Being a Two-Way Baseball Fan

⚾️ ( code )

I've talked about it a few times and occasionally post on bluesky about how brutal the job hunt has been for me. I left my last job in July of last year before venturing off on my own to consult/freelance and work on some stuff I'm passionate about. Recently a mutual said it would be a good idea for me to have a product out that users could play around with to see my skills in action. The main one I'd point to is probably Volkara , but I'd like to start translating some old ideas and continuing to migrate abandoned concepts into something deployed and usable.

So the first thing I decided to reboot was one of two teaching/data analysis focused REST API projects, namely a baseball stats API that wraps the MLB Stats API , Lahman, and Retrosheet, inspired by one of my favorite programming books, Analyzing Baseball Data with R . I've been grinding away at it for the past couple of days and have a lot of the Lahman data exposed through endpoints, with a charm cli for DIY API testing (and for a simple ETL pipeline).

On Thursday, I worked on cleaning up the messy retrosheet loading implementation I made for a lot of the day, and then added a few proxied MLB stats api endpoints. Thanks in huge part to the pypi package . That library author has this nice endpoint configuration file that was pretty easy to sift through and a good wiki. It's a little lame to take a picture of docs but I still find swagger docs to be so cool!

Since starting this log, I've mostly (‼) knocked out the entire roadmap I had laid out for myself. What remains is expanding the ETL pipeline to cover all the entire breadth of retrosheet's game logs & play by plays. I've done quite a bit of work I'm pretty proud of on this.

The project is sort of materializing (in my head) to be a Nominatim for baseball data. I plan to deploy it today and want to make the containerized application something a user could host on their own metal.

I think I'll draft a longer document about some of the cooler stuff in the API.

The Title

I'm generally not a "stats-nerd" baseball fan (not meant to be derogatory, I literally refer to my computers as Pokemon - sent from Roaring Moon) but when I discovered the R book and occasionally when I read the yearly baseball prospectus I shift gears. I like the burst of athleticism and mind games of Baseball. Not unlike a battle shonen.

The title is a silly way for me to talk about how I can be both sometimes.

NixOS ( code )

It's the weekend so I feel a teeny bit more comfortable making some more sweeping changes to my nix configuration, namely moving my mini to nix-darwin.

Thanks for reading! Happy to hear any thoughts you have either here or on bluesky !