Perfect Asymmetry: Seattle’s 2001, Detroit’s 2003

If you use the team pages over at Baseball-Reference, you’re familiar with the “Game Results” portions of the team pages, a relatively new addition. If you’re somehow not familiar, or need a refresher, check out a couple of examples, two of last decade’s iconic teams.

First, the 2001 Seattle Mariners, the team that won a whole lot of games:

(With all images, click to embiggen)

Green marks wins, red marks losses, and the height/depth of the bars mark the margin of victory/defeat. The Mariners made a bunch of green, not so much red.

Now, the Detroit Tigers, a team which instead of winning a bunch of games, did that other thing:

You’ll notice the colors are different, but the graph still reads the same. If you are wondering why the colors are different, it’s so I could do this:

This is the two graphs placed on top of each other. Juxtapo-BAM. With the placements of off days and such, it’s not perfect, but it’s pretty interesting to me how little overlap there is, and how amazing it is we saw two such incredibly good and then incredibly bad teams appear in such a short span.

Is this a thing that people find interesting? I’m not sure, but I want to find out.