As we anticipate the start of the 2015 Major League Baseball season, we begin to speculate about player performance in the upcoming season. While most players are somewhat consistent year-to-year, there are some who have either breakout years or terrible seasons. These extreme years are a confluence of events throughout the season such as player health, skills peaking, and luck — which can be partially captured by BABIP.

To find the seasons with the greatest offensive output changes, I calculated year-to-year changes for players from 2000-2014 in a handful of offensive statistics: WAR, OPS, BABIP, and HR. Since playing time can fluctuate because of injury or being a rookie, I eliminated comparisons of seasons that a player had a high discrepancy in plate appearances.

To visually compare the seasons, I used slope graphs to show the year-to-year changes in the various statistics. Each graph is limited to players in the sample who had the largest changes in both the positive and negative directions. The left end of the line represents the player’s statistic in one year with the right end of the line representing the following year. A steeper the slope indicates the largest change between two years.
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The original graphics and text omitted the Brewers, Cardinals, and Yankees. They have since been corrected.

If you’re on Twitter, you’ve probably noticed the current hashtag contest, #FaceofMLB, being run by MLB Network or the RBI Baseball advertising campaign. Social media has become an important platform that Major League Baseball teams use to communicate with their fans, especially during the off-season when there aren’t baseball games to watch or attend.  Twitter has also been touted for allowing teams or players to interact directly with fans, removing the need for an intermediary.  To measure that interaction, I gathered the timelines and favorited tweets from all 30 MLB clubs’ official Twitter accounts from November 1, 2014 until February 10, 2015 and ran an engagement analysis.

This particular analysis looks at how much effort each MLB team makes to interact with its fans, and not simply which team has the most followers. I’m looking at engagement three different ways: volume of tweets, media sharing and fan interaction. First, let’s look at volume of tweets.

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