THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

This program doesn’t include any data that’s not available elsewhere, but it allows for some decent sorting/filtering for those who aren’t Access whizs.  It also lists primary position with the offensive stats which is proving quite useful to me right now.

Thanks, I’ve heard of a few people using that, but I’ve never tried.

Your position comment reminds me that I should do an add-on to the Lahman DB to include primary position.  I’ll try to get to that this month.

Hardball Times (you’ve already included their glossary, but not their stats) has win shares and some other stats not found elsewhere:
http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/stats/

ESPN has more complete stats than yahoo (this may be redundant with the MLB link, but I find the MLB stats a real pain to navigate):
http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/statistics

If you want to include salary information:
http://mlbcontracts.blogspot.com
http://mlb4u.com

pat - what program?

Click Patriot’s name.

BP has yearly umpire stats:
http://www.baseballprospectus.com/statistics/sortable/index.php?cid=139814

Dan Fox has calculated baserunning stats (2006 only—using different method from James): http://danagonistes.blogspot.com/search/label/Baserunning

Fox also has a (free) Windows application for directional charts for BIP, described and linked here (may require BP sub to download): http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=5764

I downloaded Fox’s batted ball charts about a month ago, didn’t need a BP subscription.  Its pretty cool.

I have a link to his unfiltered post.  You can download the program from there.

http://lanaheimangelfan.blogspot.com/2006/12/batted-ball-charts.html

Thanks. Here’s a link to Fox’s BP Unfiltered post with his BIP program (to replace the link to BP premium):

http://www.baseballprospectus.com/unfiltered/?p=98

Does anybody know where I could get a list of retrosheet player IDs?  I couldn’t find it easily on retrosheet, but I’ve been known to miss things.

Doesn’t the master list of the Lahman database have that?  I can’t remember for suer but they do list several player ID’s.

Right, the MASTER table in the BDB or Lahman database has it.  Until Lahman is ready for distribution, you can use this:
http://www.insidethebook.com/ee/index.php/site/article/complete_baseball_database/

You can get the Retro Id in the .ros file in the 2006 event files.

Rally, Tango—thanks!

Tango - Other than MYSQL, What’s the best database to play with the data? Access? Is there anything you use that’s free?

If you are new, MS Access is the best one to use, bar none.  It has a fantastic user interface, and has a wonderful export/import facility, including with Excel.  And I hate Microsoft, so that says something.

Most other database have a free version, including Oracle.  Even Oracle’s full version is free, for development-use only (i.e., non-production).
http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/database/oracle10g/index.html

At the bottom, you will see various flavors of Oracle.  On the right side, you’ll have downloads, including to the Express Edition, which is free to use, even in production.

Oracle also has SQL Developer for its GUI capabilities.

SQL Server is also fairly strong, and I think they came out with a free version as well.  It has a good GUI.

I’ve never really used MySQL.  SQLlite seems to be good, but I’ve never really used it.  But it has lots of fans.

If you have less than 1 million records, and don’t anticipate doing too many joins of tables, I would stick with Access.  I processed the 99-02 data using Access for The Book.  I tried Oracle, but with all the off-the-cuff stuff I was doing, MS Access was far more practical.

I agree that MS Access is best for database newbies.  But make sure you back up your data regularly, preferably to a non MS format.  Access has had many well-documented issues with data loss and corruption (technically it’s the underlying Jet engine where problems exist and is no longer maintained by MS).

I personally use MySQL.  The GUI tools are actually quite good these days.  Plus, as open source, there is an extensive user community available as a support network for troubleshooting.  PostgreSQL is another good open source database thought by many to be more reliable than MySQL.

I would be hesitant to use SQLServer or Oracle (even the free versions) unless you have DBA experience with them.  Too complex and too much of a black box for anything less than industrial-strength apps.

I agree about backing up your Access data, but that’s the case about backing up your Oracle, MySQL, and even text data.  You’d be crazy not to backup your files on a weekly or daily basis.

Access makes it real easy to move your files from DB to text, and vice-versa.  Heck, I provided the shell script to load the BDB database, and it runs very quickly (under a minute I think, to load, I dunno… what half a million records...).  When I load flat files in Oracle, with my computer, I think it’s about 1 million records a minute.  So, the load/unload issue should be moot.

I disagree about DBA experience required for Oracle.  You just need to be confident in what you are doing.  Oracle is not complex at all, but it is very powerful.