The Pastime

Win Shares, for those who aren’t familiar with them, are an attempt to measure how much a player contributes to his team.

The formula is very complicated, but it considers virtually everything we know about a player’s performance at the ballpark and arrives at a number that measures his worth.

I’m glad there’s not a system that can break down how much I’m worth as a writer and assign me a number. What a humbling experience that would be…

But I digress.

A few days ago, while driving from Omaha to Lincoln, I was thinking about baseball and statistics (as I often do) and something occurred to me.

Win Shares are a great way to compare players to each other, but how important are the players to their team? If I imagine each player as a stone in the “team building”, the larger stones would be the more important contributors.

So here’s my raw attempt to visualize the players’ contributions to the team’s success.

The blocks are proportional in area to the amount of Win Shares the player recorded. That is to say, Huston Street’s block is exactly twice as many pixels in area as Kirk Saarloos’ square, since Street’s 12 Win Shares are double Saarloos’ 6.

Also, the brightness of the fill color is proportional to the number of Win Shares, with lighter being better. That’s why Jason Kendall’s block is bright, and Dan Johnson’s is rather dim.

Since Mike Rouse and Adam Melhuse each only contributed 1 Win Share, their blocks are designated with their last initial.

At some point I’d like to have this as a flash based tool, similar to the now out-of-date salary visualizer I mentioned a while ago. That’s a little bit beyond my skill set at the moment, though.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 5th, 2007 at 2:20 am and is filed under Oakland A's, Stats, Stat Graphics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.