Spotlight: The Chicago Cubs 'Century of Suck'.

As the Cleveland Cavaliers approach another meltdown capping off 45+ years of total sporting ineptitude for their city, it is important to remember the team that owns the market on sports-suckiness. The folks at Infoshots have compiled this wonderfully styled timeline of just how Chicago has managed a complete Century of Suck. Being a young pup myself, I only remember a few of these sucky moments, so it is neat (and a bit sad) to see how long they've been going on.

On a similar and not exactly timely note, last fall I threw this small graphic together about how the Cubs and White Sox have managed to both miss the postseason since their joint appearance in the World Series in 1906.

City totals after formula input.

After deciding on the final formula for determining pro sports success, the next step was to input all the data. Not exactly an easy task (ok, actually a monumental one), but with a few organized spreadsheets, we managed to input winning percentages and postseason results and output totals for all the sports franchises cities. Here's how the city totals stacked up (green is football, red is baseball, purple is basketball, blue is hockey):



And in case anyone is interested in seeing what the spreadsheets look like, here they are. Obviously, a database backend would have made this all much quicker, but unfortunately I have a background in design not programming. Still, a bit of elbow grease and Excel still does the trick. I'm thinking about making these databases available on Google docs eventually so you all can play with the numbers, but for now, here's a preview:

Weekly Graphic.

Spotlight: Wonderful ad campaign.

Just wanted to take a few seconds after recovering from Lebron James' epic shot to give a shoutout to a wonderful new basketball ad campaign featuring some neat infographic work.

The first comes from the incredibly creative/witty/quick minds at the alternative basketball blog FreeDarko. I first found out about them through their infographic book called FreeDarko presents The Macrophenomenal Pro Basketball Almanac: Styles, Stats, and Stars in Today's Game. The book is full of wonderful art and some very smart analysis of NBA statistics. Apparently, I was not the only one that was impressed with their work. Not sure how it happened, but Adidas came calling and the results are this very clever advertisements.



The other video, this one about 'Creator' Derrick Rose, can be viewed here.

If those weren't enough to keep you in the NBA playoff mindset, then maybe this rival campaign from Nike Basketball will do the trick. These ones feature Kobe and Lebron playing roles as Most Valuable Roles. Clearly, Nike is banking on the Laker-Cavs finals. With the way their superstars have been playing lately, nothing wrong with that bet. Here's the ads: one, two, and three.

Things moving quickly.

Things have got off to a great start at Infojocks. The website launched a few days ago (note to self: peel off the coming soon sticker). The posters were printed thanks to the very generous folks at Heeter Direct. And we've got the advertising ball rolling ever so slowly. Everything is happening fast and furious, so the blog posts might be a little short changed for a bit. Plus, the NBA and NHL playoffs are in the thick of things and seemingly getting more entertaining every night.

Luckily, with so much going on you can keep track of us via this very obscure not-yet-popular technology called Twitter. Bear with us as we figure out the @'s and the tweets of it.

To help us out in our infant stages, here's what you can do:

1. Spread the word. Infojocks is live.
2. Become a fan of us on Facebook.
3. Follow us on Twitter.
4. Buy a poster. Or ten. Free shipping till June 1.
5. Any other ideas to help? Want to become an affiliate or refer buyers or advertise or help with shipping or edit sloppy html code or just give advice? Let us know.

Thanks for the interest so far everyone and stay in touch.

Working out a formula.

When starting to answer the question of "Who is the true City of Champions?" it was important to find a way to equate different sports championships in different eras with each other. Because of the huge number of variables that would appear to make some championships worth more than others, the development of a formula was necessary to provide a way to level the playing field. The issues that needed to be resolved were as follows:

1. What leagues should be used?
The big four, sure. But what about the Canadian football league? What about the WNBA and the MLS?

2. What year should we start in?
The graphic should be about the modern era. All those championships the Montreal Canadiens and New York Yankees won when there were less than ten teams in the league shouldn't count, right? There wasn't even free agency back then.

3. What defines success?
What defines championship caliber success? Surely, winning it all. And being the runner-up. What else? Divisions? Playoffs?


After defining the problem, the next step would be answering these questions. After a lot of deliberation and careful analysis, these were the answers.

1. Use just the Big Four.
After taking a look at the stability of franchises, as well as attendance and revenue figures, the NFL, MLB, NBA, and NHL easily distinguish themselves as being in a category all to their own. The most recent team to fold in these four leagues were the NHL's Cleveland Barons way back in 1976, a mark of consistency and success.

2. Start in 1967.
With the playing of the first NFL-AFL Championship game in 1967, for the first time, one legitimate champion was crowned in all four major sports. League expansion would follow immediately after, with all four leagues stretching out west. A year later, the NHL doubled it's 'Original Six' teams, and in 1977 the NBA swallowed up the ABA to solidify it's hold and expand it's size. We saw this as the start of the modern era in sports, with free agency, balanced play, and league parity.

3. Points for championships, playoffs, and winning seasons.
With the other considerations figured out, the biggest question was to decide on how to reward the points. Because winning championships in different leagues in different times should mean more, we developed a way of awarding the appropriate number of points for successful season. It should be noted that we did not award any points for divisional championships. The size, alignment, and strength of divisions has shifted so many times in the four leagues that there was no way to reconcile those differences in a way that was fair to all franchises. However, since divisional crowns have always been automatic qualification for the playoffs, we are comfortable letting the points won for playoff qualification replace the points not awarded for divisional crowns.

Championships.
Points for winning the Stanley Cup in 1966 and the Lombardi Trophy in 2008 can’t be awarded the same points when the NHL only had 6 teams then and the NFL now has 32. We award points for a championship equal to the number of teams in the league for that year. Being a runner up in a given year is awarded half points.

Playoff qualifiers.
Making the playoffs in the 1980 MLB where only four teams make the postseason should be weighted differently than the 2008 NBA and NHL where over half the teams make it. We award points for making the postaseason that are weighted depending on how many teams make the playoffs in that league in that year.

Winning seasons.
This was actually the easiest out of them all. In any league, in any season, a winning season is a winning season. Making it above .500 is rewarded the same points in any year.

Be sure to check back in the next few days as we show how we've taken this raw data and started to develop ways of illustrating it. In the meantime, check out our earlier posts about the development of this graphic:

Introduction

Cities of Champions references.

Before continuing to explain how we've developed our poster, it is important to point out that we are not the first guys to try and make sense of all the numbers. Following are sites that provide alternative formulas in an effort to crown a true city of champions.

Donovan's Championship Index | Nutty About Sports | ESPN Titletown

In addition, we'd like to give a shout out to the best sports stats sites on the web that have proved invaluable in the collection of our data.
Pro Football Reference | Baseball Reference
Basketball Reference | Hockey Reference

Finding a true champion.

The Cities of Champions graphic started with a very simple question—what city can claim the title of "City of Champions"? Being from Pittsburgh, where all collegiate and professional sports have had an era of great success (or in the case of the Steelers, pure dominance), I heard a lot of talk about Pittsburgh's claim to being the greatest sports city of all time. In bars, dormrooms, dens—just about every city can come up some evidence about why they can truly claim the crown of 'Titletown, U. S. A.'.

This graphic attempts to take a non-biased look at the question through the creation of a formula through which we take into account league and conference championships, playoff qualifications, and winning seasons. The formula levels the playing field so that every city can make it's fair and unbiased case simply by posting it's score.

Exactly what is that formula? Check back tomorrow for an explanation.

Weekly Graphic.

Welcome.

Just starting to get things running here at InfoJocks. To find out more about what we do, take a gander over to our frequently asked questions on the left.

We plan on launching our store of sports infographics posters in a few months, but first we thought we'd share the process that goes into the creation of these graphics. We work very hard to find clear and effective ways of analyzing and visualizing meaningful sports data. This blog will share our sketches, ideas, and relevant resources we uncover in our development.