Vanderbilt Baseball Uniform Numbers
During a recent Vanderbilt baseball game, play-by-play broadcaster Max Herz brought up the unconventionally high uniform numbers assigned by Tim Corbin in recent years. Having some already-existing code that parses rosters from the official Vanderbilt Baseball roster page, I threw together a quick visualization of the uniform number distribution from 2005 (the earliest roster available) to 2021:
Got a little distracted towards the end of the @VandyBoys blowout win tonight. Was thinking about @MaxHerzTalks's comments the other day on the broadcast about Corbs assigning uniform numbers over the years. Threw this together to see what it looks like.
The next day, I spent a little more time improving the graphic by distinguishing between pitchers and position players and using opacity to indicate tenure of the same player wearing the number across multiple seasons:
Color gets lighter for each year the same player wears the number
I put these together with some inelegant HTML + CSS exported as an image. Some day I might make an interacive version. Even more interesting would be to do this for MLB teams across a much longer history of seasons. A cursory look at MLB uniform numbers reveals that I'll need to handle the uniform number 1⁄8!