[Comedian2004]

Missing in the game is something I think is very important, which is the Almanac. We can get a lot of history from the program, but no box scores or play by plays are saved after the season is over.

I am working on a program to solve this situation.

First, the bad news. There is no way I can write a program that would work if you ran multiple seasons in a row. Just no way to possibly do it. I had even thought of having a program run in the background that would monitor when the season was over and then doing the almanac function, but it would just not work, as it could not possibly get done with it's copying files before the next season was underway.

Now the good news. I have figured out a way to link it from inside the program. So, you can be in the game and then go to the almanac and view old box scores, etc.

This is going to be an easy program to write in some aspects, but difficult in others. I am still researching the information to see a few things. I DO NOT want to require you to create the HTML reports and that part looks good. It would basically copy over the contents of the NEWS FOLDER and it's subfolders. My test league I am working on has 16 teams with a full set of minors. The contents of this folder is 230meg. So, this is not for the people with small hard drives. A 20 league season could easily take up a quit a few gig worth of disk space. Hey, disk drives are cheap!

I will more and likely require you to do a CSV dump also. This does not take that long, but I could also archive this information and it would help in creating some fantastic almanac stuff that would not be possible without this dump. My dump file for this example league is just 30meg in size.

Here is some of the stuff that I would be able to add in the almanac:

An HTML page with links to each season.
List of all no-hitters, with links to the box scores and play by plays.
List of all-star games, along with their box scores and PBP.
List of all the world series with all box scores present.
A complete history of a player's season to season ratings.
A listing of all the game accomplishments, with links to the box scores and PBP.
Manager and coach won/lost records for their career.

This is just a few of the items that I can think of at 2:30am.

So far, in the infant stages of this program, I have it where you can select the year. I can then display information about the league, but mainly I can see what the date is of the league. It can check if it is January 1st. That looks like the best date to run the almanac function. I originally looked at December 31st, but some of the league files are not updated until after this day.

One problem I see if that if I copy the box score over from say June 15th, 1955, it will have links to the player's HTML files. These links will not work, since the player's HTMLs are not created unless you tell the program to create them. Same thing with the team HTML files. When you are viewing the box scores in the game and click on a team or a player's name, it creates that HTML file on the fly.

Now to me personally, an almanac without links to the player's pages is not worth it. The added benefit of this is that the almanac would show this players html page for that year. Not his current html page.

This is going to a slow process to write this program, as I really have to dig into this and do some thought process on the best way to do this.

Now, I am also thinking this. This process could actually take a very long time, to do the SQL Dump, to do the HTML dump and then for my program to copy over the files to another location, but then again, it only has to be done ONE time when the season ends. I think the end result will justify the time spent creating the almanac.

Picture this situation: Final game of the year. Detroit playing Chicago with Rogers facing some crummy guy on the Sox. Before you start the game, you look at Roger's history and see that he had a 1 hitter vs. Chicago 2 years ago on June 15th. So, without leaving the OOTP game, you head to the almanac and and look at the schedule for June 15th for that year, click on the box score and see that Dye had a single in the 7th inning with 2 outs. So, you of course walk Dye and Rogers gets a no-hitter this time.

Let me know what you think of something like this.