Winegrowing and Baseball – Rotobase

February 4th, 2010 → 3:06 pm @ Josh Hermsmeyer


Wine and baseball are intertwined in the best of ways. Both the growing season and the playing season overlap almost perfectly. Pitchers and catchers report in February, foreshadowing the beginning of spring training. In the vineyard we prune and train our vines in February in anticipation of spring.

Play begins in earnest in April, and hope is in the heart of every fan for the possibilities of a great season. Bud break and initial vine growth occur with the crack of the first bat.

Early season injuries can devastate a team (~cough~ Jose Reyes ~cough~) just as easily as early season frost can decimate a vineyard.

In September and October the seasons wind down and the harvest and playoffs begin amid frantic activity and excitement. A winner is crowned as baby wines are barreled down for the winter.

And when it’s all over and the last leaves fall from the vine, we’re eager to sit down, reflect on the past season and begin looking forward to the new.

I love baseball.

Each year, in the quiet period after crush has ended and before the work of growing begins anew, I take a few weeks to work on a project that both interests me and expands my skill set. 4 years ago, along with my family, I decided to start building a winery. Last year I wrote a desktop database client and a companion iPhone app for the winery (BTW, here’re my thoughts on the recently announced iPad).

This year my mind turned to baseball. For my wine geek friends who aren’t into baseball ( but should be) you can click away now. It’s about to become a baseball stat geekatorium up in here.

Basically I said to myself, “self, you’ve always wanted your own baseball stats database, and a pretty way to access it. You also need to get a deeper understanding of mySQL and php for projects like Help a Winery Out. Why not do that for your yearly project?” To which I replied, “hell yeah.”

There are so many incredible resources out there for the baseball fan with some technical chops, it’s breathtaking. Retrosheet, for instance, is a complete record of every play made in every game stretching back to the 50s, and they are adding more historical data each year. And it’s completely free. Truly remarkable.

So I downloaded the sucker and got to work building a cool way to interface it.

Now, dear reader, if you count yourself as one of those baseball purists who don’t sugar the whole fantasy baseball thing, you may want to click away at this point as well. That should leave under ten interested readers. Excellent! You are my peeps.

Here’s what I built. It’s called Rotobase. Like Fangraphs but for fantasy baseball nuts.

I think I do these projects now as a reaction to being unable to complete my winery project. I feel a very pressing need to complete *something* and “ship” it each year, even if it isn’t a bottle of wine.

Happily next year will be different. Bottles of wine will finally ship. Which makes me wonder if my desire to do these projects will ship with them.

For now I’ll be competing in the NFBC Auction (nationwide high stakes league) in Vegas in March and using this tool to aid me in my research.

Wish me luck!

Fair use is made of cropped copy of a photo appearing on Uncork for a Cause