Visualizing Baseball

Jim Albert is professor of statistics at Bowling Green State University. He is the author or editor of ten books, including Analyzing Baseball Data with R, Curve Ball, and the Handbook of Statistical Methods and Analyses in Sports.

• A History of Baseball. Career Trajectories. Game to Game Effects. The Pitcher and Batter Confrontation. The Pitch Count. Batted Balls. Fielding. Modeling. Clutch and Streak Performances.

"Jim Albert has a new book out. It’s called Visualizing Baseball and it’s a treat. It is a pretty short book—just 135 pages—and many of those pages are filled with graphs rather than text. Jim is adept at combining words and visuals. His prose is pointed and precise, and he doesn’t waste time 'sabersplaining.' Instead, he articulates a concept and then shows it on a graph. Both parts of your brain are engaged, your understanding deepens, and the lessons carry longer.The graphs start out simple and grow in complexity as the content becomes more complex. Moving from simple scatterplots with fitted lines, Albert moves onto graphs with elaborate labels and changes the size of dots based on some underlying values. He inserts box plots, classic PITCHf/x graphs, density graphs, isobars and violin plots, to name a few techniques. It sounds overwhelming, but each graph builds on a previous one, and it all makes sense as you move along.Most importantly, Albert doesn’t clog his graphs with lots of graph junk and needless color. The only color is blue—everything else is in black/gray scale. So many graphs these days seem to be built to impress other graphic artists instead of educating the reader. This book is a welcome antidote to that trend."~The Hardball Times"The primary aim of the book is well executed. In almost all cases the graphics are well thought out, and quickly communicate characteristics in the data, that would be difficult to convey using tables or summary statistics. The quality of the diagrams and the printing is very good. Each diagram comes with a clear explanation and many of the results are demonstrated usingwell known players."~Journal of Statistical Software"This is a book written by a statistician for the stats enthusiast about baseball. I say stats enthusiast and not statistician because little to no stats experience is required to understand the book. Likewise little expertise about baseball is assumed...The big appeal to Visualizing Baseball is the graphs...I learned a lot from Visualizing Baseball, and that's impressive given that the book is only 142 pages. I'm glad I spent the time to read it."~Jack Davis, Simon Fraser University