Temple: Building a Retrosheet database, part 1

From SABR member David G. Temple at TechGraphs on December 18, 2014:

That magical time of year has come again. Yes, the very very fine folks over at Retrosheet have updated their game files once again, and the new batch includes (among other updates) the play-by-play files for every baseball game in 2014. There are a lot of things you can do with the Retrosheet files, but one of the most powerful options is to create a Retrosheet MySQL database.

Certainly, there are a lot of things you can find out at FanGraphs and Baseball Reference without the need for your own database. But every now and then, a question pops up that Googling, FanGraphs leaderboards, or even the Almighty Play Index at Baseball Reference cannot answer. It’s a luxury to have your own database, to be sure, but any baseball nerd worth their salt should at least have one to tinker with.

This tutorial is going to be starting from scratch. This means that this first installment of the series will simply be about acquiring the right tools to build out the database. We’ll get to actually inputting the baseball data in the next chapter. This may seem like the boring part, because it is. But it’s important to have the proper foundation before we get to the fun stuff.

Read the full article here: http://www.techgraphs.com/building-a-retrosheet-database-part-1/



Originally published: December 18, 2014. Last Updated: December 18, 2014.