Kevin Dame is a writer and visual designer who brings sports information to life in new and meaningful ways. Visit his website and follow him on Twitter @kevintdame.
6 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
kds
13 years ago

Kevin,

I think the impact on the viewer is proportional to the area of each circle.  I also think that you are sizing the circles with the radius proportional to the fraction of usage of that pitch.  But the area is proportional to the square of the radius, so you are greatly increasing the perception of the usage of the most common pitch, usually the fastball.  For example, if a pitcher throws 70% fastballs, and 10% each curves, changeups and sliders, I think your circles would be proportioned 49 to 1.  Thus biasing the perception of how many fastballs were thrown vs the other pitches.  You should set the radius to the square root of the percentage.

Kevin Dame
13 years ago

Yes, I am realizing that in past word clouds, Score Tracker, and Paintomatic I have the same issue with area vs. diameter and the software I have been using views size as diameter, not area.  I’ve made the adjustments to the lee vs. price visuals and will continue that in future visuals.  Thanks for the input!  kd

J-Doug
13 years ago

If this gets updated and sent to my RSS feed one more time I’m unsubscribing from the HBT feed.

Kevin Dame
13 years ago

Apologies!  I had no idea updating the image sent out new RSS feeds.

Jonathan
13 years ago

Bubble charts are difficult to interpret no matter how you do it.

http://junkcharts.typepad.com/junk_charts/bubble_chart/

Ari Berkowitz
13 years ago

You could improve your paintomatics by separating 4-seamers and 2-seamers