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Cool Chart: A's Skipper Bob Melvin Is The King Of Platoons
Over at Sports on Earth, Jack Moore created this great graphic to demonstrate just how crazy A's manager Bob Melvin is about platoons. The green rectangles represent consecutive games in which the same hitter held the same spot in the batting order, with blanks showing a change from the previous gam...
Chart: How Does Your NFL Team Stack Up On Offense and Defense?
Over at Advanced NFL Stats, Brian Burke has put together a great visualization plotting the offensive and defensive performance of the league's 32 teams. It's nothing too complicated—basically a NYMag Approval Matrix for football—but it reveals a lot about the state of the NFL through Week 5....
What's More Improbable: The Jaguars' +28 Line Or An 11-Inch Penis?
The murmurs began last week, before the Broncos put up 51 points against the Cowboys and the Jaguars lost second-overall pick Luke Joeckel to injury. And when the dust of Week 5 had settled, sure enough, the betting line for Jaguars at Broncos was set at 28 points, which is a lot....
What If The NBA And MLB Played An NFL-Style Season?
A big part of the NFL's appeal is all that "any given Sunday" stuff—a team like the Chiefs can come out of nowhere and look like world-beaters, while a team like the Giants can spend the first quarter of the season playing like the last reel of Horse Feathers. A lot of this uncertainty can be attri...
Infographic: Are College Sports In The Midst Of A "Shaq Boom"?
Over on his blog, Ken Pomeroy makes a convincing case that we're in the midst of a "Shaq Boom." The babies named "Shaquille" that were born in O'Neal's heyday in the '90s are now turning 18 and entering college basketball. The name "Shaquille" first entered the list of top 1,000 baby names in 1991 (...
Cool Charts: NFL Team Salaries By Position
This week, The Guardian released an excellent interactive graphic on the salaries (technically, the cap hit) of NFL players by team and position. Franchises that look like cheapskates are generally heavy in rookie contracts–nothing in the NFL is as cost-effective as talented young blood–but it's sti...
Infographics: Which NFL Teams Are This Season's Biggest Road Draws?
With the NFL season set to kick off in mere hours, Vivid Seats has released data on which teams are the best and worst road draws–in terms of ticket prices–for the 2013 season. The Broncos come out on top, increasing ticket prices by an average of 53.7 percent when on the road. While Denver has abov...
Infographic: Which MLB Team Has The Most Expensive Beer, Per Ounce?
We've given plenty of grief to the Yankees for their misleading advertising, but new data from the Team Marketing Report—which tracks sports attendance costs for its annual fan index—show that Boston has the most expensive beer at $0.60 an ounce, followed by St. Louis, Toronto, and Washington. The A...
Is Wladimir Balentien Having The Most Dominant Baseball Season Ever?
Wladimir Balentien, the impeccably named, once-heralded Mariners prospect who hit just .221 in three seasons in the majors before retreating to Japan, is smacking the everloving shit out of baseballs right now. Friday he hit his 52nd home run—three shy of the Nippon Professional Baseball record—and ...
Dukies, Single People, And Women: Data Show Who Sucks At Picking Brackets
In a feel-good "enormous corporations share user-data" story, Facebook and Yahoo have joined forces to give us a rare look into the demographics that drive March Madness picks. Drawing on data from the 60,000 users who used Facebook to login to Yahoo's College Tournament Pick 'Em, Michael Bailey (cr...
How'd Those Fans Get There? A Deeper Dive Into The Facebook NFL Fandom Map
After weeks of us awkwardly guessing who wanted to watch which NFL games, Facebook finally used its terrifying trove of user data and made the map that no one else could. In our original post, we pointed out some of the more surprising fan pockets, but the data deserve a deeper dive. ...