How has the percentage of various types of hits (singles, doubles, triples, home runs) changed over time in baseball history? Are there any overall trends? This vignette examines these questions in a simple analysis of the Batting
data.
Batting
dataFirst, we load the Batting
data from the Lahman
package. We also need to load the dplyr
package so that we can sort and organize the data. The batting data has much more than we need.
library("dplyr")
data(Batting, package="Lahman")
str(Batting) #take a look at the data
## 'data.frame': 107429 obs. of 22 variables:
## $ playerID: chr "abercda01" "addybo01" "allisar01" "allisdo01" ...
## $ yearID : int 1871 1871 1871 1871 1871 1871 1871 1871 1871 1871 ...
## $ stint : int 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 ...
## $ teamID : Factor w/ 149 levels "ALT","ANA","ARI",..: 136 111 39 142 111 56 111 24 56 24 ...
## $ lgID : Factor w/ 7 levels "AA","AL","FL",..: 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 ...
## $ G : int 1 25 29 27 25 12 1 31 1 18 ...
## $ AB : int 4 118 137 133 120 49 4 157 5 86 ...
## $ R : int 0 30 28 28 29 9 0 66 1 13 ...
## $ H : int 0 32 40 44 39 11 1 63 1 13 ...
## $ X2B : int 0 6 4 10 11 2 0 10 1 2 ...
## $ X3B : int 0 0 5 2 3 1 0 9 0 1 ...
## $ HR : int 0 0 0 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 ...
## $ RBI : int 0 13 19 27 16 5 2 34 1 11 ...
## $ SB : int 0 8 3 1 6 0 0 11 0 1 ...
## $ CS : int 0 1 1 1 2 1 0 6 0 0 ...
## $ BB : int 0 4 2 0 2 0 1 13 0 0 ...
## $ SO : int 0 0 5 2 1 1 0 1 0 0 ...
## $ IBB : int NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA ...
## $ HBP : int NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA ...
## $ SH : int NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA ...
## $ SF : int NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA ...
## $ GIDP : int 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 ...
We take the full Batting data frame and select what we need to use. We want a data frame that shows us the year, followed by total hits for that year, and then singles, doubles, triples and home runs.
Singles is not a column in this data frame, so we need to add it by taking total hits (H
), and subtracting the other types of hits from it. The mutate
function does the math for us and adds a column in.
batting <- Batting %>%
# select the variables that we want left after we filter the data
select(yearID, H, X2B, X3B, HR) %>%
# select the years from 1871+
filter(yearID >= 1871) %>%
group_by(yearID) %>%
# summarise_each(funs(sum(., na.rm=TRUE))) %>%
summarise_all(funs(sum(., na.rm=TRUE))) %>%
# we summarize by year, and then na.rm takes care of 0's in the data
mutate(X1 = H-(X2B+X3B+HR)) %>% #create a column for singles
# we eventually want these as a percentage of hits, so we can do the math now
mutate(Single = X1/H*100) %>%
mutate(Double = X2B/H*100) %>%
mutate(Triple = X3B/H*100) %>%
mutate(HomeRun = HR/H*100)
Now, just select the variables we want to plot
bat <- batting %>%
select(yearID, Single, Double, Triple, HomeRun)
#this makes a nice looking data frame before we move on
We have our data in wide format right now. We need it to be in long format so that we can use ggplot to make a graph. The reshape2
package does this easily. We want to melt our data frame, but keep YearID as the ID variable (meaning that it stays put in it’s own column). Then, we look at the data to make sure it’s what we want.
To look at hits per year in a line graph, we will use ggplot2
. The data is called bat_long
, and our variables of interest are year (yearID
), the percentage of each type of hit (value
), and the type of hit (variable
).
We can use geom_line
and then make titles with xlab
, ylab
, and ggtitle
. Instead of using the default scaling, we can set our own scale_x
and scale_y
.
The guides
function tells ggplot what we want from our legend and overrides the default. We want singles at the bottom (so we reverse the legend which automatically does the opposite), and we want to set our own title for the legend.
library(ggplot2)
hitsperyear <- ggplot(bat_long, aes(x=yearID, y= value, col=variable)) +
geom_line() +
xlab("Major League Baseball Season") +
ylab("Percentage") +
ggtitle("Hits by Type in Major League Baseball") +
scale_x_continuous(breaks = c(1870, 1885, 1900, 1915, 1930, 1945,
1960, 1975, 1990, 2005, 2020 )) +
scale_y_continuous(breaks = c(0, 25, 50, 75, 100))+
guides(colour=guide_legend(reverse=TRUE,
aes(ggtitle= "Type of Hit")))
hitsperyear
We can see the overall trends more clearly by adding linear regression lines for each type of hit.
So, the percentage of singles and triples have declined over time, while the percentage of doubles and home runs have increased. Can you think of any reason for this?
Here are some questions to provoke further analyses of these data sets. If you find something interesting, post it in a Github Gist or forward it to Team Lahman as in a Lahman issue.
This analysis uses total hits for all players in all teams over time. What problems might there be with this analysis?
AB
) in a given year?