Nov 2024 - May 2025
Exploring 150+ Years of MLB History
This project explores 150+ years of MLB history with SQL and Python through compelling visualizations and narrative insights. It uncover how geography, economics, generational shifts, and team strategy have built and shaped the Major League Baseball across generations.
Overview
This project dives deep into over 150 years of Major League Baseball (MLB) history, using data to explore player origins, team behaviors, and career patterns. Powered by SQL and Python, the analysis unpacks how the game has evolved across generations, while offering insights into everything from regional talent pipelines to franchise investment trends and player performance shifts. The project provides a rich narrative, complete with visualizations and stories, showing how MLB’s ecosystem has transformed over time.
Approach
The project starts by importing data for over 18,000 players into a PostgreSQL database. Using advanced SQL queries, I cleaned and analyzed the data to uncover fascinating patterns across regions, decades, and even specific colleges. The goal was to trace the rise and fall of talent in different states and universities, while finding trends in player career lengths, handedness, and demographics.
I then turned the data into compelling visualizations with Seaborn and Matplotlib, illustrating how MLB teams have managed payrolls, player retention strategies, and the physical evolution of players over the years. This helped create a clearer picture of how team strategy and player development have adapted to shifting economic and social landscapes.
Talent Trends: Analyzed talent pipelines by college, state, and decade to understand shifts in where players came from and how team priorities evolved.
Franchise Strategy: Visualized franchise payrolls and retention strategies to discover how teams have adjusted to changes in the economic and competitive landscape.
Player Characteristics: Explored diverse player characteristics, including batting/throwing handedness, career span, and demographic patterns.
Storytelling with Data: Delivered a fully annotated Jupyter Notebook, bringing the data to life through narrative insights and rich visualizations.
Outcome
Beyond the numbers, this project tells a dynamic story about the trends that have shaped MLB. The data highlights generational shifts and the ongoing transformation of the game, making it a compelling overview of how the sport has evolved over time.
