March 21, 2008
Fun With Networks
I've been playing with trying to map player relationships by the number of seasons they spent together on a team. I've come up with some interesting graphs, and the PNG viewer that comes with the version of pylab I'm using let's one drill down deep into dense data. Unfortunately, I can't find a program like that for a web browser. If anyone knows a plugin that allows you to view png files like that in a browser, let me know.
In the mean time, here are the players who were teammates for five seasons or more on the Yankees during the Joe Torre era. The closer they are to one another, the longer they were teammates. Click on the graph for a larger image.

As you can see, right at the center is the quartet of Williams, Jeter, Posada and Rivera. The group to the lower left represents the champions of the late 1990s. The group at the top represents the late free agent additions, and the group to the lower right the transition between the two. I'll be playing with these more as I find better ways of displaying the data.
Posted by David Pinto at
08:37 AM
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methink you need a day off, Mr. Pinto.
I love things like this, but I think I don't understand how the representation works. You say, "The closer they are to one another, the longer they were teammates." But you have Matsui closer to Giambi than Jeter is. I know Matsui and Giambi haven't been teammates longer than Giambi and Jeter. So how do the distances represent times?
James,
I'll have to look into that. My guess is that it's an artifact of trying to display three dimensional data in a two dimensional space, or trying to project a sphere on a flat surface. The Giambi-Mussina-Matsui triangle might be Greenland.
Dude, you're moving into "Beautiful Mind" Russell Crowe/John Nash territory here. Slowly walk away from this, my friend. Slowly walk away.
Yes, James, but we know that Matsui hasn't been teammates with Giambi longer than he (Matsui) has been teammates with Jeter!
PNG files work out of the box in firefox. I would suggest downloading a program called irfan view. That program can do anything to a file, including seamless conversion to a more widespread format like JPEG. If you are going for something more complicated, then perhaps a Java program needs to be authored.
This chart format seems a little off. Why not do an x-y interval plot, years on the vertical, players on the horizontal (sorted by first year), and draw an interval of the years the player was on the team. If you're willing to resort to get better overlap it would look even better.