Baseball Hacks

Preface

I love baseball. I love going to baseball games and watching games on TV. I love studying player statistics in newspapers and checking them on the Internet. I love reading books about baseball. I wrote this book because of this love.

Many people have written beautifully about baseball. For example, Bill James wrote about baseball statistics, Jim Bouton wrote about what it’s like to play baseball, and Michael Lewis wrote about what it’s like to run a baseball team. But I don’t know of a book that teaches how to take advantage of the many free baseball resources on the Internet. So I decided to write one.

I think this is a unique 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 you how to do something. In short, it’s a how-to book.

My goal is to show you all the baseball-related stuff that you can do free of charge (or close to free). Just as open source projects such as Linux, MySQL, Open Office, and R have made great software freely available, collaborative projects such as Retrosheet and Baseball DataBank have made great data freely available. This book shows you how to take advantage of these data sources to research your favorite players, to win your fantasy league, or just to appreciate the game of baseball even more.

When I started writing this book, I thought of it as the baseball book for the person who ...