A little bit of visual labwork on this Friday. I’ve been playing around with R lately and I’ve been working on ‘heatmaps’. Each square has a number value and that value is ranked within each column by color — ie: all HR’s are compared against other HR totals for that column. White (higher value) -> dark red (lower value). For example, you can see that Aubrey Huff — the Giants’ best player on offense this year — has mostly orange and yellow squares. His only dark colored square — or one with a lower number value — is stolen bases.
(Click to enlarge)
Because the numbers are based on raw totals, some players’ offensive value might be misrepresented . Notice Buster Posey. He is solidly orange across the board. That’s not bad at all, but if he had started the year in the majors — and assuming he would have been this good for the entire year — he would be much closer to Aubry Huff in raw counting totals. Posey hasn’t had the same number of chances (G, PA, AB) to hit those doubles, triples, and homers when compared to some of the other players.
Other things I enjoyed
- Torres’ white-hot SB square. The Giants don’t run a lot and Torres has 23 SB all by himself. The next runner up is Aarond Rowand (5 SB) followed by Nate Schierholtz (4).
- Batting average isn’t a very important statistic, but I included it in this ‘basic’ heatmap. Rowand’s BA (.239) looks extremely poor. Maybe adding a BABIP column in a more ‘advanced’ heatmap would be helpful. Posey (.332) is leading the Giants in BA.
- Molina gets hurt by not being on the team longer — and thus not having the chances to add to his totals — but his string of red squares indicate that he never really hit for the Giants.
I’ll be posting more R experiments as I learn more. Stay tuned.
