AndrewGioia.com | News

New MLB Gameday data project.

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 8:00:00 EDT

I've been scratching my head a lot lately over how to improve my fantasy baseball free agent/draft picks, but aside from reading articles and looking at Yahoo's sortable stats, I feel like I'm just not getting any better. About a month ago I started looking into getting detailed at-bat statistics to run queries on, with the hope of predicting streaks better, and came across some incredible resources with more data than I honestly thought even existed.

Retrosheet, for one, has near-complete archived stats for each at-bat of every game going back to about 1953 (with some older years too), plus a ton of other data on players, parks, games, etc. While writing some scripts to parse that and put it in a working database, I found that the MLB actually puts up XML files with all of their Gameday information. Not only are the at-bat and detailed game stats there, but since like mid-2007 they've included the incredibly detailed PITCHf/x data, with things like start and end velocity, break points, etc.

Anyway, I decided to go with Retrosheet for all the historic data and managed to put everything from 1957 to 2006 into a MySQL database. Now, the hard part is writing a script to parse those XML files at mlb.com and update the database for 2007 and 2008, and then nightly after that, formatted like the Retrosheet data. I can't wait to start contributing to the awesome sabermetrics community, and once I get steamrolling on this I'll recount how I did everything and put up the scripts/database dumps for download. I was actually surprised someone hasn't released a Retrosheet-compatible database of all Gameday stats yet, but that's definitely the plan once I get the bugs worked out of this.

Magpie RSS for Flickr.

Fri, 4 Jan 2008 8:00:00 EST

I've been messing around (poorly) with RSS feeds for a while and last week I came across Magpie RSS, a super simple php class to handle pretty much any feed you can throw at it. Right now the Asides page uses Magpie for the Delicious bookmarks and Flickr photos; the bookmarks were pretty straightforward but I was having some trouble displaying the photos correctly. This is pretty rough, but if you're looking for some sample code to plug in here's what I'm currently using:

if ($url) { // Set $url to your Flickr url
    $rss = fetch_rss($url);
    $count = 0;
    foreach ($rss->items as $item) {
	if ($count == 14) { break; // to limit it
	} else {
	    $image = $item['description'];
	    $image_ary = explode("\\n\\n",$image);
	    $image_img = str_replace("_m.jpg", ".jpg", $image_ary[0]);
	    $image_img_ary = explode("</p>", $image_img);
	    $image = $image_img_ary[1];
	    $image = str_replace("<p>", "", $image);
	    $image = str_replace(".jpg", "_s.jpg", $image);
	    $image = preg_replace("/width="d+"/" , '', $image);
	    $image = preg_replace("/height="d+"/" , '', $image);
	    echo "$image";
} $count++; } }

You can set $url to your Flickr rss feed, and make sure to include the mapgpierss file ;) I'm pretty sure I'm adding some unnecessary steps in there, but it gets the job done. Feel free to test it out or email me if you've got something.

New site design finally.

Fri, 28 Dec 2007 8:00:00 EST

I finally found some free time over Christmas break to give this thing a much needed layout and brush up my neglected php skills. It's pretty trimmed down right now but I'm definitely still going to keep it bare bones this time. I also finally signed up for a del.icio.us account; I've been looking for a way to sync bookmarks across computers and I'm not sure why I waited so long on this, but it's definitely worth it. More coding!

Merry Christmas!

Mon, 24 Dec 2007 8:00:00 EST

First semester is finally over and I just got back from another great weekend in Grand Rapids :) Looking forward to Christmas with the fam.