Sat, 02 Sep 2006
Baseball Hacks
Baseball Hacks Tips & Tools for Analyzing and Winning with Statistics
Joseph Adler, O'Reilly
Many technical books these days are a bit odd in their organization,
because their authors know that a lot of why you would have bought a
book 20 years ago doesn't apply now that you can just google for
information. The O'Reilly Hacks series is an honest attempt to address
this problem by providing not just information, but informed guides to
where to find information online. In the case of Baseball, there is
now a lot of information online which is useful to fans, and a guide to
where to find it is quite interesting. I enjoyed browsing the sites
listed in Hack #5, Follow the Game Online, although of course a good
links page on the web would be even more user-friendly. Of course,
this isn't exactly what you'd expect from a book with "Hacks" in its
title. You'd expect lots of technical stuff that would need or provide
some programming background. So there are also hacks like #10, Get a
MySQL Database of Player and Team Statistics and #13, Learn Perl. I
don't know that these have anything to do with being able to follow
baseball better, but if you like baseball and also want to learn more
about MySQL or Perl, the instructions here seem clear and well-written.
And the examples of what you can do once you've mastered those technical
skills are quite a bit more real-world than most textbooks supply. For
example, #56, measure park effects, or #40 to #46, various ways to
compare batters. So in summary, if you aren't interested in both
programming and baseball, you probably don't want this book, but you
aren't who O'Reilly is marketing it to, so you probably wouldn't. If you
do want to apply programming to following your favorite team, it's a
well-written guide to doing that. Laura Conrad
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pre Dec 04 reviews are here