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Dashboard Week – Day 2 – Baseball Data

This post was originally published on The Data School blog between 2018 and July 2025, before our program was renamed to MIP’s Analytics Career Accelerator. References throughout this article to “The Data School” or “DS” all refer to what is now MIP’s Analytics Career Accelerator. The program, its people, and its commitment to launching outstanding analytics careers remain the same – just under a new name.

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For the 2nd round of dashboards, the challenge was to use either 2 datasets relating to baseball. The 1st dataset contained information relating to players whilst the 2nd dataset covered information relating to the play. I went for the 2nd dataset as it had very specific information on the specifics of what happened during each play which I thought was interesting.

I spent roughly 5 hours trying to overlay the zone locations with the corresponding ball hits, however later realised that the shape file wasn’t matching up with the latitude/longitude of the balls. It was at this point that I decided to scrap the concept and focus on another aspect in the data. I looked at the information for the pitcher team and player and chose to target this area. I initially wanted to compare team performance in terms of pitching and batting, however the bump chart wouldn’t work properly. As I was running low on time, I decided to focus solely on pitcher teams. I made a score for pitcher teams/players by calculating the strikeout % and subtracting this with the home run %. I made a bump chart showing the progression of team ranks over the last 5 years from 2018. Since it looked a little clunky, I also made a separate view of a slope chart that compares 2014 and 2018 ranks. The difficult components of this view was getting the table calculations for the rank, colour, and size exactly right. It took a lot of experimenting to get the right combination.

The second dashboard had a similar view to the first dashboard but showed the difference in scores between the teams. Hovering over the bars will show the team player’s ranked.

 

Ultimately, I learnt the importance of time-boxing activities as I wasted a majority of my time working on a component that didn’t work.

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