THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Monday, June 23, 2008

Mapping IDs

If you are looking to make a contribution to the world of sabermetrics, here is the perfect little project for you:  Create a mapping table of all player IDs out there.

• Captain Crunch put out the CBS, MLB.com, NFBC (whatever that is), and BP ids. 
  
• The BDB has its ID (formerly Lahman), Baseball-Almanac (Holtz), Retrosheet, and B-r.com.
  
• Mike Fast (can’t find it right now) posted the Retrosheet, MLB.com mappings.  (Mike: I found a couple of tiny mistakes.  If you can post it somewhere, I’ll give you the errors.)
  

So, this is what I would like:
1. Post all your mappings somewhere

That’s it.  Someone, maybe me, will then merge all of them to come up with the (current) definitive list.

Ideally, other sites will be as bothered as the rest of us in terms of mapping everything, that they will contribute their mappings of the new players in the future to keep this up-to-date.  All those minor league IDs, college websites, Japanese websites, etc, can finally have everything linked up.  Basically the “universal ID”.  Is it possible?  Let’s see…