How quickly do major league baseball teams settle into the neighborhood of their final winning percentage? Click on the team names to take a look.
The plot shows each team's winning percentage after each game of the 2009 season, along with a red dashed line indicating the team's overall winning percentage for the season. This plot shows how performance fluctuates during a season, and how quickly arrive at their performance level, while others start much better or worse than their final level.
Mouse over (or click) the team names to show data for that team.
I built this using Raphaël JS, a Javascript toolkit for creating vector graphics using SVG (or VML for IE). Additionally, some Ruby (with Hpricot) for screenscraping data and R to create some proof of concept plots.
James Kebinger blogs at monkeyatlarge.com and is senior developer at PatientsLikeMe