Baseball Hacks by Joseph Adler
I love going to Baseball games. I think though, I like the hot dogs and beer more than the actual game. I'm just not much of a sports fan. That said, I really admire folks that can rattle off baseball stats. So, about a year ago, I spent some time researching what kinds of baseball statistics resources there were out there in the world. I found a lot, so much that I was overwhelmed and quickly lost interest.
Fast forward to now. Joseph Adler's book "Baseball Hacks" is a guidebook for anyone with an interest in the numbers side of baseball. Like all of the O'Reilly "hacks" series, the book is divided up into individual recipes that stand on their own, but can be followed one after another. Adler includes hacks for both Microsoft based tools (Access, Excel) and open source tools (R, MySQL).
As I write this, Spring Training is in full swing, Yahoo has opened up fantasy baseball leagues for the 2006 season, and I'm sitting in Chicago, home of the current world champion Sox (go Cubs). I love computers, I like baseball, and I think statistics are cool. Adler knows that baseball is good for hot dogs and beer, but he also knows that it's awfully fun to overanalyze as well. "Baseball Hacks" is the first in the O'Reilly hacks series that I'm very glad to own.