DLD 10/18/07: AfterMach + Diego 3.4

*mmmmmmmm*

How DARE he call up his AAA catcher?  HOW DARE HE?  I'm sure if the reporter asked Beane how much playing time Brown should have gotten, Billy would have said, "Oh, he should start the next four games."  Because playing time always was, and always will be, the responsibility of the Oakland manager.

The kicking the guy while he's down, perahps not so much, but that's of less consequence than having put success in the 2006 season first.

The players said not. One. Word.

They did their jobs, they kept their complaints to themselves, and when the season was done (a season in which they, not Macha, made the ALCS) and the button was pressed to let Macha go, the players did the courteous thing (from the fans' perspective anyhow) and explained why it was necessary.

Macha can dry his eyes on the $2m he gets paid to leave - which incidentally is the same number of reasons there was to let him go.

What I would like to see toward those ends is a guarantee that any team receiving revenue sharing money must put that money toward player salaries not only at the major league level but minor league level as well (including the draft and international signings).  The union of course would never go for that because they don't represent minor leaguers.

Meaning nothing for Zito.

Each urn will be stamped with a message saying Major League Baseball officially recognizes the deceased as a lifelong fan of that team.

<hands servers Midol>

Would A-Rod or popular AN whipping boy Eric Chavez be at the hot corner?

I kinda sorta get the dodgeball bans, because that game always seemed like an exercise in recreating "Lord of the Flies" to me.  But tag?

Has it been that long since I was a kid?  "Kill the Carrier" (or its more offensively named cousin) and "Butts Up" were staples of my childhood.  We even played stickball with broomhandles...until some kid let go of the bat by mistake and broke a kid's nose.

Basically, all AN comments appear with a [kill][hide comment] next to it. You can kill all comments of a person from your sight, or just one at a time by clicking. It is easy to undo, so just try it...

I want to see Milton Bradley stop breaking baseball bats, and start biting the heads off of fruit bats.

-Leave off the bar for OPS. It's redundant information, and leaves things looking too busy.

-Maybe leave off the ticks for HRs too, as they don't really fit in with the rest of the information. (On the other hand, they don't really get in the way either, so leaving them in is fine).

-For what's left consider stacking your red and green bars on top of each other and make the blue twice as wide like
BBBBBBBBBBGGGGG
BBBBBBBBBBRRRRRRRRRR
since AVG is a component of both OBP and SLG and the remaining parts are more or less independent. (I hope that makes sense)

That said...

1. I find the graphics somewhat confusing. The issue with stacked bars is that it is very hard to compare anything other than the first stack and the total stack. Also, you throw in comparing against the league average, but only in obvious cases will it be easy to compare as the OBP bar won't line up with the league average bar. In brief, I think that if you want to compare avg/obp/slg/ops across batters and against league average, it would be clearer just to have four little bars with either accompanying league average bars or some kind of tick.
2. If the goal is to have a visual way to see what kind of hitting a batter does, one idea would be for each batter to have a stacked bar of all ABs.  

I'm going to sketch out two possibilities... these models are definitely not quite right, but I think there is the kernel of something good in them.  The prototypes suck, but were the best I could do on short notice.

The first possibility would account for the results of all at bats with slices left to right:

# of singles
# of 2B
3B
HR
BB & HBP
GB outs
FB outs
K outs

So at a glance you could see what their batting average was by coloring the first four in a sympathetic way. You could see the OBP by adding in the BB slice (colored in some clever way to attach to the hits).  You could cleverly mark the league average AVG and OBP somehow (perhaps a darkening of the outside of the bar, or maybe just big tick marks on the perimeter).

It could also be done as a pie chart.

A second graph (possibly a supplement and not a replacement for the first) would help visualize SLG, so it would just focus on the distribution of total bases, so there would be a slice for

all bases achieved on singles
bases from doubles
... triples
... homers

It would be normalized so a 1.000 SLG would have the same length as the first graph.

Here's are two quickie prototypes.

First, I used data for Swisher that is partly right (couldn't figure out the right number of GB/FB outs).  From left, you read singles, 2b, 3b (thin slice), hr, bb, hbp, Ks, GB outs, FB outs. The two lines show the league average AVG and OBP.  The bar could always be normalized to the same length, but in some ways would be more interesting left in absolute length.

Here is another brainstorm idea, where 2b, 3b and HR are shown on the same graphic as before but, proportional to their total bases:

Okay, I've spent too much time on this already!  It's an area that could use some good thinking, though. Maybe someone could build on some of the ideas in this post.

I want these to be comparable between players, and I'm not sure this helps.

What do you guys think, though? What would you look for in a graphic like this? What would you want to see?