Weekly Viz 2018-02-05

US Baseball Players Ethnicity

About Makeover Monday

MakeoverMonday is a social data project: “Each week we post a link to a chart, and its data, and then you rework the chart. Maybe you retell the story more effectively, or find a new story in the data. We’re curious to see the different approaches you all take. Whether it’s a simple bar chart or an elaborate infographic, we encourage everyone of all skills to partake. Together we can have broader conversations about and with data.”

Starting from Jan 08, 2018, I decided to put aside one hour on Monday weekly to create some visualization and find some insights from the data.

The datasets are published each week at: MakeoverMonday Datasets.

Makeover Monday 0205

This week’s data is about the US baseball player ethnicity. As is during the Black history month, we are specially interested in the percentage of African American baseball players over time. The original research and visualization could be found in this link. Bascially, we are seeing a decline of percentage of African American baseball players since 1980s.

My Visualization

Besides the percentage of players by ethnicity and percentage of WAR by ethnicity over time, one question I am thinking about is that is this trend corresponding with the total US population ethnicity trend? Or, in other words, is the decline of African American players due to the decrease of African American population in the US? To answer this question, I found US population demographics data, and for each ethnicity, compared the percentage of baseball players / WAR with the percentage of population.
As usual, I take about one hour working on this visualization.
Below is my dashboard:

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Please notice that all the visualizations are designed for desktop view, so it is recommended to view them on a desktop device.

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Insights

• While the percentage of African American baseball players has seen a decline since 1980s, the percentage of Latino players has been increasing;
• When we compare the trend of total US population proportion and that of baseball players proportion, we learn that althrough the percentage of African American US population has always been increasing, the percentage of African American baseball players declined since 1980s, indicating that the decline is not explanable by the change in total population;
• Meanwhile, the increase of Latino US population has been in line with the increase of Lantino baseball players;
• Of course, all the above observations are not enough to draw any conclusion about the decline - it could be caused by the transformation of baseball strategy, people’s interests on baseball, or other factors.

Follow this link to find more weekly vizzes :)