After a pre-release sighting earlier this year, I kept in the back of my mind the notion to buy Joseph Adler's Baseball Hacks. I got my dirty little mitts on a copy today.
Scanning through it, the book basically has three phases:
- Fundamentals of baseball and scoring
- Retrieving statistics from the Web and getting them into a database or statistics package
- Calculating all those statistics that SABRmetricians love
Pretty much what I anticipated, although I was surprised to find that there's actually a big hole in publicly available play-by-play data from 1992 to 1999 I believe. Otherwise, the book did indeed satisfy my itch for sources of raw data.
As an O'Reilly
"Hacks" book, it's doesn't appear to go into any one topic particularly deeply, which is fine. Although
Statistics Hacks and a good intro stats books are probably good companions.
In a riff on one of the books hacks, it looks like the game log data for other sports is readily scrapable off of sites like
CBS Sportsline or
ESPN.com. Hmmmmmm!