EAGLES BASEBALL

Baseball is an individual game masquerading as a team sport. It's a series of duels: pitcher against batter, catcher against stealing runner, outfielder against runner tagging up on 3rd, 1 out (to name a few). This makes it pretty exciting to watch, if you can get past the static surface. See the games within the game, the one-on-ones unfolding, and it's riveting. If you are a sucker for western movies, as I am, that duelistic thrill makes it a blast to play, too; plus, who doesn't like chasing, throwing, and hitting balls? To make matters even sweeter, note that baseball lends itself so well to data analysis: 162 games of regular season organized ball make for a large sample size; repeated, initially static situations unfolding in a limited variety of possible ways make for comparability. Diligent scorers were counting hits and stolen bases, computing batting averages and on-base percentages way back when, already, to be published in newspapers. Today, camera systems track virtually everything in the major leagues. Seriously. Outfielder route efficiencies, reaction times, to what extent the ball is hit at the barrel's sweet spot, to name a few. Baseball is data heaven. To capture a bit of that big-league data bliss, I used stats available for my rec league team, computed some advanced metrics, and rendered them in nostalgic teletext style. All to the tune of an 8-bit version of Take Me Out To The Ballgame that I composed myself. Take a peek!