Now That is Cool

Studes, on his Baseball Graphs website/blog:

...the notion of "sabermetrics" is still held in contempt by many baseball fans. Even though many sabermetric insights are simple common sense, most fans (and even sportswriters) choose to ignore them.

I believe one of the problems is the way baseball information is presented. Baseball analysts like to research things in minute detail, presenting their results in nuanced numeric tables. The problem is that most of these tables are unintelligible to the average fan. And very few people have tried to bridge the gap between the things we've learned about baseball and the way we present baseball statistics.

So that's what I'm trying to do with this site. Over the years, I've learned that information is best processed through pictures, or in the case of numbers, graphs. In the business world, accountants and actuaries use numeric tables, but real business decisions makers use graphs and conceptual charts.

I tend to agree with him.  Ever since my early days in graduate school, I often thought that graphs in a journal article were much more persuasive than a table of numbers.

And now, via  Geoff Shackelford, I've come across an animated graphic that displays the change in Tiger Woods' driving distance and accuracy compared to other PGA Tour players from 2000 to 2005.  The creator of the graphic, Paul Kedrosky explains:

As you can see, despite the supposed improvement in his game, Tiger's driving accuracy has fallen off much more than his driving distance has increased. At the same time, the gap between Woods and the mass of his professional competitors is much smaller than it was five years ago -- the animation shows this nicely, with a great splotch of competitors all closing in on Woods over the period.

As Eric McErlain at Off Wing Opinion suggests, it would be nice to see the identities for some of the blue dots, specifically Phil Mickelson or Vijay Singh or Ernie Els.  I'm also curious about the blue dot on the far left side of the graphic.  Over the last five years, his accuracy has remained very high, while his length off the tee has hardly changed -- nearly every PGA Tour player is longer than he was five years ago.  Fred Funk was my first guess, but after taking a look at his stats, even he appears to be too long off the tee (he may actually be the second dot from the left that appears to get longer -- though still a short hitter -- and straighter).