When I was introduced to the iPad last year as part of my work with pixSmix, I had certain hopes for the device. While it has been a great experience for reading academic PDFs, surfing the web, and playing Plants vs. Zombies, I hadn’t found an application that really made me reach for the iPad first. Just in time for baseball season, that may have changed.
Pennant is an interactive visualization depicting Major League Baseball from 1951 through 2010. It is a gorgeous visual treatment of the kind of statistical data I enjoy browsing, from over 115,000 baseball games. You can view any team’s complete history, any given season, or re-play-by-play individual games. Since this is an interactive application drawing from time-based data, this is a great tool for exploring how the fate of teams changed over the course of a year or game. It costs $4.99 in the App Store, but it is great to have as a demonstration of what the iPad can be (as well as anticipating future updates).
The application was initially developed as a thesis project at Parsons by Steve Varga. Pennant was launched courtesy of data drawn from Retrosheet and The Baseball Databank. Varga created his own API to manipulate the raw data, to leverage new calculations that support the visualizations. He may release that massaged data to other applications in the future as an open API. More of Varga’s work is available at Vargatron.
The application isn’t perfect, of course:
- When searching the 1983 season for a game I went to, I was annoyed that going back to the season timeline always reset me to the middle of the season, not the game I was viewing.
- Navigation is clunky if you want to move laterally. There isn’t a way to look at the detail for a game and simply flick to the next game in that view (there should be).
- Keyword search is non-existent, making it impossible to search for references to Roger Clemens pitching against my White Sox and explore just those games.
- There is no player tracking. The data is available to follow an individual player through his career, like you can with an entire team. Imagine re-living the now tainted 1998 home run race between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa.
- Customization isn’t supported, nor are personal histories or favorite games. I would love to go through my old stack of scorecards and ticket stubs and curate all of the games I attended in person. When player timelines are supported, it would be a great tool for documenting my annual fantasy baseball rosters.
Pennant is currently only available on the iPad and requires a wireless connection, so it may not yet be practical for taking to ball games to look up stats. It is, however, quite satisfying for replaying games I attended, like the time the White Sox knocked a young Roger Clemens out in the fifth inning or the “Ryne Sandberg” game on June 23, 1984.
Most of my applications are for work productivity, games, or news aggregation. I like the possibilities of specialized apps that allow easy and enjoyable exploration of large data sets in a specific domain. The tablet is wonderful for this kind quick interaction and could be quite useful to support journalism, tourism and attending conferences. This one is particularly well done, and I hope some updates are coming in time for the 2011 regular season.
