Articles by Martin Monkman

Same name, different bird

June 2, 2019 | Martin Monkman

What do we mean when we see a bird and say that it’s a robin? A simple description would be a small brownish bird with a red breast. But that’s a superficial description, and when we say “robin” what we mean depends on your location; you don’t ...
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MLB run scoring trends: Shiny app update

February 25, 2019 | Martin Monkman

The new Major League Baseball season will soon begin, which means it’s time to look back and update my run scoring trends data visualization application, built using RStudio’s shiny package. You can find the app here: https://monkmanmh.shinyapps.io/MLBrunscoring_shiny/ The github repo for this app ... [Read more...]

MLB run scoring trends: Shiny app update

February 25, 2019 | Martin Monkman

The new Major League Baseball season will soon begin, which means it’s time to look back and update my run scoring trends data visualization application, built using RStudio’s shiny package. You can find the app here: https://monkmanmh.shinyapps.io/MLBrunscoring_shiny/ The github repo for this app ... [Read more...]

EARL conference recap: Seattle 2018

November 23, 2018 | Martin Monkman

I had the pleasure of attending the EARL (Enterprise Applications of the R Language) Conference held in Seattle on 2018-11-07, and the honour of being one of the speakers. The EARL conferences occupy a unique niche in the R conference universe, bringin... [Read more...]

Smoke from a distant fire

August 31, 2018 | Martin Monkman

Forest fires and air quality August 31, 2018 It was recently announced that during 2018, British Columbia has seen the most extensive forest fire season on record. As I write this (2018-08-31) there are currently 442 wildfires burning in British Columbia. These fires have a significant impact on people’s lives–many areas ...
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Updated Shiny app

March 26, 2017 | Martin Monkman

A short post to alert the world that my modest Shiny application, showing Major League Baseball run scoring trends since 1901, has been updated to include the 2016 season. The application can be found here:https://monkmanmh.shinyapps.io/MLBrunscoring_shiny/.In addition to the underlying data, the update removed some of ... [Read more...]

Subtitles and captions with ggplot2 v.2.2.0

November 15, 2016 | Martin Monkman

Back in March 2016, I wrote about an extension to the R package ggplot2 that allowed subtitles to be added to charts. The process took a bit of fiddling and futzing, but now, with the release of ggplot2 version 2.2.0, it’s easy.Let’s retrace the steps, and create a chart ...
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Adding a subtitle to ggplot2

March 14, 2016 | Martin Monkman

A couple of days ago (2016-03-12) a short blog post by Bob Rudis appeared on R-bloggers.com, "Subtitles in ggplot2". I was intrigued by the idea and what this could mean for my own plotting efforts, and it turned out to be very simple to apply. (Note that Bob's ...
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Book review: Storytelling With Data

March 6, 2016 | Martin Monkman

by Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic (2015, Wiley)The Sabermetric bookshelf, #4One of the great strengths of R is that there are some robust (and always improving) packages that facilitate great data visualization and tabular summaries. Beyond the capabilities built into the base version of R, packages such as ggplot2 (my favourite), lattice, ... [Read more...]

Left-handed catchers

July 23, 2014 | Martin Monkman

Benny Distefano – 1985 Donruss #166 (source: baseball-almanac.com) We are approaching the twenty-fifth anniversary of the last time a left-handed throwing catcher appeared behind the plate in a Major League Baseball game; on August 18, 1989 Benny Distefano made his third and final appearance as a catcher for the Pirates. Distefano’s accomplishment was ... [Read more...]

Fair weather fans, redux

September 1, 2013 | Martin Monkman

Fair weather fans, redux Or, A little larger small sample On August 11 the Victoria HarbourCats closed out their 2013 West Coast League season with a 4-3 win over the Bellingham Bells. In an earlier post, written mid-way through the season after the 'Cats had played 15 home games, I created a scatter ... [Read more...]

Fair weather fans? (An R scatter plot matrix)

July 18, 2013 | Martin Monkman

The Victoria HarbourCats are roughly half way through their inaugural season in the West Coast League, and currently lead the league in average attendance.  In a recent conversation with one of the team's staff, he mentioned that after the first game in early June, the fans started to come out ... [Read more...]

Annotating select points on an X-Y plot using ggplot2

June 16, 2013 | Martin Monkman

or, Is the Seattle Mariners outfield a disaster?The BackstoryEarlier this week (2013-06-10), a blog post by Dave Cameron appeared at USS Mariner under the title “Maybe It's Time For Dustin Ackley To Play Some Outfield”. In the first paragraph, Cameron describes to the Seattle Mariners outfield this season ... [Read more...]

MLB runs allowed by team

February 24, 2013 | Martin Monkman

Or, How good were the Maddux/Glavine-era Braves?In this on-going series of posts about run scoring in Major League Baseball, for this installment I'll turn the equation around and look at runs allowed.  In order to account for the changing run scoring environments, the runs allowed by individual teams ... [Read more...]

Run production, one team at a time

February 17, 2013 | Martin Monkman

In a previous post, I used R to process data from the Lahman database to calculate index values that compare a team's run production to the league average for that year.  For the purpose of that exercise, I started the sequence at 1947, but for what follows I re-ran the code ... [Read more...]

Gist for previous posts

February 17, 2013 | Martin Monkman

The more I use it, the more I understand the benefits and value of Github as a code-sharing resource. The gist found here is the R code for my posts on run scoring trends by league (found here, here, and here).  I will continue to use Github for t... [Read more...]
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