A few days into the 2023 MLB season has me thrilled by baseball, and I have a few short thoughts and links to share.
Continuing My Renewed Interest
I paid baseball very little attention immediately out of college. There was a game I played on my phone and I watched MLB games sometimes, but I felt disconnected from the sport overall.
In 2021 I bought season tickets for the San Francisco Giants, fulfilling a dream that young me had for adult me. I found baseball again. Last summer I joined an adult baseball league and started keeping score of games I attended again. Over the winter I joined SABR again and fact-check an account of a game every couple weeks.
This is the first full year where I feel completely involved with baseball: I’m playing a full season with my team, I watched the World Baseball Classic, and have been closely following the MLB offseason. I’m entirely prepared to watch and listen to more games as time allows.
MLB Rule Changes
I love the pitch clock, and am skeptical about everything else. The rules regarding the shift do seem pretty fair, but the pick-off limits are too draconian.
SABR
As mentioned above, I continue to fact-check for the SABR games bio project (and infrequently for their player biographies.) For anyone interested in fascinating accounts of games and people you’ve never heard of, I highly recommend checking those out for a few minutes. It’s a niche Wikipedia rabbit hole with some fantastic writing.
Learn to Code with Baseball
I have an early “beta” version of this book, though it’s fully released now. It’s a great introduction to using Python and SQL tools to analyze data, taught using the huge accumulation of baseball data publicly available.
Baseball Reference and Stathead
I’m continually impressed by these tools. Baseball Reference either just added, or always had and I never noticed, a feature where you can select rows of a table (say, a table that contains how a player did during each game in a season) and have them automatically provide you the statistics for your selection (say, just the games in June.) For me, this has been a huge relief while fact-checking, where date-specific accumulated statistics tend to be bandied about and I found myself hand-checking far more than was desirable.
Stathead saw some use on this site during Blogmas, and while I currently only use it while fact-checking, I hope to play around with it more. It’s such an excellent tool that saves me a lot of time (and, for many common and a few niche situations, replaces the skills taught in Learn to Code with Baseball).