AUTHOR: Ryan Armbrust
DATE: 8:30:00 PM
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BODY:
<div style="clear:both;"></div>As I was poring over 2006 stats for the A's, something hit me. The lines of numbers that I was looking at weren't really giving me an easy visual comparison. I wanted to know how the hitter's numbers stacked up against his teammates, and the league averages. It wasn't easy to just glance at the numbers and see it right away.

So I came up with this system.

[click to enlarge]

<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c351/r84x/aslines.png"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; cursor: pointer; width: 400px;" src="http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c351/r84x/aslines.png" alt="" border="0" /></a>
(I included all A's with at least 100 at bats, and Antonio Perez, just to show how awful a season he had...)


The blue bar represents batting average; the green bar on-base percentage; the red bar slugging, and the brown bar OPS.

The tick marks indicate the number of home runs hit.

The vertical black bars represent American League average numbers for AVG/OBP/SLG/OPS, in that order.

So, for instance, you can see that while Nick Swisher had a below average batting average, his OBP was higher than the league median, as were his slugging and OPS.

I'm still working on refining it, but I think this has a lot of potential.

Also, I'd love to be able to automate making it. Spending two hours getting up close and personal with Microsoft Paint wasn't much fun. Anyone with some programming skills want to help out?<div style="clear:both; padding-bottom:0.25em"></div>
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COMMENT-AUTHOR:<a href="http://www.blogger.com/profile/4273697" rel="nofollow">SwizStick</a>
COMMENT-DATE:Thursday, October 19, 2006 12:17:00 AM
COMMENT-BODY:cool way to look at offense comparisons, I like it. i linked to it at my site (conditionoakland.blogspot.com)<BR/><BR/>Chavez's numbers were a pleasant surprise, compared to the league average.
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