Book Review: Baseball Hacks by Joseph Adler - Page 2

While Adler does spend some time on Excel, his tools of choice are MySQL and a powerful stats package known as R. Both have the advantages of being free and open-source, so freelancers are continually developing new plug-ins for them. MySQL doesn't have a built-in GUI, as does Access, though Adler does guide you to free downloads of Officially Sanctioned tools.

For both R and MySQL, Adler guides you completely, if somewhat briefly, through a generic installation and basic configuration. He also shows how to set up and populate a MySQL database with those fat, juicy stats, and the how to get R to talk to MySQL. In fact, the bulk of the discussion is technical, rather than baseball-focused, making me wonder if the book isn't a little bit of a Trojan horse itself, designed to sneak in technical competence under cover of sports fanaticism.

The book is probably about the right length for the subject, and it assumes a minimum of knowledge of both subjects, geared to someone thirsty for more. The subject obviously appeals to fantasy-league seamheads, many of whom have some technical background to start off with. The problem is that the cool tool building sometimes comes at the expense of baseball exposition.

Adler shows a fair number of cool stats and tools, like linear weights and runs created. But in keeping with the rest of the book, he does so with a minimum of exposition, leaving behind much of the analysis that created these tools in the first place, and that makes them so compelling. In true geek fashion, he also shows you how to set up your own fantasy league management system. With so many online tools available for just that purpose, the pages might have been better spent explaining the Favorite Toy or Win Shares.

Still, it's a substantial achievement to put the pieces together as cleanly as he has. Adler's had to cover a lot of diverse ground here and he does it fairly efficiently. He's provided enough documentation so that the interested reader knows where to look — and for someone who wants to use R to analyze, say the stock market, to know where to start — once he finishes setting up that fantasy league.

Editor's note: Another Blogcritics, Warren Kelly, has also reviewed Baseball Hacks.

Article Author: Joshua Sharf

Joshua Sharf blogs here primarily as a book reviewer. He has his own site at jsharf.com, and is a founding member of the Rocky Mountain Alliance of Blogs. He is also a contributing editor at Newsbusters. Joshua blogs from Denver, CO.

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