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	Graphical Presentation of Batting Statistics for Major League Baseball Players and Teams Historic and Current Stats

This project started while I was on an environmental field project in central Alaska in 1993. I had just rediscovered my interest in baseball, coinciding with the rediscovery of my 1969 - 1971 baseball card collection. I had a copy of Baseball Week and I was trying to familiarize myself with the current (1993) players, and I found the published stat tables overwhelming in the quantity of data. I wanted an answer to a simple question: who were the best hitters at the time.

I started doing some algebra and plotting various stats against other stats, and eventually hit on the bases per out formulation, and subsequently I discovered that lines of constant OR plotted on a chart with Batting Average on the x-axis made nice contours, like a topo map. By plotting players on the chart, the best players were at the "highest elevation". This gave me the means to get a rapid assessment of relative hitting performance of the (then) current players, and it was a natural extension to plot the Hall of Fame, active players, etc.

For the first three years at least, I transcribed data from various publications and the baseball encyclopaedia into spreadsheets, and used an old graphing program called Grapher. The first couple of charts were actually created by hand. This was very tedious, and about all I could produce was an annual year end compilation of the top players, which I gave to my sports-enthusiast friends in Anchorage, most of whom thought I was nuts for the amount of work involved. It is a source of great amazement to me that when this began the internet was not even in the public consciousness. The development of the OR system and charts coincided with the increasing availability and user-friendliness of the internet. The baseball stat study actually pushed me to explore the early internet access modes. Anybody out there remember Terminal Mode?

I now use various internet resources for data and Sean Lahman's database which can be found at www.baseball1.com. I still process the data through spreadsheets, but with some Vbasic programming I can now create the charts in MSExcel, and with some software from the internet, convert the charts from Excel to GIF.

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