TL;DR you can use waterfall charts to visualise cricketer stats. This is an attempt at plotting Tendulkar's ODI career.

Screenshot:

Live Demo

While hacking on a waterfall plot at booking.com's internal hackathon with Stuart, it occurded to me that we could employ waterfalls to visualise all kinds of things. This is an attempt at visualising Sachin Tendulkar's ODI career.

It is a simple-minded plot of runs scored each year. It is not the best way to visualise a cricketer's career. It doesn't take into account the no. of matches played. For example, 1989 shows up without a bar because Tendulkar made 0 runs in his debut year but it hides the fact that he played just one match in 1989 and that too in November. It also doesn't show significant performances like centuries scored each year. Despite the shortcomings, it is a way to look at data and it does call out some things immediately, like 1998 being Tendulkar's most prolific year (odi-wise).

The data comes courtesy of ESPN Cricinfo's brilliant and ever reliable Statsguru. I got the data through simple jQuery DOM traversal in Chrome's web console and converted it into a PhantomJS script. You can find it under the crawlers directory.