4.1. Hacks 30–39: Introduction

In the past few chapters, I told you where to get information about baseball games. In the next few chapters, I give you a better understanding of the game of baseball. In this chapter, I present a set of hacks to help you explore baseball visually.

I'm a big fan of R, an open source application for working with data. It's very popular among statisticians for modeling and plotting data, and it's very popular among biologists. I think R is just as easy to use as a spreadsheet, and it's a lot easier to explain how to do something with R than with a spreadsheet. Most of the hacks in this chapter are about R.

But R isn't for everyone. You can do plenty of things with Microsoft Excel, so I'll also show you a few tricks for using Microsoft Excel to look at data.