Jimmy Sez

Recently, Joe Posnanski - the greatest baseball writer of our generation - undertook the task of ranking all of the plaques currently captured in the Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. It's an interesting project, and certainly a unique way to dig through baseball history. Naturally, those rankings got me thinking about the Yankees and how we could do a similar exercise with the plaques housed in Monument Park. At the very least, it would be a good way to distract myself from the beatings they took recently from the Red Sox, Orioles, Braves, and Mets. In these rankings I focused only on plaques that cover what I'll call "uniformed" Yankees. That is, players and managers only. The handful of other plaques in Monument Park tend to be quite different in nature. I'm also ignoring the blue plaques beneath the retired numbers in Monument Park. There's a subset of players and managers who have been honored with a bronze plaque that have also had their uniform number...

While we're all waiting around for the World Series to end, I found a new way to create some Yankees content before we can really dig in to off-season topics. Home runs are always fun and have a prominent place in Yankee history. So why not combine those with a cool way to visualize data that's all the rage with the kids these days. It's the Yankees cumulative career home run bar chart race. The bar chart race you didn't know you needed in your life until just now. More thoughts below the race (click the button on the bottom left to pause/play/re-play as you'd like). Nothing but the Ruth It's no secret that Babe Ruth took the baseball world by storm via the home run, but this race does a great job of showing that visually. In 1918, the infamous Wally Pipp was the Yankees career leader with 27 home runs. By 1921 he had doubled that total, but Ruth had amassed 115 home runs in three seasons as a Yankee to dwarf him on the career list. Then it goes from ridiculous...