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Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Retrosheet Announcement
Details:
Retrosheet web site updated with new release
June 25, 2008
I am pleased to announce that the semiannual update of the Retrosheet site has been completed. As usual we have released some new league-seasons:
1921 NL
1953 NL
1954 AL (NL was released earlier)
1955 both leagues
I presume everyone is pleased with our continued retro-progress as I am. However, there are two other special new features that are more unusual and that have been on the wish list of many people for a long time. These are:
The 1999 play by play data files are now available on our site!
The site no longer uses frames, but has a menubar at the top of each page instead.
We concluded a licensing agreement with Pete Palmer and Gary Gillette for the 1999 data a few weeks ago. Having the data for this season is tremendous in so many ways and with our other new seasons (listed above) we now have the past 54 seasons covered (1954-2007) with the exception of the “box score only” games for the pre-1974 years. These files include full pitch by pitch data as well, giving us 20 straight seasons with that detail, again with a few exceptions in the earlier years.
The change from frames to menubar is a significant change. The most immediate benefits are: 1)each page now has more width to display since the frame is no longer occupying the left hand side, and 2) the URL for each page now shows in the address bar so that it is easier to copy the link for use elsewhere. This should also increase our visibility to indexing services such as Google. Thanks to Marc Drumm for creating the necessary code to make the menubar a reality. Of course there is always the potential for glitches with this large an effort (our site now has over 491,000 html files) and I would be grateful to learn of any problems that are discovered so that we can fix them as promptly as possible.
Once again the lion’s share of the work was done by Tom Ruane who generated all those pages and integrated all the updates. However, many others continue their priceless contributions. Many people deserve praise and they are noted on the website. However I would like to give special recognition to the following: Clem Comly (most of the proofing of the new seasons), David Vincent (Umpire data, biographical data, ballpark pages), Dick Cramer (proofing 1953 NL), Jim Herdman (ballpark data) and webmaster Mark Pankin who maintains the site and keeps it up to date on a nearly daily basis.
Dave Smith
Retrosheet