Mapping T206 Cards

[theshowandme]

Hey folks,

I got bored and decided to go down a rabbit hole and try to map different parts of the T206 set.

Using a number of sources and a lot of Python and SQL, I’ve been able to do a number of things so far.

This will be a work in progress and I welcome all ideas and feedback.

I am giving credit to Baseball Reference, t206resource, SABR, and the Sean Lahman database as data sources for this. I will update this post as data sources and contributions change.

I will have a longer write up at some point on the “how” for those interested in this type of data analysis.

First up is a map of all the cities of teams represented on T206 cards. I have distinguished where HOFers are and by their league.

Since this is mostly a national map, you can see clustering in major cities. It is nice to see the distribution of minor and southern leagues as well.


Next up I decided to zoom into St. Louis since they had both leagues present in the set. One challenge I had is that when geolocating these cities, all points for a city will just stack on top of one another. Thats no good. I wrote a point explosion function that dispersed similar points in a 360 degree radius between 1000 and 5000 feet from one another. You can see this in action below. One thing to note, every CARD has a point in this dataset. Therefor you can see duplicate points for Rube Waddell and Roger Bresnahan towards the north end of the city. Vic Willis also has two points.



Next up I wanted to show how the database I have built is combining a variety of information sources. When I click on a point, I am presented information about the player to include the baseball reference link and the t206resource link which has a high resolution scan of the image

I did this with Walter Johnson’s portrait of course


My next goals will be birthplaces and resting places. Those will be a bit tricky but I have the things I need. It will involve more data clean up and standardization but it will be fun.

I also want to map individual players journeys who may have had cups of coffees in the big leagues but played long careers in the minors across any number of cities. I will take suggestions on players who may be interesting case studies!

It was already suggested to me by a friend that it would be interesting to find data for the railroad network and major train stations of the time showing the travel networks between cities. I do not know how tough this will be, but I think that could be fun.

Outside the map side of this, now that I have tables of t206 players, I can also query historical batting, fielding, and pitching tables to answer more questions about the careers of players. I will try to show some things off with this stuff as well.

Anyways, if you have made it this far, I appreciate you taking the time to read this.

-Don