Earlier today I saw this really cool viz created by Will Sutton that's an animation of the top home run hitters from 1985-2016.

31 years of MLB Home Runs!
I've seen plenty of these charts lately, so for #MakeoverMonday I wanted to learn how to make my own. Feedback welcome. Thanks, @TriMyData & @VizWizBI R code available here: https://t.co/8ipKQOzmrO #Rstats pic.twitter.com/GreSt6t1b0

— Will Sutton (@WJSutton12) May 6, 2019

As I posted last week, Sophie Sparkes introduced The Data School and me to Flourish. Flourish makes it super simple to create animated visualizations with tons of customization options. Given that Tableau doesn't support animations in the browser, this is a great alternative. Flourish provides an example, you import your data, do a bit of customization and voila! You have an animated viz.

The data needed to be structured with a column for each season, so I prepped the data in Alteryx and I included all seasons from 1912-2018. I then filtered down to players with 250+ career home runs (to make the list manageable).

And here's my animated viz of the top 10 home run hitters of all-time.

From Chart of the Day:

For me, this chart is quite hard to read because (1) you have to tilt your head 90 degrees to read anything and (2) the background is unnecessarily dark.  A bar chart would be far superior; you’d be able to read left-to-right, just like a book.

Adding the player name inside the bar stumped me for a bit, but this solution on Tableau forum proved useful (via Joe Mako).

As a follow up to the comments from my recent blog post on ranking a team’s total HR output, I have put together this simple interactive viz using Tableau Public.

The data covers 1920 through 2008 (1920 was the start of the live ball era) and measures three stats:

1. Total home runs over the history of each franchise (the oldest teams will nearly always be ranked at the top)
2. Total home runs per year for each franchise
3. Total home runs per game for each franchise

Click on a team name and the viz will:

• Highlight the bar charts to allow for comparison within the three categories
• Update trend charts to reflect only the team selected

What do you see?

Joe Mako posted the following comment about my post on all-time HR rankings: “What about consideration for the year? Seems to me that comparing the total number of home runs of teams that have been around for a over 100 years to teams that have been around for just a few dozen years does not seem useful. Is there data that tracks the number of home runs by team per year? If so maybe the data could be normalized, or viewed differently.”

Three measures that are likely a better indicator include HR/Game, HR/Year, and HR/Win.  Colorado now comes in at #1 in all three categories, with Arizona in the top 3 in all three of these categories.  The Yankees, Giants, Cubs and Braves are all much, much farther down the list now.  Remember, normalizing the data can very often be your friend, unless of course you want to intentionally skew the data.

Chart of the Day has recently become one of my favorite blogs to follow.  I like the content/writing, typically the visual displays are good and there are lots of posts about sports.  There have been more posts about baseball recently as spring training has already begun.

Today they posted this chart:

Quick, which team is #5 all-time?  Can’t find it very easily can you?  This chart has a few basic design flaws:

1. A bar chart would be more effective as it would rotate the labels so that they are easier to read.
2. The sorting could be done better.  It’s sorted by when they joined the major leagues (see the numbers inside the bars), but that’s distracting to me.  My brain is trying to order these in a more logical way
3. The gridlines are too strong.  Yes, they are gray, but they could be more muted; they grab too much attention

Here’s how I would have presented the data (note that my data only goes through 2008, but you get the idea):

Quick, which team is #5 all-time?  I  bet that only took 1-2 seconds.  Much easier, wouldn’t you say?  Notice that I’ve addressed all of the problems above:

1. The team names and stats are much, much easier to read
2. The teams are sorted by the number of home runs in the franchise’s history, which makes more sense for this chart.  You could still have the year in the bar, but it doesn’t add any value to the chart, therefore it’s chart junk
3. The gridlines are much less noticeable, but can still be used for reference if needed

Have your say below.