Sunday, November 22, 2009
Why Baseball Needs a Visual Facelift
Posted by Kevin DameBaseball has been around for awhile. Over a hundred years, with a VAST treasure chest of information and history. As a baseball fan I’ve often wondered why there was so little visualization of stats and other information. It seems like most of baseball’s rich history has been communicated through rows and columns of data. Not that I have anything against numbers (I love numbers!), but shouldn’t we have progressed beyond this approach by now? I got curious about progress, and looked back at how things have changed in our society since baseball was invented.
Take a look at how little the box score has changed since 1876! It’s really the tip of the iceberg in terms of how little innovation there has been in the sport’s design and communication of information. My hope is to be part of a revolution in changing the way baseball is viewed and understood by its fans. In the same way that Sabermetrics has opened up new insight via new and better analysis of information, I'd like to see the same happen via the visual communication of information.
"The commonality between science and art is in trying to see profoundly - to develop strategies of seeing and showing." - Edward Tufte.
Feel free to send comments, questions, and suggestions to Kevin via email.
There have been a lot of new stats invented, really help fans understand the game, I think that one thing that really need to be done, is find a way to accurately measure the fielding ability of a player.