Mapping Out Judge’s Big Flies
So, the other day, I got this idea stuck in my head. You know, watching Aaron Judge launch baseballs into orbit got me thinking – where do all those things actually land? Or at least, where are they hit from? I figured it’d be cool to see them all plotted out on a map. Like, a visual record of his power across different ballparks. Sounded simple enough, right?
First hurdle: getting the actual data. This turned out to be trickier than I thought. I started digging around online, looking for some easy list of all his home runs with locations. You find plenty of stats, sure – date, opponent, distance maybe – but not neat little coordinates ready for a map. Forget about exact landing spots, that’s just not consistently tracked in a way I could easily grab. I ended up having to piece stuff together. Found some game logs and databases, mostly just listing the date, park, and sometimes the reported distance. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a start.
Getting the Ballparks Plotted
Okay, so I had a list: date, park, maybe distance. The next step was figuring out how to actually put this on a map. I’m no coding genius, so I looked for something straightforward. Played around with a couple of free online mapping tools first. Some were okay, but felt a bit clunky for what I wanted. I remembered doing some basic stuff with spreadsheets before, mapping addresses, so I thought maybe I could get the ballpark addresses and try that. Finding the stadium locations was easy enough. A quick search gave me the latitude and longitude for each MLB park he’s hit a homer in.
So, I started punching those coordinates into my list, matching them up with the home runs. This took a bit of time, just manually associating each homer with the correct ballpark location. It was kinda tedious, just copying and pasting coordinates, making sure I didn’t mix up Fenway with Yankee Stadium.
Making the Map Visual
Once I had the list somewhat organized – each homer tied to a park location – I tried plotting them. My first attempt just put a dot on each stadium where he’d hit one. That was… okay? But it didn’t really show the volume. Yankee Stadium just had one dot, same as a park where he hit only one homer.
- I needed a way to show how many homers per park. Maybe make the dot bigger for more homers?
- Or maybe cluster them somehow?
- Could I color-code them by year? Or distance?
I decided to keep it simple. I ended up using a tool where I could just upload my spreadsheet. It put a point for every single home run. So, Yankee Stadium had a whole bunch of points clustered on top of it, while other parks had fewer. It wasn’t super sophisticated, no fancy lines showing the ball flight or anything. Just points on a map representing each dinger at its source ballpark.
What I Got Out Of It
Looking at the final map, it was pretty neat. You could really see the concentration at Yankee Stadium, obviously, but also get a sense of his power across all the different parks he’s visited. It wasn’t some groundbreaking data science project, just a fan’s way of visualizing something cool. Took more manual work gathering and cleaning up the data than I expected. But seeing all those points spread across the map? Yeah, kinda satisfying. Gives you a different perspective than just seeing the numbers in a list.
