Hardball Times: Baseballr Package For R

[weams]

http://www.hardballtimes.com/developing-the-baseballr-package-for-r/

All of the development can be tracked on GitHub, including the draft versions of the functions referenced here. My plan is to flesh out additional data acquisition functions largely through existing application program interfaces (API?s) or scraping of websites. Additional metrics will be added, specifically the ability to calculate things like wOBA on contact, wOBA per pitch based on PITCHf/x data, calculating Edge% from PITCHf/x data, and individual player consistency/volatility. I am also toying with some visualization functions as well, but more on those later.

[srock]

Writing code in R is like running your brain through a blender full of acid.

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[Frobby]

He's talking way over my head. I hope the software/data guys will find whatever he's doing to be useful.

[crissfan172]

Being able to calculate advanced stats with splits is pretty cool. Hopefully Fangraphs will use this to make this information easily accessible to its users.

[srock]

Being able to calculate advanced stats with splits is pretty cool. Hopefully Fangraphs will use this to make this information easily accessible to its users.

Pretty sure Fangraphs and BBRef have no interest in making there proprietary data available via a free API. They want people to pay for it or generate hits on the site to generate ad money.

The reason this guy is doing this R package, is that all the raw data is available for free from MLB. Its just a bear to process because it formatted for MLB's purposes, not ours.

Having dug around a bit in the data, I can tell you this. If you want to analyze baseball data, take the time to get into your own database. Then use R to explore it.

Nice thing about baseball stats, the historical raw data never changes. So once its in a DB, all you have to do is update the database when new data comes out.