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August 4: And another... The 1907-08 Cubs.
August 4: Another assembling and dismantling chart. This time the 1985 Kansas City Royals.
August 3: Here's a new infographic, charting the assembling and dismantling of the Oakland A's that won three consecutive World Series.
August 3: I've been doing a few more of those pixelly baseball card-y drawings, so I made a new part of the site which I'm punningly calling Flopps. New ones: Ichiro, Manny Ramirez, Kevin Youkilis, Cito Gaston, and Jose Bautista.
July 28: Some more pixelly pictures of baseball players: Johnny Bench, Pedro Martinez, Bruce Sutter, Dave Parker, and Keith Hernandez.
July 27: A brief update re. the lack of new graphics. For the past six months, and particularly the last three months, I've been working on a Flip Flop Fly Ball book. Bar a bit of editing and tinkering, it's pretty much finished now, and will be published by Bloomsbury USA in spring 2011. Now the book is finished, I'll be putting up some new stuff on the site with a bit more regularity. In the meantime, here's a visual metaphor for the summer I've had: more-or-less ignoring everything else in favour of thinking about baseball. (Link takes you to my other, more arty site, flipflopflyin.com.)
And I've recently some pixelly pictures of baseball players. I kinda like the way they look, so hopefully, I'll be doing more of them in the near future. For now, I've done Jayson Werth, D-Backs-era Randy Johnson, and umpire Joe West.
April 26: If a fan were to watch every minute of ever Tigers game of the 2009 season, how much time would he/she spend doing so? how much time.
April 23: Just a quick silly one today: Welcome to Bradenia.
April 15: Jackie Robinson Day, so let's look at the last player on each team to wear his number.
March 26: I got to thinking, what would be the best state to live in if you wanted to watch as much baseball as possible. Arizona is the answer.
March 9: I can't say I'm surprised by this, but there's not been many openly homosexual major leaguers.
February 16: As well as there being more players in the majors than ever before in the last five years, the percentage of U.S.-born players is at its lowest point since the first few years of professional baseball. In the five year period from 2005-2009, only 72.9% of players were Born in the U.S.A.
January 26: Of all the infographics I've done for this site, this is the one that has taken the longest. I worked on this for three days flat, and the overwhelming feeling after doing it, aside from eye-strain, is how utterly marvelous baseball-reference.com is. I took a look at the site's player index, and added up what are the most common surnames in major league history, and the occurrence of each of the top forty surnames season-by-season in the majors.
January 21: Now that Mark McGwire has told us that it was the talent given to him by "the man upstairs" that helped him hit all those home runs, I figured I'd look at which of the top all-time home run hitters have admitted to using PEDs, been suspended for using PEDS, and suspected of using PEDs.
January 14: Back from a little break over the holidays, and looking forward to seeing what A-Rod will earn for the 2010 season.
November 17: I have no idea what this means in the grand scheme of things, but of all the current MLB team jerseys with pinstripes, only three of them (Cubs home, Yankees home, Brewers alternate) have the pinstripes on the sleeves as a separate piece that extends as far as the neck. I'm not explaining it very well, but you can see what I mean here. (Update: from the ever-wonderful Uni Watch on the glossary page, there are terms for the different styles. The Cubs, Yanks, and Brewers jerseys have raglan sleeves; all the others have set-in sleeves.)
November 17: I have some news. I'm pregnant! No, not really. It makes me very happy, and blows my mind a wee bit, to tell you that I've got a deal to produce a book based on the baseball infographics stuff from this site. After some sterling work done by my literary agent - the wonderfully-named Farley Chase - I've been hooked up with a great editor called Pete Beatty at Bloomsbury USA who I get along really well with, so I'm expecting it's going to be a fun experience making the book, which will be published in Spring 2011.
At the moment, the book is called "Flip Flop Fly Ball," but that might change. It's a name I'm not overly happy with for the web site, let alone a book, but we'll see. (Frankly, if I'd have thought that the site was going to be as popular as it has been - thank you! - I'd have chosen a more baseball-y name, rather than a name that's just a baseball-related pun on the name of my main web site.)
The book will essentially be like the web site, but with about 25,000 words thrown in, and maybe a few photographs and drawings, too. Somewhere in the region of 50% of the infographics that will go in the book will be exclusive, so I'll be trying to balance the needs of the book with also putting new stuff on the web site itself.
I'm super happy about this, especially - and I know I've brought this up before, so forgive me - especially because I'm a foreigner and a relative newcomer to wonderful world of baseball. I never imagined I'd love any sport more than soccer, but baseball sucked me in through a turnstile in the Bronx and on the other side I found a thoughtful pastime, an engrossing history, and an aesthetic joy waiting to be explored.
It's going to be so much fun for me immersing myself so completely in baseball while I produce this book, so I'd better apologise to my friends in advance: I know you don't care about Larry Yount's incredibly short career in Major League Baseball but I'm probably not going to be able to stop myself from telling you about it.
November 11: After the Phillies beat the Yankees in game 5 of the World Series, I'm sure most Yankee fans found themselves cautiously thinking that at least that loss meant their team could clinch at home. I began to wonder how many times teams have been able to celebrate at home, in front of their own fans.
November 6: I've updated the Best Record in Baseball graphic to include the 2009 playoffs, where the Yankees became just the third World Series winners since 1995 to have also posted the best regular season record.
October 14: A new one today looking at how many innings were pitched by starters and the bullpen during the 2009 regular season.
October 13: A while back I did a map of the Kansas City Royals' 2009 schedule, to see how much travelling an MLB team does during a season. I've done two more related maps: for the 1959 Kansas City Athletics and the 1886 Kansas City Cowboys. While there's not as much travelling as there is today, check out the length of the road trips that the Cowboys went on...
October 7: I've been wanting to do this one for a while; expanding on the AL and NL history I'd previously done, and including all the major leagues that have existed. Frankly, it fried my brain a little bit trying to get it all together. There's possibly some errors, so if you spot any, feel free to email and tell me.
September 23: A couple of English soccer things today: a (hopefully) easy-to-follow guide looking at every team that has been in the Premier League since it came into being in the 1992/93 season, and which divisions they are/have been in during that time; and a look at assembly and disassembly of the undefeated 2003/04 Premier League championship-winning Arsenal team. As always, thumbnails and links for all the non-baseball stuff is on the left at the bottom of the page.
September 15: As the Yankees seem on course to having the best record in baseball this season, I thought I'd look at how that figures in playoff success since the advent of the Wild Card.
September 9: With the playoffs just around the corner, I thought I'd look at exactly how many off days teams get when they get to the post season compared to their regular season off days. I guess we can all agree it's ridiculous...
September 7: A bit of a departure from baseball stuff today with a look at the history of current NFL franchises. I don't really know a huge amount about football, I've seen a couple of games, and watched some on TV, but researching the franchises' history has acted as a nice swift history lesson. I had to pick a team, of course, and for mostly aesthetic reasons, I'll be rooting for the Cleveland Browns. (In case you're wondering where the thumbnail/link is on the left, the non-baseball stuff lives at the bottom of this page.)
September 3: I've been working on this team names Venn diagram for a while; just not been able to get it right. Now, though, it's kinda looking okay, so I thought I'd stop tinkering and put it online. As far as I can tell, it seems to be about right. The origins of some team names are a bit hazy and lost in time, so if there are any glaring errors, please let me know.
September 2: Work and regular life has got in the way of being a baseball nerd over the past few weeks, so it's been a while. Today, I take a look at the history of Taiwanese baseball history, with an accompanying map.
August 3: Turner, MT: twelve miles from the Canadian border, but which is its local major league team?
July 29: I kinda feel for Blue Jays fans and former Expos fans; they, more often than not, have to listen to another country's national anthem before a game. But how many times has "O Canada" had the moment all to itself? And, apart from the bank accounts of the MLB teams, who exactly benefits from interleague play?
July 23: Just a silly one today: a "how to" guide for youngsters who are finding it difficult to remove the New Era stickers from their ballcaps. And there's an updated version of the smoking graphic; apparently one can go outside Fenway to smoke and subsequently reenter the park. And an update of the Major League parks pie charts including some naming rights corrections. Thanks to those who emailed me about Busch, Wrigley, and Turner. Hopefully the pie chart is a bit clearer now.
July 16: Three new things today. A look at how many lefties, righties, and switch-hitters there are in the majors; a simple examination of Nolan Ryan's 27-season major league career; and which ballparks allow smoking, and which ballparks make smokers like me pray that the game doesn't go to extra innings.
July 13: A new thing looking at how many of the 17,056 all-time major league players have got into the Hall of Fame so far.
July 13: A couple of corrections: misspellings of Tuscon corrected in a couple of places (thanks David); and a couple of retired numbers added, two 31s (Greg Maddux and Fergie Jenkins of the Cubs) (thanks Brian). Once again, I'd like to thank those who've taken the time to email me with thoughts and corrections. I'm planning on a few more corrections when I get a chance; I'm trying to find a new apartment at the moment, so new stuff might be sporadic in the near future.
July 5: After reading an article in the New York Times today about the 1998 home run chase, I kinda felt their chart was lacking the chase element; just showing, as it did, the total HRs by a bunch of players. My chart shows how the chase went day-to-day.
July 4: New infographic looking at the overall strength of MLB teams since 1995. Thanks again for the emails, there's a few corrections to existing graphics to do that I hope to take care of this week.
June 29: A few corrections posted today. Errors on the Washington D.C., Really fantasy baseball, and Yankees retired numbers graphics have been corrected. Thanks to those who pointed those errors out. I've also added the play-by-play for the Wu-Tang vs. E Street game, if you're interested.
June 27: Last night I visited one of the new NY stadiums for the first time to see a Subway Series game at Citi Field. A rain delay followed by one of the most magnificent skies I've ever seen in my life. Photos here.
And I noticed that all players in MLB were paying tribute to Michael Jackson by wearing one glove. Nice touch, Bud.
June 24: A quick note to say thank you to everyone who's visited the site. I'm overwhelmed by the reception it has received. Thanks to all those sites that have linked to it and people who've tweeted about it. I've had about 300 emails in the past few days, so apologies if I take a while to reply to you. Those of you who have enquired about prints or posters: hopefully that's something I'll sort out in the not-too-distant future. Those of you who've pointed out discrepancies in the infographics: thanks so much for taking the time to do so, I will get around to amending the errors soon.
Meanwhile, I went on a tour of Safeco Field today. Couldn't resist taking this photo.
August 4: Another assembling and dismantling chart. This time the 1985 Kansas City Royals.
August 3: Here's a new infographic, charting the assembling and dismantling of the Oakland A's that won three consecutive World Series.
August 3: I've been doing a few more of those pixelly baseball card-y drawings, so I made a new part of the site which I'm punningly calling Flopps. New ones: Ichiro, Manny Ramirez, Kevin Youkilis, Cito Gaston, and Jose Bautista.
July 28: Some more pixelly pictures of baseball players: Johnny Bench, Pedro Martinez, Bruce Sutter, Dave Parker, and Keith Hernandez.
July 27: A brief update re. the lack of new graphics. For the past six months, and particularly the last three months, I've been working on a Flip Flop Fly Ball book. Bar a bit of editing and tinkering, it's pretty much finished now, and will be published by Bloomsbury USA in spring 2011. Now the book is finished, I'll be putting up some new stuff on the site with a bit more regularity. In the meantime, here's a visual metaphor for the summer I've had: more-or-less ignoring everything else in favour of thinking about baseball. (Link takes you to my other, more arty site, flipflopflyin.com.)
And I've recently some pixelly pictures of baseball players. I kinda like the way they look, so hopefully, I'll be doing more of them in the near future. For now, I've done Jayson Werth, D-Backs-era Randy Johnson, and umpire Joe West.
April 26: If a fan were to watch every minute of ever Tigers game of the 2009 season, how much time would he/she spend doing so? how much time.
April 23: Just a quick silly one today: Welcome to Bradenia.
April 15: Jackie Robinson Day, so let's look at the last player on each team to wear his number.
March 26: I got to thinking, what would be the best state to live in if you wanted to watch as much baseball as possible. Arizona is the answer.
March 9: I can't say I'm surprised by this, but there's not been many openly homosexual major leaguers.
February 16: As well as there being more players in the majors than ever before in the last five years, the percentage of U.S.-born players is at its lowest point since the first few years of professional baseball. In the five year period from 2005-2009, only 72.9% of players were Born in the U.S.A.
January 26: Of all the infographics I've done for this site, this is the one that has taken the longest. I worked on this for three days flat, and the overwhelming feeling after doing it, aside from eye-strain, is how utterly marvelous baseball-reference.com is. I took a look at the site's player index, and added up what are the most common surnames in major league history, and the occurrence of each of the top forty surnames season-by-season in the majors.
January 21: Now that Mark McGwire has told us that it was the talent given to him by "the man upstairs" that helped him hit all those home runs, I figured I'd look at which of the top all-time home run hitters have admitted to using PEDs, been suspended for using PEDS, and suspected of using PEDs.
January 14: Back from a little break over the holidays, and looking forward to seeing what A-Rod will earn for the 2010 season.
November 17: I have no idea what this means in the grand scheme of things, but of all the current MLB team jerseys with pinstripes, only three of them (Cubs home, Yankees home, Brewers alternate) have the pinstripes on the sleeves as a separate piece that extends as far as the neck. I'm not explaining it very well, but you can see what I mean here. (Update: from the ever-wonderful Uni Watch on the glossary page, there are terms for the different styles. The Cubs, Yanks, and Brewers jerseys have raglan sleeves; all the others have set-in sleeves.)
November 17: I have some news. I'm pregnant! No, not really. It makes me very happy, and blows my mind a wee bit, to tell you that I've got a deal to produce a book based on the baseball infographics stuff from this site. After some sterling work done by my literary agent - the wonderfully-named Farley Chase - I've been hooked up with a great editor called Pete Beatty at Bloomsbury USA who I get along really well with, so I'm expecting it's going to be a fun experience making the book, which will be published in Spring 2011.
At the moment, the book is called "Flip Flop Fly Ball," but that might change. It's a name I'm not overly happy with for the web site, let alone a book, but we'll see. (Frankly, if I'd have thought that the site was going to be as popular as it has been - thank you! - I'd have chosen a more baseball-y name, rather than a name that's just a baseball-related pun on the name of my main web site.)
The book will essentially be like the web site, but with about 25,000 words thrown in, and maybe a few photographs and drawings, too. Somewhere in the region of 50% of the infographics that will go in the book will be exclusive, so I'll be trying to balance the needs of the book with also putting new stuff on the web site itself.
I'm super happy about this, especially - and I know I've brought this up before, so forgive me - especially because I'm a foreigner and a relative newcomer to wonderful world of baseball. I never imagined I'd love any sport more than soccer, but baseball sucked me in through a turnstile in the Bronx and on the other side I found a thoughtful pastime, an engrossing history, and an aesthetic joy waiting to be explored.
It's going to be so much fun for me immersing myself so completely in baseball while I produce this book, so I'd better apologise to my friends in advance: I know you don't care about Larry Yount's incredibly short career in Major League Baseball but I'm probably not going to be able to stop myself from telling you about it.
November 11: After the Phillies beat the Yankees in game 5 of the World Series, I'm sure most Yankee fans found themselves cautiously thinking that at least that loss meant their team could clinch at home. I began to wonder how many times teams have been able to celebrate at home, in front of their own fans.
November 6: I've updated the Best Record in Baseball graphic to include the 2009 playoffs, where the Yankees became just the third World Series winners since 1995 to have also posted the best regular season record.
October 14: A new one today looking at how many innings were pitched by starters and the bullpen during the 2009 regular season.
October 13: A while back I did a map of the Kansas City Royals' 2009 schedule, to see how much travelling an MLB team does during a season. I've done two more related maps: for the 1959 Kansas City Athletics and the 1886 Kansas City Cowboys. While there's not as much travelling as there is today, check out the length of the road trips that the Cowboys went on...
October 7: I've been wanting to do this one for a while; expanding on the AL and NL history I'd previously done, and including all the major leagues that have existed. Frankly, it fried my brain a little bit trying to get it all together. There's possibly some errors, so if you spot any, feel free to email and tell me.
September 23: A couple of English soccer things today: a (hopefully) easy-to-follow guide looking at every team that has been in the Premier League since it came into being in the 1992/93 season, and which divisions they are/have been in during that time; and a look at assembly and disassembly of the undefeated 2003/04 Premier League championship-winning Arsenal team. As always, thumbnails and links for all the non-baseball stuff is on the left at the bottom of the page.
September 15: As the Yankees seem on course to having the best record in baseball this season, I thought I'd look at how that figures in playoff success since the advent of the Wild Card.
September 9: With the playoffs just around the corner, I thought I'd look at exactly how many off days teams get when they get to the post season compared to their regular season off days. I guess we can all agree it's ridiculous...
September 7: A bit of a departure from baseball stuff today with a look at the history of current NFL franchises. I don't really know a huge amount about football, I've seen a couple of games, and watched some on TV, but researching the franchises' history has acted as a nice swift history lesson. I had to pick a team, of course, and for mostly aesthetic reasons, I'll be rooting for the Cleveland Browns. (In case you're wondering where the thumbnail/link is on the left, the non-baseball stuff lives at the bottom of this page.)
September 3: I've been working on this team names Venn diagram for a while; just not been able to get it right. Now, though, it's kinda looking okay, so I thought I'd stop tinkering and put it online. As far as I can tell, it seems to be about right. The origins of some team names are a bit hazy and lost in time, so if there are any glaring errors, please let me know.
September 2: Work and regular life has got in the way of being a baseball nerd over the past few weeks, so it's been a while. Today, I take a look at the history of Taiwanese baseball history, with an accompanying map.
August 3: Turner, MT: twelve miles from the Canadian border, but which is its local major league team?
July 29: I kinda feel for Blue Jays fans and former Expos fans; they, more often than not, have to listen to another country's national anthem before a game. But how many times has "O Canada" had the moment all to itself? And, apart from the bank accounts of the MLB teams, who exactly benefits from interleague play?
July 23: Just a silly one today: a "how to" guide for youngsters who are finding it difficult to remove the New Era stickers from their ballcaps. And there's an updated version of the smoking graphic; apparently one can go outside Fenway to smoke and subsequently reenter the park. And an update of the Major League parks pie charts including some naming rights corrections. Thanks to those who emailed me about Busch, Wrigley, and Turner. Hopefully the pie chart is a bit clearer now.
July 16: Three new things today. A look at how many lefties, righties, and switch-hitters there are in the majors; a simple examination of Nolan Ryan's 27-season major league career; and which ballparks allow smoking, and which ballparks make smokers like me pray that the game doesn't go to extra innings.
July 13: A new thing looking at how many of the 17,056 all-time major league players have got into the Hall of Fame so far.
July 13: A couple of corrections: misspellings of Tuscon corrected in a couple of places (thanks David); and a couple of retired numbers added, two 31s (Greg Maddux and Fergie Jenkins of the Cubs) (thanks Brian). Once again, I'd like to thank those who've taken the time to email me with thoughts and corrections. I'm planning on a few more corrections when I get a chance; I'm trying to find a new apartment at the moment, so new stuff might be sporadic in the near future.
July 5: After reading an article in the New York Times today about the 1998 home run chase, I kinda felt their chart was lacking the chase element; just showing, as it did, the total HRs by a bunch of players. My chart shows how the chase went day-to-day.
July 4: New infographic looking at the overall strength of MLB teams since 1995. Thanks again for the emails, there's a few corrections to existing graphics to do that I hope to take care of this week.
June 29: A few corrections posted today. Errors on the Washington D.C., Really fantasy baseball, and Yankees retired numbers graphics have been corrected. Thanks to those who pointed those errors out. I've also added the play-by-play for the Wu-Tang vs. E Street game, if you're interested.
June 27: Last night I visited one of the new NY stadiums for the first time to see a Subway Series game at Citi Field. A rain delay followed by one of the most magnificent skies I've ever seen in my life. Photos here.
And I noticed that all players in MLB were paying tribute to Michael Jackson by wearing one glove. Nice touch, Bud.
June 24: A quick note to say thank you to everyone who's visited the site. I'm overwhelmed by the reception it has received. Thanks to all those sites that have linked to it and people who've tweeted about it. I've had about 300 emails in the past few days, so apologies if I take a while to reply to you. Those of you who have enquired about prints or posters: hopefully that's something I'll sort out in the not-too-distant future. Those of you who've pointed out discrepancies in the infographics: thanks so much for taking the time to do so, I will get around to amending the errors soon.
Meanwhile, I went on a tour of Safeco Field today. Couldn't resist taking this photo.