I'm a sucker for a good visualization.
At my day job, I have the benefit of working with many smart people who are doing wonderful things in the healthcare field. One of them, James Kebinger, has a knack for taking a bunch of numbers, making sense of them, and producing incredible visualizations (like his award-winning visualization of the MBTA system).
I was excited when James gave me a sneak peek of his latest visualization the other day—mostly because he was taking his skills to the fine field of baseball. His visualization plots a team's winning percentage game-by-game. It is very interesting to see which teams settled around their eventual winning percentage early (like the Red Sox and Tigers), those who saw their percentage climb for most of the year (like the Yankees and Twins), and those who saw a decrease most of the season (like the Dodgers and—of course— the Mets).
Here's an excerpt from James' post about the visualization:
I created an interactive plot to look at the results for the 2009 season, team by team.
Take Boston. Seen below, Boston started slow, but pretty quickly arrived at their ultimate winning level.
On the other hand, the Yankees started even slower, and in fact didn’t reach their ultimate winning level until very late in the season.
Be sure to check out the full interactive visualization.