Spring Training, Baseball, and Database Management

As baseball spring training begins across the USA baseball fans are starting to get excited about the prospects of their favorite teams starting to "play ball" once again. Whether you are from Chicago and can't seem to root for both local teams (White Sox to repeat, Cubs to end curse), from Houston and want your Astros to finally win one, or from anywhere else, baseball fans are starting to come alive. Me, I'm a lifelong Pittsburgh Pirates fan, and while they may have added some oomph to their line-up, there is no hope for a World Series title anytime soon. (I take solace in the fact that the Steelers won the Super Bowl though!)

At any rate, this blog is about database management, so why the baseball theme? Well, earlier this week I started reading an intriguing new book from O'Reilly titled Baseball Hacks. This book is uniquely geared toward the database-literate baseball fan. The author, Joseph Adler, shows all kinds of ways to gather free baseball statistics over the Internet, load them into databases, and then to build reports and queries against them. If this sounds even vaguely interesting to you, this book will entertain you for hours - and it might help you with your fantasy baseball picks, too.

The book contains 75 hacks to help you acquire and analyze baseball statistics. O'Reilly publishes a whole series of hacks books and in this context, a hack is basically a solution to a problem. It is an idea or piece of code that can be used to further your understanding and knowledge of baseball. If you follow the daily baseball box scores, review historical statistics, or play fantasy baseball, you will definitely enjoy these hacks.

OK, how about a few examples. Do you want historical play-by-play data? Baseball Hacks tells you where to find it, as well as offering some ideas of what to do with it.

Interested in creating your own books or reports of statistics for specific players? Baseball Hacks tells you where to find the data and how to build the reports.

If you are a new baseball fan that likes the game but is befuddled by all the terms and statistics thrown around, Baseball Hacks can help. Even some long-term baseball fans don't understand things like slugging average, OPS, or DIPS. But Baseball Hacks explains them and how to derive them.

If you are an open source proponent, and a baseball fan, you'll definitely want to take advantage of hack #10, which shows you how to get a MySQL database of player and team statistics. Rather use Microsoft Access? You'll want hack #9.

Really. Baseball Hacks is the ultimate book for the database/baseball nerd in all of us. If you are looking for a way to merge your profession with a hobby, look no further than picking up a copy of Baseball Hacks.