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 Hacks:

"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

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 16 Ratings

Baseball/Computer Nerds Unite! - 2007-01-18
Reviewer Rating:
This book is uniquely geared toward the database-literate and technology-literate baseball fan. The author 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.

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 a great 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.

Baseball Hacks, the "How to" manual for Moneyball - 2008-04-07
Reviewer Rating:
Baseball Hacks: Tips & Tools for Analyzing and Winning with Statistics (Hacks), which comes with download able scripts from the O'Reilly site, shows how to do SABR metrics like the big league analysts.

If, like me, you wish to use only the free, or open source, programs on Linux, you are in for significant work. I could not get R, (the statistical analysis program much like S-Plus,) to work under Ubuntu. I was able to get it to work under the SuSE version of Linux. If exploring Baseball Statistics is like the Lewis and Clark expedition, Adler is your Pocohantuas!

What satisfaction comes from comparing baseball intuition with computerized analysis of the vast databases of baseball statistics! The American economy would be much more efficient if lessons from Baseball Hacks were applied to enterprise management.

Tips & Tools For Analyzing Baseball Data - 2007-02-25
Reviewer Rating:
This book takes a fairly different approach to baseball statistics. The author goes thru and explains most all of the newer statistics. The real meat of this work is teaching the reader how to build his or her own data bases free of charge by importing information from various websites. My sense is that to really benefit from the data base aspects the reader must have a pretty good acumen for dealing with computer programing. Even though the author provides precise step by step help with codes. Still, I would say most baseball fans who enjoy statistics will benefit from this.

Good explanations - 2008-08-28
Reviewer Rating:
You have to be a programmer to do much with the code in this book. There is no robust system to download you can just run. However, it goes beyond programming and has a lot of explanations of advanced baseball statistics. Mostly historical statistics such as "Was Barry Bond's better then Babe Ruth and how do we use statistics to tell?". The world could stand to have a few more books involving baseball and programming.

Good Information - 2009-04-20
Reviewer Rating:
The information in this book is exactly as advertised. I was looking for a book that I could use as a reference tool to find, calculate, analyze and efficiently store baseball statistics electronically. The book has a lot of practical and applicable information. I highly recommend this to others interested in baseball statistics.