A Penguin in the Orchard

Stats so pure …

It’s hard to imagine how you could be a code hacker and not be a baseball fan. The elegance of the statistical database of baseball sometimes just takes my breath away. This, for example, from last night’s Mets Cardinals game, courtesy of the Elias Sports Bureau. In the game, left-handed pinch-hitter Chris Duncan hit a homerun off left-handed pitcher Pedro Feliciano.

… we’re here to tell you, just how rare that was: In the 1,164 postseason games played since the American League and National League champions first met in 1903, there have been only two other occasions on which a left-handed batter pinch-hit a home run off a left-handed pitcher. Johnny Mize of the Yankees hit one off the Brooklyn Dodgers’ Preacher Roe in the 1952 World Series, and Arizona’s Erubiel Durazo hit one off Glavine, then with the Braves, in the 2001 NLCS.

The volume of statistical history in baseball is almost overwhelming, stretching back well more than 120 years. And, the ability to cull such an obscure set of facts from those statistics is, in my book, stunning. To me, it’s the essence of hacking - taking what’s available and making it your own.

How could any good hacker not be a baseball fan?