Jeff Smith Blog

Random Thoughts & Cartesian Products with Microsoft SQL Server

Two Words: Baseball

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! 

Legacy Comments


Scott Allen
2004-05-14
re: Two Words: Baseball
Very cool, Jeff. I've been looking for something more interesting than Northwind and production databases at work to experiment with, and this would be it.

graz
2004-05-15
re: Two Words: Baseball
So do you already have table structures and an import routine you can share with me? :)

Jeff
2004-05-16
re: Two Words: Baseball
I've used DTS .... it's not bad, just import all tables. You'll have to set up relationships and add any indexes you might need (other than the primary key's which do come over).


Jeff
2004-05-16
re: Two Words: Baseball
Note that if you don't have access there is a full CSV version available as well to download (same page), but I haven't checked it out yet.

Tim
2004-05-17
re: Two Words: Baseball
Cognos used to have a demo OLAP application in PowerPlay that had a similar baseball data set. That was pretty cool.

graz
2004-06-13
re: Two Words: Baseball
Do you know where to get per game stats for the current year?

JeffS
2004-06-15
re: Two Words: Baseball
no luck on current year stats ... one of these days i am going to write something to download box scores and parse HTML from ESPN.COM or something, but of course that might not be very legal!

Maldini
2005-06-01
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