Retrosheet announces Summer 2023 updates
By Tom Thress
Retrosheet is pleased to announce its semi-annual update for Summer 2023 at Retrosheet.org.
Major thanks go out to Joe Callahan for generating the “Games/People/Parks” portion of the website. I would also like to thank Rob Wood and Dave Smith for their significant efforts in helping to prepare the data presented here.
What’s New in This Release
New and improved data
- 1919 and 1920 AL and NL seasons. Event files, including some deduced files, are now available for all of the 1919 and 1920 seasons. Special thanks to Rob Wood for leading this effort and thanks to our team of deducers: Cliff Blau, Dick Cramer, Jim Herdman, Dave Smith, Wayne Townsend, and Rob Wood. See [Data downloads]
- 1913 AL and NL seasons. Event files are now available for approximately 775 of the 1,234 regular-season AL/NL games played in 1913 (63%). Special thanks to Dave Smith, Wayne Townsend, and Rob Wood for their help in preparing this season. See [1913 season]
- 1940 and 1941 Negro League seasons. Special thanks to Alan Cohen, Dean Esgrow, Dave Lamoureaux, and Wes Tervo. See [Negro League Seasons]
- In addition, improvements have been made to the game accounts of more than 400 games which were previously released through the discovery of new scorecards, new newspaper sources, and a growing number of radio and television accounts that are being made available online. These improvements have led to the promotion of 168 deduced files to full event files. Special thanks to Wayne Townsend, Jay Wigley, Rob Wood, and others for their help in this work.
- An optional new info field has been added for Retrosheet’s event and box-score files, gametype. The documentation of our event files has been edited to describe this new field as well as improved to better address some other issues. Thanks to Dave Smith for making these edits. See here.
- Retrosheet’s compilations of people, teams, and ballparks have been expanded to include Negro League data. Retrosheet’s play-by-play collections of All-Star and postseason games also include Negro League games where possible.
- Finally, Retrosheet has added an option to download all of our data with a single click. The resulting zip file is 237Mb large. You can download it by clicking here.
Website Improvements
Retrosheet has added two new menu items. To accommodate these, the previous menu items “About” and “Organization” can now be accessed via the link in the opening paragraph on the home page – or here.
- Search: Retrosheet has added simple search capabilities to link to our calendar pages and player pages. Retrosheet hopes to expand these search capabilities in the near future.
- Data Resources: Retrosheet has added lists of websites which may be of interest to Retrosheet users. These include sites which make Retrosheet data more accessible as well as web sites which use Retrosheet data.
- In addition, the Negro Leagues portion of the website has been improved. See [Negro Leagues].
Additional Updates
Three new research papers are available which rely upon Retrosheet data.
- Dynasty – 1901-1938 4 Team Dominance by Brien Kocsis
- Prospect Theory and the Favorite Long-Shot Bias in Baseball by James Nutaro (outside link)
- Fielders’ In-Game Fatigue Figures in Their Batting Performance by Jay Wigley
Thank you to all of Retrosheet’s volunteers. My apologies for any that I failed to identify by name. Retrosheet is always looking for more volunteers. If you would like to help us with this work, please reach out to me at the e-mail address below.
TOM THRESS is the president of Retrosheet. He can be contacted at tthress@retrosheet.org.
Originally published: July 3, 2023. Last Updated: June 30, 2023.