Baseball Hacks

Get an Access Database of Player and Team Statistics

Get a free database of historical baseball data from the Internet (covering every major league game from 1871 through today) in Microsoft Access format.

Suppose you want to know the average ERA for your fantasy league. Or maybe you want to settle a bet with a friend about which players got on base most often during the 1970s. Or perhaps you want to show that Jim Thome was a clutch hitter for the Phillies in 2004. To do this, you’ll need to find some statistics.

Sometimes you can find the statistics you want from MLB.com, the Baseball Reference, or the Baseball Prospectus (see “Follow the Game Online” [Hack #5] for some suggestions), but other times you won’t find exactly what you want. You might be able to find this information online by spending hours tediously searching for the raw data, cutting and pasting the data into a spreadsheet, and producing the stats you want in the form you want.

I think that it’s often easier to find the stats you want if you have your own database. This hack shows you the easiest way I know to get a database of baseball players. These databases include the total statistics, by year, for each baseball player. Later in this book, I’ll show how to find records by game and play-by-play information. I’ll also show how to get data in two common database formats: Microsoft Access and MySQL, the popular (and free!) open source database.

The information in these databases is identical, so you can pick whichever ...