When Babe Ruth met Kandinsky

When Babe Ruth first retired from baseball he found it tough. Without the protection of the Yankees PR department his various, and widespread, indiscretions were fodder for the yellow press and the reluctance of anyone to give him a managerial position was humiliating

So he became a virtual recluse mainly fly-fishing, painting water-colours and studying the lives of contemporary artists. It was during the late 1930’s that he discovered that his favourite painter, Wassily Kandinsky, was alive and living in France.

Aware that war in Europe was looming and that he would not be mobbed on a continent where baseball was regarded as a game for girls he made a secret trip to meet his hero.

None of these #fakefacts were known until recently when a painting Babe created as a tribute to the Russian master was discovered

OK so there is now a fun way to produce random images in R thanks to the kandinsky package by Giora Simchoni whose blog covers several fun ways to use R

Any data can be used to create these images so I just used a subset of batting data from the Lahman Baseball package. Just choose any player and a Kandinsky-style image will appear N.B. A few players do cause errors currently. Just try another

knitr::include_app("https://mytinyshinys.shinyapps.io/kandinskyFD/", 
  height = "600px")

I have to execute this as an embedded shiny app which you may prefer to experiment with here

However, the code with comments is given below You can use any data for input but the source I have employed swiftly returns thousands of variations

If you are on Windows you can easily amend the code to employ the xkcd font, which more closely represents a signature. Many other can be installed, if desired

Firstly load libraries and do some munging on the Lahman database (which has data up to 2016 season as I write) ensuring that only players with at least two seasons of data are included (otherwise an image cannot be produced)

library(tidyverse)
library(Lahman)
library(kandinsky)
library(glue)
library(grDevices)

# Font will only work if font installed (by default windows10)- but looks better
#windowsFonts(xkcd=windowsFont("xkcd"))

## construct batters select

players <- Master %>% 
      left_join(Batting) %>% 
      filter(H>0)  %>% 
  mutate(deathYear=ifelse(is.na(deathYear)," ",deathYear)) %>% 
  mutate(playerName=glue("{nameFirst} {nameLast} ({birthYear}-{deathYear})")) %>% 
   mutate(signature=glue("{nameFirst} {nameLast}")) %>%
    select(playerID,playerName,signature) %>% 
  group_by(playerID) %>% 
 slice(2) #10299 # ensures at least 2 seasons which is needed to create plot


playerChoice <- players$playerID
names(playerChoice) <- players$playerName

# Raw data (selection of variables - anything will do)
df <-   Batting %>% 
          left_join(Master) %>% 
          filter(H>0)  %>%
          select(H,R,HR,RBI,SB,playerID)

Then create a input field to select any player and produce a temporary image for display

selectInput("id","Choose or type in player",choices=playerChoice, selectize=TRUE, selected="troutmi01")


 

 output$plot <- renderImage({
    # A temp file to save the output. It will be deleted after renderImage
    # sends it, because deleteFile=TRUE.
    outfile <- tempfile(fileext='.png')
    
    # signature
    sig <- players %>% 
       filter(playerID==input$id) %>% 
      pull(signature)
    
    # # Generate a png
     png(outfile, width=600, height=400)
     
      pic <- df %>% 
      filter(playerID==input$id) %>% 
       select(-playerID) 
      
      
    # basic Image   
    kandinsky(pic)
    #Add Signature - bottom right
    grid.text(sig, x=0.8, y=0.1, rot=0,
          gp=gpar(fontsize=20, col="black")) # add if windows ,fontfamily="xkcd" 
     
     dev.off()
     
   
    # Return a list
    list(src = outfile,
         alt = "This is alternate text")
  }, deleteFile = TRUE)

plotOutput("plot")

Hope you enjoy!