The new baseball season has just started and like every year the race is on to win the World Series. Baseball is probably the richest sport when it comes to statistical data and analysis, yet for a sport so rich in statistical data a search in the custom google data visualization search engine, and the infovis image search database yielded very few results. These are some of the more interesting baseball visualizations I found around.

Salary vs Performance - Ben Fry, one of the authors of the Processing programming language uses his freely available tool to visualize which baseball teams are spending their money well, and how does each team position changes over the course of the season? The last applet uploaded looks at the teams and their salaries in 2007.

Baseball Visualization Tool - This is a commercial tool that uses a pie chart to guide the manager whether to pull the pitcher or not. The fuller the pie chart the more the pitcher should be changed.

Baseball race - This visualization tracks the progress of each team in a season as the season progresses. The dataset used for this application starts from 1901 and continues till the present day. The data is freely available from Retrosheet, a baseball scores database.

Bivariate Baseball Score Plots - The bivariate baseball score plots present summary information for MLB teams game scores. The scores are visualized using a bivariate baseball score plot with each game being a point in a two-dimensional grid.

Chernoff Faces baseball managers - A visualization coming fresh off the press that uses Chernoff faces to display baseball manager stats. The features of the face like face height, width, nose size, mouth curvature, etc. change according to the values of the attributes they are representing.

Mitchell Report Visualization - In December 2007 a 409 page report was published detailing the use of steroids in Major League Baseball. A social network of connections between players and trainers mentioned in the Mitchell Report was created using Social Action, a tool developed by the HCI Lab of Maryland University.

Bill James - A video interview and a newspaper interview with the most popular baseball statistician, and also the inventor of the term used to describe baseball analysis - Sabremetrics.