Stat crunching and visualization of baseball data is immensely rewarding if you are a software developer and baseball fan. I'm learning more about statistics than I will ever learn as a web developer. The existing knowledge base is huge (sabermetrics) and growing every day as people develop more interesting measures of performance.
As soon as I find time, I hope to start reading about monte carlo simulations and implement one using existing MLB data.
If you anyone is interested in this stuff, google sabermetrics, baseball databank and retrosheet. Cool stuff and the community looks like it could use a solid dose of high quality OSS software. It seems a lot of experts in the field still use MS Access and Excel to model their information.
As soon as I find time, I hope to start reading about monte carlo simulations and implement one using existing MLB data.
If you anyone is interested in this stuff, google sabermetrics, baseball databank and retrosheet. Cool stuff and the community looks like it could use a solid dose of high quality OSS software. It seems a lot of experts in the field still use MS Access and Excel to model their information.