Retrosheet announces Fall 2019 updates
By David W. Smith
It is with great pleasure that I announce the semiannual update to the Retrosheet website for Fall 2019. There are some new files and many others have been updated. Here is a summary.
1. The 2019 event files are available: regular season, All-Star game and postseason games.
2. We have added deduced games for 1932 to 1936 thanks to the continued great work by Tom Thress, Rob Wood, Dick Cramer, Jim Herdman, Cliff Blau, Javier Anderson, and John Gabcik. I am sorry to say that we lost John to cancer a few months ago; he will be greatly missed. We now have at least deduced versions of full play-by-play for the last 88 seasons.
3. We have also completed the proofing of play by play files from 1918. Although this season is still missing some games which will eventually be deduced, I think it is valuable to get the information we have available as soon as possible. These new releases cover over 85% of the games back through 1918, meaning that we now provide play-by-play data for the last 102 seasons.
4. Individual player pages, career totals, umpire pages, biographical details and game logs have been updated.
5. Tom Ruane continues to lead the way on constructing box score files with the addition of the 1905 and 1904 seasons with this release. He has had great help from Dave Lamoureaux, Jonathan Frankel, Javier Anderson, Mike Grahek, Tom Bradley, Bill Nowlin, Tom Stillman, Gary Pearce, Rob Wood, J.G. Preston, Pete Palmer, Herm Krabbenhoft, Don Zminda, Charlie O’Reilly, Bob Boehme, Chuck Hildebrandt, Mark Armour, Ron Weaver, Bob LeMoine, Ian Orr, Dave Newman, and Dixie Tourangeau.
6. Rob Wood has done a huge amount of work in updating our ejection data, both in adding new instances and correcting the details on many more. We have now documented over 17,500 ejections and in the next few weeks, there will be an announcement concerning a new feature on the website with ejection data.
7. Rob has also managed to find time to gather additional details on umpire changes during games, many of which are caused by foul ball injuries to the home plate umpire. This section of our site has also been updated.
8. Webmaster Mark Pankin continues to manage the site with updates on replay reviews, umpire changes, batting out of turn, and so much more, including comments from users who have found errors in some of our files. Thanks to his efforts, we stay current to the greatest extent possible.
9. We continue to get new scorecards, largely through the efforts of Joe Stillwell and his regular scanning of auction sites. Many of these are improvements over accounts we have already posted, for example, for deduced games. Wayne Townsend has taken on the difficult task of incorporating the new information into the old files.
Thanks to everyone for your continued interest in Retrosheet. It is a continued pleasure to supply this information to the baseball public.
SABR member DAVID W. SMITH is the founder and president of Retrosheet. He can be reached at dwsmith@retrosheet.org.
Originally published: December 10, 2019. Last Updated: December 10, 2019.