Hi All - question.

How can I use retrosheet data to get a db file that has:
Column 1 Date
Column 2 Team
Column 3 Games out of first place or if in 1st place games ahead.

How familiar are you with SQL? If you’re unfamiliar with it, you might need someone to just do that for you. It wouldn’t take long if someone knew how to do it (I don’t know, but I’ve been trying to learn).

I know how to use access some - but I believe this is beyond my scope.

I have been asking Dan Fox (recently at HT, now at BP) over email about certain specifics. He’s been very helpful. I’m sure there are a ton of people who use Retrosheet you could email.

If you have the time and energy, you can download the play-by-play data files yourself, and figure it out in SQL. At retrosheet.org, click on “Event Files”—two things on that Event Files page that are especially helpful is ( http://www.retrosheet.org/stepex.txt ) and ( http://www.retrosheet.org/tools.htm ) which would get you pretty far into the process. Just get it into SQL, and google some basic SQL language for what you’re trying to do. If I knew how, I would help you out here.

It seems like you wouldn’t need Retrosheet to do that, though. Could you use Baseball-Reference.com?

Perhaps I don’t understand. Is this all teams in history, at the end of the year, or one (or more) team(s) as they go along the season? If it’s the former, Baseball-Ref might be able to help you out more than anything. If it’s the latter, then I can’t think of a better site than Retrosheet.

I just realized I kind of skipped a step. SQL would be able to get you from the un-comma-delimited files of Retrosheet.org, to comma-delimited files you can put in Mic. Access.

From Dan Fox’ email to me, when I asked him how to “harvest” the data in general from Retrosheet to Access:

“As far as harvesting of data, what I do is download the event files from retrosheet and then run the BEVENT.exe program on them which you can also download from the site. That produces comma delimited files which I load into SQL Server. I then write SQL queries to study various questions. On the retrosheet site they also have a nice document that tells you what the fields mean. If you know SQL you can answer lots of questions fairly easily.”

I don’t know if you’ve heard of the book “Baseball Hacks,” but I would imagine it would help here a lot more than my ramblings.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596009429/sr=8-1/qid=1147793027/ref=pd_bbs_1/104-2358283-8092755?_encoding=UTF8

Generally speaking, if you don’t have or don’t know how to use database software (like Access or SQL), you can do a lot just in Excel.  You are limited to 65,536 rows, however, so you might need to split some data into multiple sheets.  Also, Excel obviously limits what you can do.