Craig Robinson (1)

What is this? Art? Humor? Sports? Math? – or all of the above? With baseball season starting, I found it irresistible to recommend “Flip Flop Fly Ball”, which reminds me in some ways of the beautiful series of graphical exemplar books by Edward Tufte, and in others of Michael Lewis’ MoneyBall (the book, more than the movie, although the movie was ok). I suggest this for teachers of science because of the intimate relationship between baseball and statistics and because of the witty, inventive, and highly entertaining bar graphs, scatter plots, photographs, maps, Venn diagrams, and limited associated commentary. The author is an English artist who has fallen in love with the American pastime, not only in its US major league manifestation, but also in the minor leagues and the Mexican, Japanese, and Korean leagues. His entertaining blog has recently been commentaries on the Mexican league games he has been watching before the US “Opening Day”. Robinson apparently likes the “high socks” look (especially with stirrups), loves baseball history, Ted Williams, the Molina brothers, and quantitative comparisons and he hates “the wave”, steroid-enhanced players, the New York Yankees, baseball caps with the manufacturer’s sticker still attached, and John 3:16 signs. Did you know that Turner, Montana is the American town furthest from a major league team, or that there have been 32 players named Harris in the major leagues since 1880?… (mere)

This amazing book should be in the library of any baseball fan who likes to see things presented graphically. Robinson has a genius for coming up with visually striking and convincing ways to present data; one of the first charts, of pro baseball history in the U.S., shows the earliest teams at the top with colored bars extending down to show the length of their existence, different colors for the various leagues, and it's the little touches that make it -- the Cincinnati Red Stockings off by themselves at the top left, and their pre-league rivals (Brooklyn's Eckfords and Atlantics, the Troy Haymakers, and so on) continuing down farther but changing color as they joined the NAPBBP (in pink), and the slight overlaps to show where teams contributed to the makeup of more than one later team. There's even an inset paragraph about the Continental League, which never actually came into existence. There's an "etymological Venn diagram" about team names ("Braves" comes under both "Bragging" and "Native American"), there's a graph of the Yankees' retired numbers ("the whole roster should have three-digit numbers by the year 2220"), there's "Ballpark Orientation" showing which direction the batter is facing in each park, there's a chart of 100-win seasons showing how far each team got... Well, you get the idea. Docked half a star for too much rambling in the essays ("At the Greyhound station in Milwaukee to get an overnight bus to the Twin Cities, I took an empty seat next to a hipster-looking guy...").… (mere)