Baseball Hacks

by Joseph Adler

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 hinges upon interpreting statistical data. Players are acquired based on their performance in statistical categories that ownership deems most important. Managers make in-game decisions based not on instincts, but on probability - how a particular batter might fare against left-handed pitching, for instance. The goal of this unique book is to show fans all the baseball-related stuff that they can do for free (or close to free). Just as open source projects have made great software freely available, collaborative projects such as Retrosheet and Baseball DataBank have made great data freely available. You can use these data sources to research your favorite players, win your fantasy league, or appreciate the game of baseball even more than you do now. Baseball Hacks shows how easy it is to get data, process it, and use it to truly understand baseball. The book lists a number of sources for current and historical baseball data, and explains how to load it into a database for analysis. It then introduces several powerful statistical tools for understanding data and forecasting results. For the uninitiated baseball fan, author Joseph Adler walks readers through the core statistical categories for hitters (batting average, on-base percentage, etc.), pitchers (earned run average, strikeout-to-walk ratio, etc.), and fielders (putouts, errors, etc.). He then extrapolates upon these numbers to examine more advanced data groups like career averages, team stats, season-by-season comparisons, and more. Whether you're a mathematician, scientist, or season-ticket holder to your favorite team, Baseball Hacks is sure to have something for you. Advance praise for Baseball " Baseball Hacks is the best book ever written for understanding and practicing baseball analytics. A must-read for baseball professionals and enthusiasts alike." -- Ari Kaplan, database consultant to the Montreal Expos, San Diego Padres, and Baltimore Orioles "The game was born in the 19th century, but the passion for its analysis continues to grow into the 21st. In Baseball Hacks , Joe Adler not only demonstrates that the latest data-mining technologies have useful application to the study of baseball statistics, he also teaches the reader how to do the analysis himself, arming the dedicated baseball fan with tools to take his understanding of the game to a higher level." -- Mark E. Johnson, Ph.D., Founder, SportMetrika, Inc. and Baseball Analyst for the 2004 St. Louis Cardinals

Genres: Sports, Baseball, Nonfiction, Computers

467 pages, Paperback

First published January 31, 2006

Reviews

[Devin · Rating 1 out of 5]

A dated look at how to do basic data analysis and database queries. The tools outlined in this book are largely obsolete and the availability of free statistical datasets and APIs are much broader today than at the time this book was written. Also, much of the "advanced" sabermetric stats is a little basic. My main takeaway was being glad I don't interact with Microsoft Access on a daily basis or need it to do my own work.

[Josh · Rating 3 out of 5]

I bought this thinking it was a baseball book, and one could use it to gain a deeper understanding of the game's statistics. But the advanced stats it discussed weren't all that new to me, and several good sites like Baseball Reference, Baseball Prospectus, and FanGraphs already fulfill the niche of advanced stats databases. So I didn't really know what to do with the book. It sat my shelf for a few years.

Then one day I paged through it again and it clicked. This isn't a baseball book: it's an applied programming book, using baseball as an interesting and convenient content source. Now I'm enjoying the book a lot. It's giving me an excuse for refreshing my SQL and learning R and Perl.

A few warnings: you will encounter some sloppiness and aging problems. I found a number of typos, and some instructions that were flatly incorrect. It's unfortunate to see those kinds of editing problems in an O'Reilly book. Age will be a more serious issue. In 2011 it's still quite usable but some of the things you are told to download have updated or changed formats since publication. Just don't take the instructions 100% literally and it will still be an effective guide.

At this point I've worked through a good chunk but setting it aside for a bit. I'm marking it "done" even though I am no such thing. I'll be revisiting it as I can to work on these projects more over time.

[Tommy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was ok. I think it will be most useful as a reference tool.

For anyone who reads about baseball statistics and Sabermetrics, whether it be from Bill James, Pete Palmer, Baseball Prospectus or anyone else won't really find any new ideas here but it is a great how-to guide.

Adler basically gives you the steps and the code to create a robust baseball database and gives you shows you some useful things to do with it so that you can go off and use it in any way you would like.

But at the end of the day, it's not a leisure read, it's a programmer's reference tool.

[Chris · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some interesting content, but not well organized, and it's starting to show its age. O'Reilly has also not kept up its page for this title, so while the sample code is still available, the necessary data is not (and many of the scripts for scraping data from the web are outdated). It also relies heavily on mySQL to slice and dice data rather than explaining how to do it in R.

Readers interested in using R for analyzing baseball data are better off hitting the blogs.

[Tony Canas · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not a big baseball fan but this was an excellent look at how people rock their fantasy leagues and how much somebody can geek out over sports statistics. Even having an MIS degree it taught me quite a bit about practical uses of MySQL from a PC perspective. I'm sure I'll be using it for non-baseball related stuff.

[Craig Curtin]

good stats, good overview of sabre/open source s/w