Baseball Hacks

Make Your Own Stats Book

Produce your own book of baseball statistics using Microsoft Access reports.

Every year, publishers release a set of new phonebook-size directories of baseball statistics. You can find the exact same statistics in free sources like the Baseball DataBank and Baseball Archive databases. (You can’t get any accompanying insight, though, which is why it can still be worth buying these books.)

I usually find electronic databases more convenient than printed copies, but sometimes paper is better. For example, if your fantasy baseball league does a live draft, you might find a prioritized list of players. This hack tells you how to use Microsoft Access to print a professional-looking statistics report.

To use this hack, you will need Microsoft Access. For the example here, we’ll only print batting statistics. We’ll limit this further to show only:

• Players who played in the last year

  A History of the Player and Team Databases

  The Baseball Archive and Baseball DataBank databases have a long history. As you might imagine, it took a lot of work to assemble a database of player statistics going back to 1871. The story of the free databases begins with Pete Palmer. During the 1970s and 1980s, Pete compiled paper records for baseball games into a computer database and used this database to produce the statistics in the book Total Baseball (Total Sports). CMC Corporation of Portland, Oregon, released a CD-ROM containing all the statistics from the 1993 edition of Total Baseball ...