2012 baseball season data now available at Retrosheet

Passing along a note from SABR member David W. Smith, founder of Retrosheet.org:

I am pleased to announce that the Retrosheet website has had its fall update with many additions and revisions.

1. The 2012 season data are now available and player pages are up to date with this information.

2. Play by play files have been added for both leagues for 1946, 1945 and for the 1931 AL. In each case, we have between half and two thirds of the games, but those have all received our standard rigorous proofing of comparing totals against the official totals on a daily basis. The 1931 project received great help from Cliff Blau, who input many games into our computer format, Walter LeConte, who scanned hundreds of games from St. Louis newspapers, and Clem Comly who entered the games Walter collected and also did all the early stages of the proofing.

3. This proofing has led to the discovery of many discrepancies with the official totals and all are thoroughly documented on our site. Also, the 1948 and 1949 seasons have had their discrepancies completed to encompass all the games we have posted for those years.

4. Tom Ruane has completed the careful processing of the 1915 AL and NL official daily data to create his excellent, detailed box scores for that season. This information has also been incorporated into the player pages. The 1915 Federal League is not included yet, but work is underway there as well.

5. David Vincent has undertaken a systematic review of event files from the present back to 1972 and is continuing to work on earlier seasons. He has not only standardized the syntax of events of many cases, but also added details for hundreds of ejections. To do this, he created a new type of comment record which documents each of these events in a consistent format. The ejectee, his role (player, manager, coach), the umpire and a brief description of the reason are in each record. David has been helped by some others who researched details: Rich Carletti, Paul Golba, and Trent McCotter have been especially helpful in this regard.

As always, we work very hard to make all parts of our data as accurate as possible. However, with the huge amount of information on our site, there are bound to be some glitches. Our loyal readers have always been tremendously helpful in alerting us to issues that we need to address. I ask you to please continue that help and send any questions you have to me or to our webmaster, Mark Pankin.

For more information, visit Retrosheet.org.



Originally published: November 19, 2012. Last Updated: November 19, 2012.