The other day I saw this video of a 14 year old high school basketball sensation. He’s billed as “The Next LeBron” who was in turn billed as “The Next Michael Jordan.” What caught my eye is that they all wear number 23 on their jersey (until LeBron moved to The Heat, at least).
When I was a kid I played lots of sports, and the best basketball player on my team was always #23 and the best football player was always #34 (Bo Jackson, Walter Payton, etc). So that got me to wondering what the “desirable” numbers are in other sports. I asked about other sports on twitter and #10 is clearly the best number to wear in soccer, and maybe #9 for hockey (Richard, Hull, Howe).
I wanted to figure out which jersey numbers have been the best historically, and baseball is the obvious sport to turn to for this, since data is so reliable and readily available. So I downloaded the career stats for a little over 17,000 players (which I think is every baseball player ever) and decided to see which are the best jersey numbers over all.
For each player, I got their career batting average and their jersey number, which proved to be harder than I expected. For example, Johnny Damon wore #18 from 2002-2009 (during his best seasons with the Red Sox and Yankees), but has also worn 51, 8, 22, and 33. So to make it a little easy on myself, I just got the number that they wore on the most teams. Johnny Damon has had 7 numbers on 6 teams, but wore #18 on 4 teams, so I’m associating him with #18.
For scoring the jersey number, I’m taking the mean of career batting averages for all players who wore that number, weighted by the number of plate appearances per user. I perform this weighting so that someone like Roberto Clemente who hit .317 over 10,211 plate appearances would have more influence than someone like Buster Posey, who hit .311 with only 1,324 plate appearances. That’s a bit of a mouthful so here’s some math that might make more sense:
\[ S_j = \sum_{i=1}^{N_j} \frac{p_{j,i} b_{j,i}}{\sum_{k=1}^{N_j}p_{j,k}} \]
Where \( S_j \) is the score for jersey number \( j \), \( b_{j,i} \) and \( p_{j,i} \) are respectively the batting average and number of plate appearances for the \( i^{th} \) player who wears jersey number \( j \), and \( N_j \) is the total number of players who wore jersey number \( j \). I was also sure to limit the data set to \( p_{j,i} \geq 500 \) and \( N_j \geq 5 \). There were also a lot of older (~100 years ago) players whose number I couldn’t gather, so I dropped those as well. This narrowed the data set down to about 3,500 players.
The next thing to consider is that since I’m using lifetime batting average and number of plate appearances to rank players, what I’m really doing is ranking hitters. Many pitchers in the National League end up with over 500 at bats, but their batting average is just going to hurt the overall ranking of their jersey number. The following graph makes this crystal clear. The y-axis shows the jersey number, and the x-axis is the batting average for each player.
So once we remove the pitchers, here’s where each number ranks in terms of weighted batting average:
There are some clear winners here. The number 51 is a bit of an outlier because there are only 10 batters with that number who meet the minumum plate appearance requirement, but the list includes Ichiro Suzuki (.321) and Bernie Williams (.297) among others with high batting averages. Here are the top players who wore #4, a more “classic” number:
name plate_appearances batting_average Rogers Hornsby 9480 0.358 Lou Gehrig 9663 0.340 Riggs Stephenson 5134 0.336 Dale Alexander 2736 0.331 Babe Herman 6228 0.324 Luke Appling 10254 0.310 Hack Wilson 5556 0.307 Paul Molitor 12167 0.306 Smead Jolley 1815 0.305 Mel Ott 11348 0.304Not a bad group to be in. There are also some clear loser numbers, but they’re mostly higher numbers which I think are often worn by pitchers.
Here are the the 10 best and worst lifetime batting averages:
name number plate_appearances batting_average Rogers Hornsby 4 9480 0.358 0 Ted Williams 9 9788 0.344 0 Bill Terry 3 7108 0.341 0 Lou Gehrig 4 9663 0.340 0 Tony Gwynn 19 10232 0.338 0 Riggs Stephenson 4 5134 0.336 0 Al Simmons 7 9518 0.334 0 Paul Waner 24 10766 0.333 0 Dale Alexander 4 2736 0.331 0 Stan Musial 6 12717 0.331 0 ... Corky Miller 37 575 0.188 0 J.R. Phillips 17 545 0.188 0 Bill Plummer 8 1007 0.188 0 Gus Gil 18 538 0.186 0 Brandon Wood 32 751 0.186 0 Drew Butera 41 531 0.183 0 Kevin Cash 17 714 0.183 0 Tommy Dean 3 594 0.180 0 Ray Oyler 1 1445 0.175 0 John Vukovich 16 607 0.161 0If you’re a baseball fan, you can see that the bottom is all populated by pitchers, because no .890 batter would ever get 950 at bats in the majors. In fact, baseball’s obvious bias towards keeping good hitters and cutting poor hitters is obvious when you plot lifetime batting average against total plate appearances:
So what number would I wear if I were a pro baseball player? I can’t NOT choose #9, even though it’s retired by the Red Sox.
Also, all of the code and results for this blog post are available on my github page.
We treat desire as a problem to be solved, address what desire is for and focus on that something and how to acquire it rather than on the nature and the sensation of desire, though often it is the distance between us and the object of desire that fills the space in between with the blue of longing. I wonder sometimes whether with a slight adjustment of perspective it could be cherished as a sensation on its own terms, since it is as inherent to the human condition as blue is to distance? If you can look across the distance without wanting to close it up, if you can own your longing in the same way that you own the beauty of that blue that can never be possessed? For something of this longing will, like the blue of distance, only be relocated, not assuaged, by acquisition and arrival, just as the mountains cease to be blue when you arrive among them and the blue instead tints the next beyond. Somewhere in this is the mystery of why tragedies are more beautiful than comedies and why we take a huge pleasure in the sadness of certain songs and stories. Something is always far away.
— Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost (via dontoverthink)
And then when I think about it, I realize we probably shouldn’t, and most likely won’t, digitize them and put them on Youtube or Vimeo or wherever.
It would ruin the memories.
— Memories - great post by Andy
Artisanal gritmaker at #scratchbread / spicy broccoli, crisped bacon, almond romanesco, pesto, egg
And then this arrived! Thanks, Kimberly and Franklin!
Dear Londoners,
I am coming to Europe this summer to visit my old school in Italy (I spent my junior year abroad in Florence). While I’m all the way over there on that side of the pond I would like to play a concert or two.
Where should I play? I usually travel to a distant place because a…
(via soundboy)
As longtime readers of Continuations know, I have been a strong proponent of the Benefit Corporation. I am therefore thrilled that Delaware, which is the home to almost all venture backed corporations, has introduced Benefit Corporation legislation. This will allow companies to charter or…
Yes.
Frustrated with reforms failing in Congress? Real change can’t happen when elections can be bought. Let’s fix it. http://letsfreecongress.org/
(This is my thesis project at the School of Visual Arts Interaction Design Program, an attempt to use interaction design for political advocacy.)
A few weeks ago, I read Cap Watkins’ amazing blog post on failure, Formspring - A Postmortem. The post touched on so many nuances and issues that are rarely spoken of, so I asked him if he’d be willing to come speak to my Entrepreneurial Design class at the School of Visual Arts.
Cap graciously accepted and came to visit us last week, giving an incredibly open and honest talk, not just about the Formspring blog post, but also about his career arc. As he wrapped up, I asked him one more question. His latest blog post Be Kind picks up the story from there.
And as if the gods of the Internet wanted to endorse Cap’s post in an even more emphatic manner, Daniel Burka, the subject of Cap’s post, independently wrote a similar blog post and unknowingly published it on the same day.
They’re both a wonderful read. Thanks, Cap and Daniel.
