Creating HexBin Plots

Kirk Goldsberry has attracted a lot of attention with his “geographic” shot charts for NBA players. These are examples of “hexbin” plots. Luckily, the hexbin package for R provides the ability to quickly similar plots. Here, we’ll show how to create a few quick hexbin plots using the MLBAM data.

Carlos Gomez has been in the news recently – let’s focus on him. We’ll start by loading the openWAR data for 2013, and locating Gomez’s MLBAM player ID. [Of course, you can also do this with a web query.]

From this subset, we can compute how many balls Gomez caught while playing CF in 2013. In the MLBAM data, the fielderId field contains the ID of the player who first fielded the ball.

This confirms that Gomez caught each of these 390 balls. Note that we can also calculate statistics when Gomez was playing CF, including the…