Retrosheet announces Fall 2020 updates
By David W. Smith
It is with great pleasure that I announce the semiannual update to the Retrosheet website for Fall 2020. There are many aspects to the new release.
1. With the superb help of Dr. Ted Turocy, we were able to collect the play-by-play of all 898 regular season games played in 2020 plus all the postseason games. There are now on our website as usual at retrosheet.org/gam
2. At the beginning of the truncated 60-game season of 2020, I posted two versions of the 2020 schedule. The first was as it was planned for 162 games per team and the second for 60. Our schedule files have routinely listed not only the games as they were planned, but also as they were actually played, with every rainout, postponement, venue change, or other alteration noted. For 2020, Rob Wood tackled the many changes that occurred, most due to Covid-19. That annotated version is now on our site and I thank Rob for his diligence in this work.
3. The attendance and time of game records in hundreds of games have been corrected — many entered for the first time — again thanks to Rob Wood. He also led a major campaign to get our ejection data in much better shape, both in terms of accuracy and completeness, but also with improvements in the standardization of format. This is still a work in progress, but we have added almost 150 ejections to the list since we first released the file in July. There are now 18,132 entries at retrosheet.org/eje
4. As I have mentioned many times here, we have a stalwart group of volunteers who create deduced play-by-play files from newspaper stories. They are: Rob Wood, Cliff Blau, Mark Pankin, Tom Thress, Jim Herdman, and Dick Cramer. However, for the first time in several years we are adding no new deduced games in the current release. This work absolutely requires as many newspaper stories as possible and the large majority of what we need is available online. Cliff, Rob, and Jim are all very active in collecting those. However, there are two papers: the Boston Herald and Boston Post, which are not available online. I have obtained microfilm of those papers through the Interlibrary Loan office of the University of Delaware library and scan the stories when the film arrives. However, the various lockdowns and quarantines have greatly restricted microfilm lending from other libraries. Hence, there are several dozen games for each year prior to 1928 which we cannot yet complete. The film is beginning to arrive slowly but surely and I fervently hope we will obtain what we need to complete these files before the June 2021 release.
I hope everyone on this list is healthy and remains that way. Have the best holiday season possible and perhaps 2021 will see a more normal world in all the important ways.
SABR member DAVID W. SMITH is the founder and president of Retrosheet. He can be reached at dwsmith@retrosheet.org.
Originally published: December 1, 2020. Last Updated: December 1, 2020.