I want to create a visualization of the correlation between baseball team wins and payroll between 2002 and 2012. My first idea was to do a slope chart with the different payroll values on 2 parallel vertical axis for the two years. I also wanted to visualize the team standings by percent win and how that changed between the two years, i.e how one team had the highest percent win in 2002 and how that value changed in 2012. Given that I had those two values to try to correlate, I opted for a horizontal bar chart that would enable the viewer compare the change between 2002 and 2012 for all the teams, and at the same time could allow visualizing the correlation between that change and the team performance.

The visualization is a clustered bar chart that shows the correlation between the percent change in payroll and performance between 2002 and 2012. There are two bars on the y-axis: the thick light blue one represents the percent change in payroll between 2002 and 2012, and the thin dark bar represents the change in percent wins between 2002 and 2012. The grey and red bars are for negative values

In an iteration to the graph, I rearranged the bars following the winning percentage in the overall League. (Data are here.)

MLBPayroll2