Closeread Project: Launch Metrics in a Baseball Series

Overview

This repository contains materials for my Closeread project, an analysis of the 2024 Dodgers-Padres playoff matchup. The project includes:

• A Closeread article that explores the series' launch angle metrics, with a particular focus on home runs.
• A Shiny app providing interactive visualizations and analysis of launch angle data. Most of the visualizations in the Closeread article were retrieved from the app.
• Supporting data, a data retrieval script, and visualizations to build the article.

You can view the published Closeread article here: Closeread Article

The Shiny app is hosted here: Shiny App

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How to access the Closeread article locally

1. Install the Closeread extension from https://closeread.dev/.
2. Run index.qmd in RStudio

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How to Access the Shiny App locally

1. Navigate to the shiny folder
2. Open app.R in RStudio and click Run App.

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Data and Visualizations

• Data: The data used in the analysis is stored in the shiny/ folder. You can regenerate the dataset using the retrieve_data.R script.
• Visualizations: The visualizations, including those created by the Shiny app and others used in the Closeread article, are in the visualizations/ folder.

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Acknowledgments

This is my project for submission to the Closeread Prize. Big thank you to the Posit community for their help and putting this event together.

I would like to acknowledge Jim Albert, for his visualizations created on his blog post titled "Zack Wheeler’s Pitching in the 2023 NLCS" encouraged me to do a deep dive on the 2024 Dodgers-Padres playoff series. Albert's code used to generate that blog post's visualizations is found here.

I would also like to acknowledge Robert Frey, for his YouTube tutorial titled "Combine Video with a Savant Dataset!" and code demonstrated how to retrieve videos for each observation. Frey's code is available here.

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License

This project is licensed under the MIT License.