Visual Think Map

Cork Gaines wrote about the HR trend in baseball since testing started for performance enhancing drugs.  He presented a chart of the trend (surprising effective given his past charts), but he never answered his own question….is testing working? 

One way to determine the answer is through comparisons to other statistics.

I downloaded the season averages across both leagues and MLB in total from baseball-reference and built this interactive analysis.  The stats are order by batting stats then pitching stats.

This viz allows you to compare home runs to many other statistics through the selectors at the top right.  In addition you can:

1. View any two statistics to look for trends by choosing a primary measure and a comparison
2. Filter the time frame to all years, the pre-testing era, and the testing era (1993+)
3. Filter the leagues to focus your analysis
4. Click on a league at the bottom to highlight that league

In this initial view of HR vs. ERA, I see a couple of things:

1. HR are on a slow descent in the testing era, especially since 2000
2. ERA is in a similar decline, possibly indicating that improved pitches has had as much of an impact as testing
3. Batting Average has remained flat.  This means that the reduction in HR has not impacted BA.
4. Teams are simply scoring fewer runs, likely due to the reduction in long balls
5. The trend in complete games is despicable

What do you see?  Play around with the different stats and see if you can draw any conclusions.

This tip is a follow up to my post about asking How common is your birthday?.  In this post, I created a heat map and Matt Stiles asked me if I could write a tutorial showing how I did it so quickly in Tableau.

The steps are for creating the viz only.  I’m assuming you already connected to the data.

Step 1 – Hold the CTRL key and click the Day, Month and Rank fields (they should all be highlighted after you choose them)

Step 2 – Open the Show Me window on the toolbar and click on the Highlight Table option

You should see the view below with Days in the columns and Months in the rows.

Step 3 – Click on the swap icon to place Day on the row shelf and the Month on the column shelf

Step 4 – Right click on the Month column label and choose Hide Field Labels for Columns

Step 5 – Drag the Rank measure off of the Label shelf

You should now this view.

Step 6 – Double click the color shelf to show the Edit Colors window.  Choose Orange from the Pallet list and the Reversed option, then click OK.

You need to choose the reverse option if you want the highest ranking days to be the darkest.  You final view should look like this.

That’s it!  Six steps, less than 30 seconds, and you have a beautiful heat map. 

Give it a shot.

• Get the data here
• See my final viz (including interactivity) here

Matt Stiles posted a heat map on his blog yesterday that I thought was pretty well done.  I decided to get the data from NYTimes.com and recreate it in Tableau.

It takes under 20 seconds and under 10 clicks to create it in Tableau, more like 15 seconds if you’ve been using Tableau longer.

Matt chose a brownish color pallet, but I wanted to try lots of different colors.  Tableau makes is incredibly simple to try out many options very quickly.  I tested green, blue, gray and orange-blue pallets before settling on an orange pallet.  For my eye, the orange pallet made distinguishing the colors easiest.

Creating this as an interactive viz in Tableau allows you to provide the reader/viewer/interactor with more information.  Hover over your birthday and you will see exactly where it ranks.  Try it! 

In a static version, you’re left to guess at the approximate range in which it falls.

Check out Matt’s post and the comments.  There are some interesting insights from the readers including:

• Matt struggled with getting the colors just right using Illustrator.  With Tableau, it’s all built in.  There’s no need to tinker.
• Doctors apparently don’t like having their vacations disturbed.  Check out how around major holidays (July 4th, Thanksgiving, Christmas) there a fewer babies born.
• September clearly has many of the top days (in fact it has all of the top 10), but July and August aren’t far behind.  It looks like people conceive during all of those Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s parties.
• A reader noted that the 13th seems to be least common on average.  Perhaps that’s because many people see that as an unlucky day.

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1. Stockport Narratives

1. Checkout an Interview of me with Shrieking Violets & Shift-Space
2. Alice in Apps Land - Future Everything/Victoria Baths

1. Manuel Lima | Visual Complexity Interview

1. Checkout an Interview of me with Shrieking Violets & Shift-Space
2. My Android Apps
3. Visualthinkmap on Pinterest

Is there a way to embed a Tableau Dashboard in a PowerPoint presentation?

1. Download the add-in here
2. Extract the contents of the zip to a folder
3. Launch PowerPoint
4. Click on Tools | Add-ins to bring up the add-ins window
5. Click on Add to bring up the 'Add New PowerPoint Add-in' dialog box
6. Navigate to the folder where the contents of the zip file was extracted and select 'LiveWeb.ppa' and click on OK.
7. You might be prompted with the macro virus warning. Enable the macros. When the Add-in is properly loaded, it will display a 'X' against the add-in name.

1. From the browser address
2. Click on the Share button on the bottom left of the viz and copy the Email link

1. The viz might be a bit slower to load than when viewed in Public or Server.  This viz took about 10 seconds to load.
2. It can be tricky to get the mouse pointer to show up.  You’ll have to play around with it to see what I mean.