It wouldn’t be February in Tempe unless we knew Spring Training and the Cactus League was starting up. In the spirit of the season, I walked down to the local Borders bookstore to take a look at the new Baseball Hacks book from O’Reilly. I just can’t get enough baseball stats and this book really gets into it with MySQL and even Perl examples. One part that is missing is mapping. I thumbed through the index looking for any examples and all I found were two references to Google Maps and Google Earth on how to get pictures of your favorite stadiums out of both. I ended up not buying it, but I’ll probably head back down later this week and pick it up after I find any Borders or Barnes & Noble coupons. OK, someone just burnt popcorn in our office and I can’t stand the smell. I took the opportunity to go out and buy a copy of Baseball Hacks. 🙂
Still I wish I had some time because I think this would be a great opportunity to try out some of the new web mapping APIs out there, specifically the new Yahoo! Maps beta or most likely ArcWeb 2006. I’d love to plot baseball statistics on a map and I have been looking for a reason to get involved with ArcWeb 2006.