face.
Shape of the mouth—Power makes people smile. I used slugging (height), isolated slugging (width) and total home runs (curve of the smile).
Shape of the eyes—Batters who walk a ton need good eyes. Therefore, walk rates (height) and on-base percentage (width) are represented here.
Shape of the hair—Height and width of the hair depend on the player's stolen base totals and his base running above average. Style of the hair is defined by Fangraphs' Fielding metric.
Shape of the nose—A general idea about high batting average on balls in play is that they are unsustainable (not in all cases, but let's go with this notion for a second). Thus, if a hitter had a high BABIP, he is lying about his true talent. Higher BABIP, bigger nose (think Pinocchio).
Shape of the ears—Psst...players with high strike out rates have big ears because they love to hear the sound of their bat whiffing.
PS—If you were worried last time about Jose Bautista's nose, don't worry, it's there. But I think we'll need to check up on Mark Teixeira, Ian Kinsler and Evan Longoria. Also, Chris Young just does not look good at all.
Kevin welcomes comments and questions—Please send e-mails to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
A suggestion for next time: change the spacing. As it is right now, there’s the same spacing both above and below the names, so I keep getting confused about whether the face I’m looking at is the name above or below it (and likewise, whether the player I’m looking for is the face above or below). Obviously the first & last rows answer the question, but still, for scanning it’s problematic.