A plea from a humble Astros blogger

Getting my nerd on with the Stat Speak guide to building a MySQL database has been a fun way to procrastinate this weekend.  My real desire is to build a pitch/fx database and begin doing some analysis with those numbers (it's useful for more than just the pitching data).

However, to build one, I need to use Perl to scrape MLB's site to grab the XML files of each game and then convert it into a database table.  Mike Fast, formerly of Stat Speak, has an excellent tutorial on how to do everything, but it's all for Windows users.  Unfortunately, my overly pretentious self purchased a Macbook in February and I'm having trouble figuring out how to make everything work inside OS X.

So I'm sending out a plea to see if there is anyone who's worked with setting up and working with Perl inside OS X.  I know that I could run Boot Camp or Parallels to set up all the data mining, but I'd like to keep everything in OS X so I don't have to partition my hard drive, which would suck on a laptop.  Any advice/assistance would be appreciated and feel free to send me an email (it's located on my profile).

Thanks in advance,

DQ