Baseball Hacks

by Joseph Adler

Book Overview

Baseball Hacks isn't your typical baseball book--it's a book about how to watch, research, and understand baseball. It's an instruction manual for the free baseball databases. It's a cookbook for baseball research. Every part of this book is designed to teach baseball fans how to do something. In short, it's a how-to book--one that will increase your enjoyment and knowledge of the game.

So much of the way baseball is played today...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0596009429
• ISBN13: 9780596009427
• Release Date: March 2006
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media
• Length: 467 Pages
• Weight: 1.49 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.3" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

How to watch, research, and understand baseball

This book's purpose is to show you all the baseball-related stuff that you can do free of charge or close to free. Just as open source projects such as Linux, MySQL, Open Office, and R have made great software freely available, collaborative projects such as Retrosheet and Baseball DataBank have made great data freely available. This book shows you how to take advantage of these data sources to research your favorite players, to win your fantasy league, or just to appreciate the game of baseball even more. Many of the hacks in this book deal with statistics, and others will require that you install a baseball database. The following is the table of contents: Chapter 1, Basics of Baseball - some easy hacks showing how to watch and score baseball games, and how to find some simple baseball data on the Web. Hack 1. Score a Baseball Game Hack 2. Make a Box Score from a Score Sheet Hack 3. Keep Score, Project Scoresheet-Style Hack 4. Follow Pitches During a Game Hack 5. Follow the Game Online Hack 6. Add Baseball Searches to Firefox Hack 7. Find Images of Stadiums Chapter 2, Baseball Games from Past Years - shows you where to get databases of career statistics and introduces some tools that you'll find helpful in working with this data. Hack 8. Get and Install MySQL Hack 9. Get an Access Database of Player and Team Statistics Hack 10. Get a MySQL Database of Player and Team Statistics Hack 11. Make Your Own Stats Book Hack 12. Get Perl Hack 13. Learn Perl Hack 14. Get Historical Play-by-Play Data Hack 15. Make Box Scores or Database Tables from Play-by-Play Data with Retrosheet Tools Hack 16. Use SQL to Explore Game Data Hack 17. Use Microsoft Access to Run SQL Queries Hack 18. Get a GUI for MySQL Hack 19. Move Data from a Database to Excel Hack 20. Load Baseball Data into MySQL Hack 21. Load Retrosheet Game Logs Hack 22. Make a Historical Play-by-Play Database Hack 23. Use Regular Expressions to Identify Events Chapter 3, Stats from the Current Season - how to get data on current baseball games. It's easy to get data on old games because they're already in databases. It's hard to get data on this year's games because you have to scrape it off the Web. This chapter shows you how. Hack 24. Use Microsoft Excel Web Queries to Get Stats Hack 25. Spider Baseball Sites for Data Hack 26. Discover How Live Score Applications Work Hack 27. Keep Your Stats Database Up-to-Date Hack 28. Get Recent Play-by-Play Data Hack 29. Find Data on Hit Locations Chapter 4, Visualize Baseball Statistics - R is a free data analysis and visualization tool. This chapter introduces R and shows you a lot of cool tricks that you can use to analyze baseball data with R. Hack 30. Plot Histograms in Excel Hack 31. Get R and R Packages Hack 32. Analyze Baseball with R Hack 33. Access Databases Directly from Excel or R Hack 34. Load Text Files into R Hack 35. Compare Teams and Players with Lattices Hack 36. Compare Teams Using Chernoff Faces Hac

"OFF WE GO TO THE BALL GAME!!"

Are you a baseball aficionado or fanatic who is interested in statistics and want to know how to load this data into a database for analysis? If you are, then this book is for you! Author Joseph Adler, has done an outstanding job of writing a book about how to watch, research, and understand baseball. Adler, begins by showing you how to watch and score baseball games, and how to find some simple baseball data on the Web. Then, the author shows you where to get databases of career statistics and introduces some tools that you'll find helpful in working with this data. Next, he shows you how to get data on current baseball games. The author then introduces R and shows you a lot of cool tricks that you can use to analyze baseball data with R. He continues by covering a few of the most popular formulas and a few favorites. Then, the author discusses many baseball problems, some classic and some new. Finally, he comprises a few random topics that didn't fit anywhere else: fantasy baseball, widgets, and other sports. This most excellent book is an instruction manual for the free baseball databases. More importantly, this book is a cookbook for baseball research.

Valuable tool for professional gamblers

Winning sports bettors will spend whatever amount of time is necessary to collect data for analysis. The primary focus of this book is collecting data off the internet and analyzing it. It instructs on this task very well - inexperienced programmers will quickly be gathering the information they need. In addition to providing actual source code (which is short enough to type in a project in just a few minutes), the author draws conclusions from the data he gathered. It's not exactly a treatise on Sabrmetrics, but it does make an otherwise dry topic more interesting. If you do your own numerical analyses, this is an invaluable text - quite possibly the most useful book since Wong's "Sharp Sports Betting".

Hacks for Sports Fans

If you've ever been involved in a fantasy baseball league and gotten killed by people who seem to have time to do nothing but research obscure baseball players, Baseball Hacks is the book for you. In this book, Joseph Adler takes his love of baseball and combines it with an understanding of databases and data-mining technology to help fantasy-sports fanatics and baseball statistic junkies get their regular fix of the numbers that drive America's Game. The great thing about this book is that the software used is all open source. Adler includes Access and Excel hacks for those who have Office at home or at work, but the main hacks in the book involve MySQL for database queries and R for graphic statistical analysis. I've used MySQL before, but R was new for me, and I really enjoyed using the program. Adler also uses Perl. A lot of Perl. But he doesn't expect the reader to be Perl programmers; he shows how the program was written, and what everything does. More importantly, he includes the whole script so that it's a simple matter of copying, and making modifications if needed. He even shows how to modify the scripts. Downloading a beginning stat database is as easy as 1-2-3. Hack 25 tells you how to spider websites for statistical data - including getting data from MLB.com. Detailed instructions on working with R are included in section 4 (hacks 31-39). Adler even includes formulas for calculating the more arcane statistics (at least to non-sports people like me) such as OPS (on-base plus slugging average) and ISO (isolated power - a measure of how well a player hits the ball). It's obvious that Baseball Hacks is a book designed for fantasy sports fanatics. I've also pointed the book out to some computer applications teachers and statistics teachers - combining the study of stats and database construction with a subject that so many teenage boys enjoy studying is a great idea. Teaching database structure and analysis is tough, but give them something that they like to do, and they're all over it. This book does exactly that.

Take me (and my laptop) out to the ball game...

While I'm not a diehard baseball fan, there is a certain appeal (or perhaps nostalgia) about "America's Pastime". And there isn't another sport around that takes their statistics as seriously as baseball does. So if you're a computer geek who loves baseball and statistics, what do you do? You get Baseball Hacks: Tips & Tools for Analyzing and Winning with Statistics by Joseph Adler. Even I, a non-baseball fanatic, can appreciate the appeal of this book. Contents: Basics of Baseball; Baseball Games from Past Years; Stats from the Current Season; Visualize Baseball Statistics; Formulas; Sabermetric Thinking; The Bullpen; Where to Learn More Stuff; Abbreviations; Index The author and his co-contributors have come up with 75 statistical "hacks" all related to baseball. In here, you'll learn how to keep a scoresheet in the traditional fashion as well as how to use a format that is generally used for computer entry and analysis. After showing you where to find downloadable stats and how to get them in a format you can use, they then take you through open source packages like MySQL and R (a statistical software offering) as well as standards like Access and Excel. By loading the data into these formats, you can then slice and dice with the best of them. Some of the hacks show you common statistical generation like batting average or on-base percentage, but there are more esoteric ones you can look into, like Park effect and Fan Save value. If you've always dreamed of combining your love of statistics and baseball into a single passion, this book will push you over the edge. Once you get done here, you should be able to figure out the batting average of Barry Bonds on Tuesday night games against left-handed pitching with two men on base... :) Seriously, a very well-done book that will appeal to both the baseball fan interested in statistics, as well as the computer geek who loves his (or her!) baseball recordkeeping...