Psd hit when Craig told us that for day 2 we would be working on baseball data. Memories of struggling with my illiteracy of any sports term for the final interview data on AFL flooded my mind.
The first step was to decide which data set to work with. The second one contained locations and shapefiles, which to me seemed more exciting to work with. After reading through the documentation to get my head again what any of the nonsense meant, it was time to get some vizspiration.
Looking on tableau public and Twitter for anything MLB related or with the sportsvizsunday tag. After seeing Jacob Olsufka on using the hit location.
I decided to put my focus on this area. My initial plan was a simple dot location plot but after some more exploring and vizspiration from Jacob Olsulfka, I went with a density heat map. I found this to be the most effective way of showing where the ball was hit the majority of the time.
After creating a few bar charts and realising that my other plans couldn’t be done with this data set alone, it was time to explore the additional files. The pitcher file had more locations of zones of where the ball release came from. After exploring this for a while and getting nowhere, I again shifted my focus.
This time to the types of pitch. This meant I could then highlight what types of pitches resulted in which events and also where the players mostly hit them. Adding a highlight action so you could see all the batters that kick certain types of pitches and also allowing for selecting a single pitcher to see who and where they hit the ball. I kept exploring the data, making graph after graph. Trying to find something else to add value and but it was now close to the end of the day and I needed to start figuring out how I was going to display what I had on the dashboard.
Following with my vizspiration I put a field map behind the hit locations. Added some colours of green and brown to resemble the field colours.
