Section 435 An Atlanta Braves blog. From the upper deck at Turner Field.

Posted
11 June 2008 @ 4pm

Tagged
Cutting Edge Analysis

Key Stat: Record by Uniform (Update)

A few weeks ago, I reported on our record by jersey. A lot has changed in that time period:

  • The Braves started experimenting with mixing and matching caps and jerseys on the road.
  • The AJC cribbed my story.
  • The Braves started sucking everywhere they play.

So here’s an update on those numbers:

Uniform W L PCT RS RA
Blue jersey, Blue cap 2 9 0.182 36 46
White jersey, Blue and Red cap 21 9 0.700 160 116
Red jersey, Tomahawk cap 4 2 0.667 34 26
Grey jersey, Blue and Red cap 4 11 0.267 61 66
Grey jersey, Blue cap 1 1 0.500 10 4
Blue jersey, Blue and Red cap 0 1 0.000 2 6

And, for the remainder of the season you’ll be able to keep track of these numbers using my handy Atlanta Braves Record by Uniform site.

For those more technically inclined or who like to hear boring, whiney, drawn out stories, click the read more link to read the sob story about how I finally got this online.

After compiling the first stats by hand, I decided that this would be really, really easy to track if I wrote a little application. Having a (very) little experience (i.e., I did the tutorial last summer) with the Django framework and a girlfriend who is a world-renowned Django expert, I used Django to write up a handly little application to keep track of the stats. That took about an hour and a half.

Then, I spent 10+ hours, over the next few weeks trying to get Django running on my web host. Finally, I gave up on that and decided to rewrite the application in PHP using CakePHP (which is crazy backwards). I spent about 3 hours on that and got as far as writing my models and getting the scaffolding up when I decided to take one more shot at getting Django running. And in about 5 minutes I figured out what was wrong in all the tutorials and missing from all the websites that I had been referencing.

Then I had to setup the databases, settings, et cetera for my production environment. That also took longer than it took to write the application the first time.

In the meantime, since the Braves started mixing and matching jerseys, I decided on taking Maura’s advice to change the application so that the uniform selections were a database field so I could easily add new combinations. That took an hour or two to add a model and rewrite my views to handle that.

Finally, rather than keying in the data by hand, I decided that I would import the schedule from the CSV file available at the Braves website. I spent a few hours writing a script to parse that data before I figured out that I couldn’t import games that hadn’t been played yet without rewriting the application.

So then I copied all of the games thus far from our schedule on baseball-reference.com and used NeoOffice’s (awesome) fixed format text importer to parse the data into opponent and score, added the date and time from the braves.com CSV schedule, tweaked the schedule for rain delays, and finally added in the uniform combinations from my original Google doc. All in all, importing the data took about 4 hours. (When I could’ve keyed it by hand in thirty minutes.)

So that’s what I’ve been up to the last three weeks instead of actually writing good blog posts or having a life outside of baseball games.


7 Comments

Posted by
Jbinatl
11 June 2008 @ 7pm

I’m not entirely sure but I was sure we won a game Campillo pitched in Milwaukee with the Red/Blue Cap, Blue Jersey combo.

Am I wrong?

Any way can we just win tonight?
Even nicer would be tomorrow when I’m in Chicago at the game supporting my “Road Woe” Braves.


Posted by
Shaun
11 June 2008 @ 8pm


Posted by
David
12 June 2008 @ 1am

Hey Shaun… how are you going to categorize tomorrow’s game when they’re wearing the 1948 Boston Braves jerseys? =o) Might be a one game anomaly. =o)

http://chicago.cubs.mlb.com/news/press_releases/press_release.jsp?ymd=20080527&content_id=2780248&vkey=pr_chc&fext=.jsp&c_id=chc


Posted by
Jbinatl
13 June 2008 @ 1pm

Braves in throwback 1948 Boston uniforms….. 0-1.

And I have the photo to prove it.

Oh well.

Thanks for verifying that stat for me, Shaun. Peace to you, and keep posted for my Wrigley Field post I’ll get up here soon.


Posted by
Jbinatl
13 June 2008 @ 1pm

I was wrong anyways. It was grey jersey w/ blue road cap. Ok. I got it now. I thought it was something like that.


Posted by
Shaun
13 June 2008 @ 1pm

Sorry you had to witness such a debacle. I’ll look forward to your Wrigley Field post.


Posted by
shaun
14 June 2008 @ 12pm

@David - Sorry, Akismet didn’t like you.

As I said, in my latest version, uniform is a model, so I just added 1948 throwback. And any time they screw around with the combinations again, I can just add another one.


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