Visual-Baseball Press Releases New Baseball Pennant Race Book

Detroit, MI

The Visual-Baseball Press announces the release of Ken Cherven's new book http://www.amazon.com/MLB-Pennant-Races-1901-1968-Baseballs/dp/0615903401/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1392863205&sr=1-2 MLB Pennant Races, 1901-1968: A Visual Analysis of Baseball's Pennant Races. Cherven, the founder and curator of http://visual-baseball.com The Visual-Baseball Project, provides a rich visual look at pennant races in the pre-divisional era, using an array of charts and text to create a dashboard for each season for both the American and National Leagues. The book is currently available through Amazon.com.

The growing influence of information visualization in how society views and processes data helped provide inspiration for creating the book. "Younger generations are accustomed to viewing charts and infographics in place of traditional text," states Cherven. "I wanted to create a book that merges the rich historical data baseball provides with some sophisticated visualization approaches that will appeal to current and future fans. With this book, and another to follow for the 1969-2013 seasons, I hope to bridge the gap between baseball data and modern visualization and draw readers from both fields."

The book is divided into multiple sections based on specific eras of the game, with each section containing a visual overview that summarizes the patterns within the period. 1901-1920 corresponds with the Dead Ball era, while the 1921-1940 section covers the inter-war period and the advent of the home run as an offensive weapon. The 1941-1960 (1941-61 for the National League) pages detail the World War II and post-war seasons, a period considered by many to be the golden era of baseball. Finally, 1961-1968 (1962-68 in the National League) covers the expansion years prior to the advent of divisional play.

In addition to traditional charts that track the progress of each pennant race from April through October, the book uses box plots, horizon charts, dot plots, and heatmaps to shed light on how specific seasons and periods evolve. Using these tools, readers can begin to visually comprehend the differences between pennant winners both within and across seasons. "While there is still an essential place for the traditional text-based baseball statistics, I hope to help expand the dialogue through this book and my continued work on the Visual-Baseball Project site," said Cherven.

To view interactive versions of every pennant race, select this link: http://visual-baseball.com/wordpress/?gallery=pennant-races-2.

About the Visual-Baseball Press

The Visual-Baseball Press is the publishing arm of the Visual-Baseball Project, a website dedicated to the creative visualization of baseball information. The site features a wide range of projects using network graphs, interactive charts, and other visualization approaches to provide new insights into current and historical data.

Ken Cherven is the founder and curator of the site. In addition to maintaining the site, Ken works as a Senior Analyst in the automotive sector, and has previously authored a book titled Network Graph Analysis and Visualization with Gephi.

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