from Amazon
Sunday, February 08, 2009
MLB/MiLB: 8833
That’s how many players played in MLB or MiLB in 2008: 8833. And here is the entire list (csv). All of them are listed with their MLBAM Id. (It does not include JT Snow.)
1289 of the 1290 MLB players also have their Retro, BDB, STATS, and BIS ids listed. (The one guy I didn’t do never took the field at all and never started a game as DH. I’ll leave it to one of you guys to figure out who that player was.)
All the players are assigned a primary position class: C, IF, OF, 1B, based on where they played the most in MLB (minimum, uh… I forget what I did… I think I used 100 innings in MLB). Anyone who played less than that in MLB, I then merged his MLB totals to his MiLB totals to get his fielding position class.
• Sabermetrics
• Data
I did not notice this when it was originally posted and only saw it when it was linked in another thread a little while ago. I had independently done similar work [MLB only] (actually adding 2008 mappings to mappings up through 2007).
The good news is that I found only two discrepancies between our mappings and that yours were without error. The caveat is that IDs need not be permanent identifiers. The discrepancies I found were only for 2 BIS IDs, for Robinson Cancel and for Adam Pettyjohn. These two originally had played in MLB in 1999 and 2001 respectively and then did not appear again until 2008. When I did my mappings originally in 2006/7, BIS had identified them with historical IDs >1000000, so I did not look to remap their IDs against “new” players in 2008. But BIS changed their IDs to their post 2001 form (<10000). I have also seen this sort of re-identifying process occur with ESPN player IDs ... Anyway, something to beware of if you build on this mapping for 2009 ...