Baseline Stat Cherrypicker....

[Baldkin]

http://benschmidt.org/mvp/#-WPitching

 

Read the entire page, then play around, that thing is so, so cool.

 

Baseball edition

 

Statements of the form "Jack Morris won more games in the 1980s than anyone else" are fascinating. Although they're true, they rest on cherry-picked years that may or may not illustrate a deeper truth in context. (And we see them all the time: see my college degrees cherry-picker for another area.) For baseball, there are thousands of statements just like the ones here that you can make about any single cumulative stat over the game's history--10,296, to be exact. Printed out, all the statements you could make with the data here (which now includes individual franchise and league leaderboards) would take about 120,000 pages, single-spaced. This visualization lets you hone in on the patches of interest.