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Into the Strike Zone: A-Rod's 600th Homer

On Wednesday, Alex Rodriguez became only the seventh player in Major League Baseball to hit 600 career home runs in a game against the Toronto Blue Jays. The road was difficult, having gone 46 at-bats without a homer. However, once he found the pitch he wanted, it was history. Take a look at every pitch he saw during the game below.


As you can see, Shaun Marcum (the Blue Jays pitcher) wanted to keep the ball away from A-Rod as much as possible. However, even the tiniest slip of the finger in a 90 MPH pitch can result in the perfect, slightly inside fastball.

Thanks to Jesse Gebhardt for this amazing viz.

Category Sports

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Very cool viz, Ross. Where did you get the pitch location data and outcome? And like the lefty/righty orientation. Very creative display technique.

Can't you switch the Batter Image with the player selected (or at least a cutout of the face)?

I'm kidding. Nice Work.

Haha thanks Kyle- Jesse Gebhardt actually made the viz. He got the data here: http://webusers.npl.illinois.edu/~a-nathan/pob/tracking.htm. I would let you know more about it but thats about the full extent of my knowledge.

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