Last year we tried to take the techniques we were using a bit further with a piece on tennis great Roger Federer’s Footwork, which incorporated an animated 3D tennis player. (I don’t think I ever thanked Michael Agar for his very nice comments on that one.)

And earlier this year, we forged ahead with even more sophisticated interactives as part of our coverage of the Winter Olympics in Vancouver.

But none of them are quite like How Mariano Rivera Dominates Hitters, which accompanied a Times magazine profile of the Yankees closer last month.

I asked the three graphics editors who put the piece together — Shan Carter, Graham Roberts and Joe Ward — explain how the piece came together and the decisions they made as they were building it.

The piece was remarkable, because as graphics director Steve Duenes puts it: “They managed to fully integrate a series of terrific data visualizations into a compelling, linear piece. It’s not something you see often because it’s difficult.”

Why Mariano Rivera?

Even if you know nothing about baseball you’ll get — and love — the graphic. I asked Joe Ward, the graphics editor for sports, what was so impressive about Rivera. (Although, it becomes obvious as you watch the graphic.)

Joe explains anyway: “What makes him most interesting is that he is one of the best relief pitchers in history. He has also been good for a very long time, and has relied on a single pitch, the cut fastball, or cutter. He has incredible accuracy with his pitches which was verified when we got a heat map of the locations of his pitches.”

“We contacted the guys at Complete Game Consulting who have been compiling that data. His cutter has significant lateral movement, which we were able to show with data from PitchF/X on the mlb.com site.”

A Processing app to understand the data

The data set contains XYZ coordinates for the nearly 1,300 pitches Rivera threw in 2009, which allows you to plot the curve of each and every pitch in three dimensions.

Here is a partial example of what the data looked like:

So, how can you make sense of all data? Shan Carter built an application in Processing that allowed him, Joe and Graham to navigate and investigate the data.

Yep, they built a graphic to know which graphic should they do. The visualization helped them decide which data to display and how they should show it. Here’s a screenshot:

“We built it to be able to explore the data and experiment with different interaction models,” Shan says. Although we all know that there’s a certain beauty in exploring the data by yourself, “in the end,” he continues, “we decided it would be more interesting to show users what was interesting rather than requiring them to find it themselves. We were trying to show what makes Rivera the best — allowing a user to browse all his pitches wasn’t the most effective way of doing that.”

The storyboard

Once the basic decisions on what to show were made, Graham put together a storyboard and Joe wrote the script based on that.

I have talked long about the virtues of storyboarding. It helps organize your workflow, structure your story, try out the narrative … I repeat it in every workshop. And I have proven it to myself many times on my own graphics: the more complete and polished the storyboard, the easier and more coherent the storytelling will be in the end.

Advanced 3D for newspapers

It could be a wild guess, but I’d say you use a script to load 3D data from a database into Maya and work with the NYU’s Movement Lab only once in a blue moon.

To get all pitches into Maya, Shan wrote “a Python script that loaded the tab-delimited text file and programmatically created and animated the baseballs. Graham then lit, textured and rendered the Maya file.”

And it’s also the first graphic The Times has done using motion capture data instead of traditional character animation — I’d guess the first one any newspaper has done (comment below if I’m wrong and you know of other examples).

Last year, we visited NYU’s Movement Lab to learn a bit about the technology and ended up putting Graham Roberts in a mo-cap suit.

But the chances of getting Rivera in a mo-cap suit in a lab were pretty slim. So, the NYU researchers used another technique they’d been working on to reconstruct Rivera’s windup and delivery.

“We gave them videos of Mariano Rivera from several different angles — mostly slow motion videos,” Graham explains. “Those videos became then simulations of the different cameras they would use on a motion capture stage.”

“It is kind of working backwards. Normally a camera would shoot someone wearing a motion capture suit. In this case, they extrapolate a camera position from several videos, from different angles, to make up the stage, and bring each video into the same space.”

A short video from NYU’s Movement Lab shows a bit of the process used to build the animation.

A few of my favorite things

There’s many things I think are genius in this graphic, but two of the smartest choices I think Shan, Graham and Joe made were orienting the graphic around the batter’s perspective and freezing all his pitches in that massive ball cloud.

Joe explains the thinking behind those decisions: “It is tough to recognize the pitch in the time necessary for a batter to make his decisions. That is why we decided to freeze the pitches where we did, to show what the batters see. They usually recognize pitches by their spin. The spin on his cutter is nearly indistinguishable from his fastball.”

Simply brilliant.

I will not comment on the visual metaphor itself — or the issues I have with the interaction design. It’s Spain! We’ve all done silly graphics at some point, right? Errrr… not quite like that. The problem I have with the graphic has to do with the analysis of the data.

The graphic implies that these countries will exit the crisis whenever they reach 100 in the index, which means their GDP will return to the levels of 2008, the year prior to the crisis.

The chart below shows exactly same data without the distracting metaphor — I know, I promised not to comment. I even respected their index — I don’t show China because it isn’t in a recession after all.

Among other sources, the International Monetary Fund — the one they apparently use — predicted that we would exit the economic crisis in early 2010. But the graphic shows that the U.S. will have to wait until 2011 to exit the crisis, same as France, and that Italy and Spain will do it by 2014.

Their math isn’t completely wrong (I checked it: elpais.tsv). It seems they calculated correctly that made up index, using this data from the IMF. But they made the assumption that the end of the recession would come when real GDP goes back to the levels of 2008, which is untrue.

I blame it on the use of the more vague term “crisis”. Recession is perhaps a more technical term — that all readers at some level understand anyway — for which Real GDP growth is one of its main metrics.

In simplest terms, a sustained drop in Real GDP equals recession. Once it starts growing again we’re out of the recession. Crisis, on the other hand, seems to be whatever you want it to be. Or maybe, I’m just trying to justify the unjustifiable.

This chart compares El País’s analysis with everyone else’s. Again, I left China out because it isn’t in a recession.

Luckily for us, Dominique Strauss-Kahn might be more accurate than El País: “We expect to get out of the crisis early in 2010, especially if a clean-up of certain segments of the financial system is carried out,” the IMF Managing Director said in May 2009.

A postscipt
If they had kept the sentence in the lead “When would we recover what we lost?” in that finish line, I wouldn’t be writing this. It’s the fact that they say “Exit the crisis” to refer to that what throws me off.

But also, I don’t fully understand why didn’t they stick to the little charts that appear when you roll over all the pretty the little horses. They may not be perfectly designed, but they convey the right information.

I will not break it down further, as it’s perfectly explained here.

1st try: A Dorling cartogram

2nd try: A Demers cartogram

3rd try: A sometimes called rectangular cartogram

The final version

“Can you hear me?” “Xaquín?” “Marita, I can’t hear him in this computer” “Aren’t you suppose to hear yourself through the headphones? I can’t” “Bfff clink, I can, bfff bfff, hear, bfff clink, lots of bffff interferences” “Do not talk all at once, please” “Hey, I can hear him” Clunk! Call failed. This was going to be hard to do this way, so I called a single computer connected to speakers. In order to ask they would just get a microphone.

I explained a little bit about thinking process: select, parse and chew on the data until is tender, choose the right viz, and — if it is an online piece — the right interaction. At the end, I proposed an exercise, which according to Marita will be mandatory to do. Last week, Eurostat published it’s quarterly review of the G.D.P. growth in the European Union. They had to find a different approach to the same idea: Spain didn’t grow as much as the other big European economies.

One of the students asked if by using a map, instead of a bar chart, we would be already doing a more attractive graphic. My wife would say: “A map. Again? What a bummer!” For her if it isn’t 3D it’s not sexy anymore. Another one asked if it the solution wouldn’t be more like finding a sexier data set, instead of finding a prettier presentation. Bingo! (Someone was paying attention).

My solution to the exercise was this: the percentage difference in the index of industrial production, one of the O.E.C.D. short-term indicators.

Spain’s Mild Bounce
A look at the index of industrial production shows how elastic the economies of Italy, France and Germany seem to be, after touching bottom this spring. Meanwhile, the United Kingdom continues to fall and Spain doesn’t seem to be able to get out of the crisis — despite the Government’s economic stimulus.

Advantages over the GDP? It’s monthly so you can actually see the effect of the Spanish economic stimulus solely in the month of April, when it started. And you’re showing something new, that not many newspapers have published and that offers an original approach to the same idea: Spanish economy is lagging compared to the rest of the E.U.

In a few weeks, the solutions from the students. We’ll comment them then.

It is for that reason that I see the lack of honesty when producing visual reconstructions as a curse for our profession. Horrifying. The following examples are real gems.

MSNBC’s includes details of the room, highlights the dead soldiers —sequentially— in red, wounded in purple, and shows Major Hasan with two semiautomatic guns in his hands, shouting shooting rounds —visual effects included.

He gets in —wearing combat fatigue— through the door of a building under a giant sign that reads “Soldier Readiness Center”, knees kneels down and shoots from the door.

A bit of ethics … Please?

Yesterday I made yet another one on quantum physics. It went with a story by Dennis Overbye about a NASA experiment that suggests Einstein is still right about the invariance of the speed of light in vacuum.

According to quantum theory, space-time, up very close, appears discontinuous and chaotic, and that would affect the propagation of light. High-energy photons, with shorter wavelengths, would suffer it more, and navigate slower in this bumpy space-time.

Dennis Overbye’s metaphor tells how two boats maneuver on a choppy ocean. While high-energy photons would have to sail up and down the waves — the wavy, bumpy space-time; low-energy photons would jump and cut through the waves.

That is a very visual way of describing it! And an interesting metaphor to represent the invisible, magical mistery world. So invisible and obscure that incites to try crazy visualizations, “artistic renditions”.

I came up with this one.

Playing around at home, I came up with a different version of the same graphic, Newsweek style. A tribute to my dearest Kevin Hand. I googled fractal and space, a little photoshop here and there, and voilá.

This brings back memories of those wonder years as Health and Science Graphics Editor at elmundo.es Sigh! Explaining the physics of MRI, my first encounter with quantum theory. What a crazy interactive!

If you send me your graphics on quantum physics at I’ll compile the craziest ones and we’ll comment.

It might be the age. As there is a time in your life when everyone seems to be getting married. I presume there is a time in your life when everyone seems to be getting pregnant.

I order another beer and see, behind the bar, a sign that reads “Not Arguing About Politics Here”. And I go in for the kill. I turn around and say: “It’s the economy”.

I remember reading an article on a study that said that people appreciate family in recession times. Maybe we don’t enjoy loneliness that much during a storm.

“It would be great to see if recession times correlate with an increase in birth rate,” I say.

My wife gives me a little smile and drops: “Oh! I can see a graphic already.” And she and Chrys Wu start laughing. Hm! I don’t find it that funny.

The following data is from the National Center for Health Statistics. G.D.P. data is from the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

I try to find a pattern here and hypothetize. Let’s leave aside the rational issues we weigh up when we decide to have a baby: how expensive it is, how am I suppose to pay for college … Having a baby is synonym of hope — an encouraging notion, hope this is, in times of crisis.

“At the precipice, we change” says Klaatu in “The Day the Earth Stood Still” — great quote, terrible movie. In times of turmoil, we become more sentimental. We decide to have children because we foresee a better future. Or maybe I’m just too naive.

Obviously an increase in birth rate wouldn’t coincide exactly with the recessions. A pregnancy takes 38 weeks, nine months, three quarters of a year. So we move the recession periods forward one year.

Do people decide to have more kids during recession? It is not conclusive, but there is a hint of a trend.

But two things strike me the most by looking at both charts. First it’s how the increase in the G.D.P. in the sixties and early seventies mirrors the collapsing birth rates in the same period. And following my hypothesis, it seems like whenever we enjoy economic prosperity, we forget about the future. Or maybe I’m just trying to make sense of a visual coincidence.

Second it’s the significant drop in 2008 birth rate. My guess is that the same way we may decide to have children in times of crisis hoping for a better future, when we see how the economy slows down and predict a downturn — and we saw this one coming, long ago — we are more reluctant to have them.

I’m afraid that in order to prove our personal consideration that this mini baby boom is related to the economy, we may have to wait to be out of the recession and count the rugrats then.

Anyway, and for now, my congratulations to all the moms and dads-to-be.

One of the goals of telling his story was to clarify what had been left unexplained and had been speculated after his escape. ‘The David Rohde Puzzle’, the New York Magazine called it. And according to Mr. Rohde, the graphic helps to fill the gaps.

Here’s an early sketch. Step by step, with spatial references and details, outlined by Archie Tse.

Obviously people seemed hesitant to go “full elmundo.es” with this graphic. But the elegance and finesse of Graham’s solution convinced the most reluctant.

The silhouettes may seem a dramatization, something that shouldn’t belong in a visual reconstruction — unfortunately we are getting too used to dramatizations. But in this case they’re far from that: the primary source worked with us in the visual explanation – Do I repeat myself much? and we left the drama to be carried by the story itself.

“The visuals themselves don’t generate the drama, they clarify spatial concerns and atmospheric conditions, and nothing more.” Steve Duenes says.

But there’s an extra thought on that: I’m a romantic who believes heroes deserve glory, victims respect and villains disdain. Such a precise reenactment of Rohde’s story was appropriate – and only because we had all the details first hand.

An in depth account of how the victim of an attack died is hideous and reenacting how an assassin pulled the trigger is inconceivable, even if we had enough witness accounts.

From Archie’s sketches, I made a quick model of the house in 3D Studio Max …

… which Graham modified, corrected and refined for the final graphic.

The print piece on the newspaper is not-to-be-missed. On A1:

And on the International pages:

By the way, did I say we would never have done the graphic if we didn’t have Rohde guiding us through the reenactment?

Not-to-be-missed either — for obvious different reasons — what this Hong Kong paper did.