To me, baseball is an American art form. I am not the first to say so. In Ken Burns’ Baseball, Gerald Early named the Constitution, jazz, and baseball as the three most beautifully designed things American culture has produced. Three things make the design beautiful to me.
First, the game has no game clock. It ends in outs, not minutes, which is why George Carlin called it a pastoral game. That flow survived the pitch clock Major League Baseball added in 2023, which times only the gap between pitches. It cut about half an hour from the average game, and only a die-hard purist misses that half hour.
Second, it is many games inside one. The pitcher duels the hitter, the managers try to outguess each other, and the fans needle each other in the stands. That makes it a game of strategy and a lot of fun.
Third, almost every fan inherits a thread of history with it. A father, an uncle, or a grandfather loved a team or hated a player, and the feeling gets passed down. No other realm holds that much nostalgia for me.
It is also America’s gift to the world, though the gift took root mostly around the Caribbean and in East Asia. John Fogerty’s “Centerfield” tips its cap to Chuck Berry’s “Brown Eyed Handsome Man,” and I tip mine to both.
For data hacking, I keep one link: https://github.com/baseballhackday/data-and-resources/wiki/Resources-and-ideas