{"id":98,"date":"2015-05-30T11:32:28","date_gmt":"2015-05-30T15:32:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/josephmurphy.name\/ds106\/?p=98"},"modified":"2020-02-11T20:41:59","modified_gmt":"2020-02-12T01:41:59","slug":"put-me-in-coach","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/josephmurphy.name\/ds106\/tdc\/put-me-in-coach\/","title":{"rendered":"Put me in, Coach!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I already drew a <a href=\"https:\/\/josephmurphy.name\/ds106\/tdc\/john-john-i-can-see-your-house-from-here\/\">map which tells a story<\/a>, so when TDC 1237 challenged us to make a <a href=\"http:\/\/tdc.ds106.us\/tdc1237\/\">map which explains nothing<\/a>, it seemed like a fitting challenge. I was inspired by the map of &#8220;Super Bowl Wins By Country&#8221; on the TDC page, so here&#8217;s:<\/p>\n<h4><span class=\"gwt-InlineLabel mainTitle ADUQCKC-t-b\" title=\"Change in MLB Batting Average by US State 2005-2014\">Change in MLB Batting Average by US State 2005-2014<\/span><\/h4>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/fusiontables\/embedviz?q=select+col3%3E%3E1+from+1hMWoImsh42kHRzwehdPFLCM0t_Hc_5T-742D9iG9&amp;viz=MAP&amp;h=false&amp;lat=35.40071253360072&amp;lng=-91.90641132812505&amp;t=1&amp;z=4&amp;l=col3%3E%3E1&amp;y=2&amp;tmplt=2&amp;hml=KML\" width=\"500\" height=\"300\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><em>(Edit: this used to be an interactive map. But Google killed the product. So here&#8217;s a screenshot.)<\/em><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/flic.kr\/p\/ty6Uhf\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/live.staticflickr.com\/7775\/18084912038_3749fb9c33_n.jpg\" alt=\"Batting Average by State\" width=\"320\" height=\"240\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>This map is made with <a href=\"https:\/\/support.google.com\/fusiontables\/answer\/2571232\">Google Fusion Tables<\/a>. The team batting average data comes from <a href=\"http:\/\/www.baseball-reference.com\/\">Baseball-Reference.com<\/a>; the state shapes are a resource file within Fusion Tables. (This introduces the one unintentional inaccuracy in the map &#8211; I couldn&#8217;t quickly find a shape file including both U.S. states and Canadian provinces, so the Toronto Blue Jays are just left off the map.)<\/p>\n<p>More importantly, its story is a mess. For starters, who would compare team batting average over 10 years? There are so many differences in lineups and managers (and probably even park effects) that it seems like a pointless comparison. (My baseball geek friends are welcomed to debate that point.)<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Batting average by state&#8221; is almost as meaningless as &#8220;Super Bowls by country&#8221; &#8211; maybe more so, because it suggests specificity. But if there&#8217;s a useful reason to compare the average batting average of the 5 teams in California with the 1 in Maryland, I&#8217;m at a loss to explain it. (And you can barely see the poor Nats in DC.)<\/p>\n<p>The state statistics are actually an average of team batting averages in the state, but every team doesn&#8217;t have the same number of at bats, so that introduces a little inaccuracy. Not much, but it would show up out at the 4th digit.<\/p>\n<p>And then there&#8217;s design. Google only labels the top and bottom of the legend, so we know the bounds, but not what the middle colors correspond to. I picked a green color for half the scale, on a map which is mostly green &#8211; very bad for readability, especially in the Satellite view. I also set green to correspond to the biggest declines, and red for the biggest increases, which I think is the opposite of American expectations.<\/p>\n<p>But I did learn a little about Fusion Tables, and practiced normalizing data, so that was fun!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I already drew a map which tells a story, so when TDC 1237 challenged us to make a map which explains nothing, it seemed like a fitting challenge. I was inspired by the map of &#8220;Super Bowl Wins By Country&#8221; on the TDC page, so here&#8217;s: Change in MLB Batting Average by US State 2005-2014 &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/josephmurphy.name\/ds106\/tdc\/put-me-in-coach\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Put me in, Coach!<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[5,11,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-98","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tdc","category-ds106-2","category-images"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p53vXx-1A","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/josephmurphy.name\/ds106\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/josephmurphy.name\/ds106\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/josephmurphy.name\/ds106\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/josephmurphy.name\/ds106\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/josephmurphy.name\/ds106\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=98"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/josephmurphy.name\/ds106\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":153,"href":"https:\/\/josephmurphy.name\/ds106\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98\/revisions\/153"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/josephmurphy.name\/ds106\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=98"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/josephmurphy.name\/ds106\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=98"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/josephmurphy.name\/ds106\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=98"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}