Smile If You Bunt (NYTimes)

So, I originally saw this on one of the sports blogs that I read, and the author of the post thought it was an April Fools Joke, but we've seen this sort of graph (I think he didn't realize it was a graph). Interestingly, the person who authored the original article also appears to read the blog, since he replied to the post on the blog.

What are people's feelings on this type of graph? Personally, I think that you can marginally tell which are similar, but otherwise I find them especially hard to read. It's not at all intuitive and you have to keep looking at the key to find what variance in a particular train means, then another place to understand the range of values. On top of that, this particular one varies two traits with a particular variable as well. But can anyone think of a way to display so much information at once?