Retrosheet announces Summer 2017 updates
By David W. Smith
I am pleased to announce Retrosheet‘s semi-annual update to our website for Summer 2017. Much has happened in the last six months and here are the highlights:
We have had many updates to event files, along with updated game logs and transaction data. The major inputters to the play by play (event) files have been Dick Cramer, Jim Herdman, Cliff Blau, David Vincent, Doug Burks, Gary Frownfelter, and Howard Johnson. Many seasons have seen additional games added to the event files and the 1928 season has been released for the first time with full accounts for 996 of the 1,231 games played that year (81% of the total). The Most Wanted list on our website has been updated to reflect our progress across all seasons.
In addition to the 1928 season with its 81% completion, we have finished deductions for 1943 and 1942 for those games lacking scorecards or play by play accounts from newspapers. With these deduced games in hand and online, we now have plausible — my favorite way to describe the deduced games — play by play accounts online for 100% of games for all seasons from 1942-2016. These deductions require painstaking work with newspaper stories to construct the accounts; the major work in this area has been done by Tom Thress, Dick Cramer, Jim Wohlenhaus, Jim Herdman, John Gabcik, Mark Pankin, and Stew Thornley.
The discrepancy files for 1973-79 have undergone thorough proofing and are now on the website. Box score files for 1910 have also been rigorously proofed and are now available.
As usual, Tom Ruane provided the leadership for the proofing of the box score files project. For the Deadball Era work, Tom gives special thanks to Jonathan Frankel for help researching batter walks and strikeouts and to Dave Lamoureaux for help on discrepancy files, researching RBI data and anything else that came up. Others who worked on 1910 include: Ted Turocy, Ron Weaver, Tom Bradley, Larry Defillipo, Wayne Voltz, Stu Shea, and as always, Pete Palmer.
We have provided schedules for download for each season for several years. These contain the information that was published before each season by the leagues. Thanks largely to the efforts of David Vincent, these schedules have now been enhanced so that we now have information for every game that was NOT played as planned, almost always with the reason and the makeup date for the postponed game. This is a remarkable database that will be useful to anyone interested in these daily activities.
DAVID W. SMITH is the founder and president of Retrosheet. He can be reached at dwsmith@retrosheet.org.
Originally published: June 27, 2017. Last Updated: June 27, 2017.