It's baseball season again and as many SQLTeamer's have probably discovered over the years, I'm a huge fan of the game.  Living in Boston, of course my team of preference is the Red Sox which in itself can be quite a rollercoster ride.  Howerver, before I digress too much (and I could go on for days about those guys), my point is that if you are a fan of the game and have any interest in statistics, and if you like working with SQL you've got to check out this link:

http://baseball1.com/statistics/

You can download an Access database (easily converted to SQL Server, of course) with all of the baseball stats you can imagine since about 1900.  It's great to put together all kinds of analysis like “total career home runs by a player's birth state” or “who averages more RBI's per abat -- righty's or lefty's?”.  These guys have done a great job putting together almost everything imaginable, and it's not too big of a download.  All star appearances, post season stats, gold gloves -- it's quite impressive and pretty well normalized.

It's also a great way to learn how to write SQL statements and learn the finer points of joins, criteria, expressions, GROUP BY's and HAVING clauses.  The best way to lean this stuff is to work with interesting data and for most baseball fans it doesn't get much better than this!

Anyway, check it out!