MLB Park Factor Project goals

In the MLB Park Factor entry in the Project Lab Series we will utilize four building blocks of the Composable platform: DataFlows, DataPortals, QueryViews, and WebApps.

The project answers one question: does a ballpark play differently at night than it does during the day? For every park, every calendar month, and both times of day, we compute a park factor, the park's average runs per game divided by the league's average runs for that same month and time of day. A park factor of 1.15 means 15% more scoring than the league average, and 0.85 means 15% less.

We will use DataFlows to pull eleven seasons of schedule data from the public MLB Stats API, clean it into tabular format, load it, and serve it back out over HTTP as JSON.

The DataPortal will let us create a database from an Excel model file, then store one record per game played.

With the QueryView, we will compute park factors in SQL and review the stored data as an interactive grid.

Finally, a WebApp will chart the results, so that picking a ballpark draws its day and night park factor month by month.

Each tutorial builds on the one before it, and each produces something you can run on its own.

Let's get started!