Flip Flop Fly Ball is a totally different kind of ‘odd ball’ baseball site. For example, take a look at this graphic that shows you the directions that homeplate faces in every major league park – and let me know if you thought it would look like this.
Cool site with a mix of inspired and awkward graphics! The one on retired numbers
http://www.flipflopflyin.com/flipflopflyball/info-retirednumbers.html
speaks to some of the limitations of univariate statistics. ’42′ comes up a whopping 31 times because it was JACKIE ROBINSON’s number, retired for all teams in his honor.
(…and not because 42 was Super Computer’s answer, in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe, to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything …YIKES!…was it really retired? Uh oh….)
Eliminating this outlier and tallying the rest in numerical order suggests that single digit numbers are unusually preponderant among the retired. A statistical test could confirm this. (But it’s July. Please.) Graphing these numbers with some covariates (age/record of players, year of retirement, years since first use) would be more interesting than the univariate tally.