Retirement
If you’ve peeked at the Beyond the Box Score footer lately, you may have noticed this:
It’s been quite a while since I’ve written anything at BaseballTwit. For the last year-plus, I’ve been writing for Beyond the Box Score, providing historical analysis and infographics for the influential saber-slanted baseball site. I started off contributing on a “when I can” schedule, but later officially took on a weekly column.
Writing and visualizing for Beyond the Box Score was a great diversion from the insanity of my personal life. Unfortunately, time to devote to this diversion has been increasingly difficult to come by. So, this week, I reluctantly relinquished my column.
Am I done writing? I sure hope not. In fact, BtB’s manager Justin Bopp told me I’ll always have a platform to share my work. And that’s good, because I’ll have a lot to say when Hall of Fame season rolls around again.
I’m very proud of the work I did for BtB. Some of my favorite posts/projects include:
- The Hall of wWAR — I developed a metric called wWAR (Peak-Weighted Wins Above Replacement) and decided to see what the Hall of Fame would look like if it was populated simply by this one metric. I designed and built an interactive timeline of this alternate Hall (and the 66 players who were bumped from the original Hall of Fame) and wrote detailed position-by-position induction posts for the site.
- Interactive Hall of Fame Timeline — Before I did the Hall of wWAR timeline, I created a similar timeline for the “real” Hall of Fame.
- Interactive Hall of Fame Ballot — Another one of my favorite visualizations I did was the WAR/WAE/WAM “bullseye” (originally published to commemorate Ron Santo). I used the bullseyes on this click-and-draggable Hall of Fame ballot.
- Double Plays Erased 16.5% of Jim Rice’s Offensive Value — I loved the simplicity of this visualization. It tells so much just by using two circles. I wrote another post where I used the same visual for several other players.
- SaberCards — I loved baseball cards as a kid. But come on, they have archaic stats like batting average and wins and losses on the back. What would a card catered towards stat geeks look like? Well, a little something like this. (Here are a couple alternate designs.)
I really enjoyed writing for BtB and I’m grateful that the crew of Sky Kalkman, Erik Manning, and Dan Turkenkopf got me in the door. Hopefully I won’t be a stranger to the SaberWorld. There’s more I’d like to explore—I just need to carve out the time to do it.
Thanks so much to everyone who read a post, commented, or said something nice to me about my visualizations. It really means a lot.