Learn to Code with Baseball
Learn to Code with Baseball — available at codebaseball.com — is the baseball
adaptation of
Learn to Code With Fantasy Football
.
I wrote it early in 2020, put it down for a while due to Covid, and picked it
back up in the fall.
Like the football version, it covers Python, Pandas (Python's main data
analysis library), SQL, web scraping, public APIs, data visualization, summary
stats and modeling.
Writing Process
Because the original football version is much more focused on teaching
programming and data science basics, which are similar across domains
(including non sports domains!), porting the same concepts to baseball was
fairly straightforward.
Baseball is much more stat heavy than football, which helped. I personally
don't follow it as much as football, which didn't help. But I did some
research, and I do like reading baseball books (Moneyball is an all time
favorite, also really liked The Only Rule is It Has to Work).
One difference is that baseball is much more focused on good composite stats
and measuring individual vs (fantasy) football, and the analysis portion of
the book reflects that.