Baseball Reference - Minor Stats

[Comedian2004]

They now have 16 years worth of minor stats available on their site. Hopefully they are going back in time and filling in the blanks. Sporting News reported Minor League stats way back, so they should be ready available.

I think this could lead to a minor league version of the database in the Lahman style, or even the merging of the minor league data into the existing database.

[f.montoya]

This is very good news.

[DrArbiter]

As I was writing the other day on the "General Discussions" forum, I'm fairly confident that there will be some sort of minor league database available by Opening Day. The only questions are how much coverage there will be, and/or whether the database import technology OOTP uses will be able to handle it. I have been experimenting privately with some minor league databases, but they're so large, the current methodology OOTP uses makes them impractically slow.

There will certainly be a database featuring the last few years' of stats, which would be useful primarily for roster makers for '08. A database going back as far as about 1993 is more-likely-than-not. Beyond that, I don't want to speculate.

[AnthonyGiacalone]

Sean at Baseball-Reference is working hard on securing more and more minor league statistics.

SABR's website is going through a re-design, but following that SABR will, allegedly, have ALL the minor league numbers available. Many, many people have been working on this a long time. It's still uncertain how friendly these numbers will be in building a database for use with OOTP. For example, their scouting database is excellent but almost impossible to use for OOTP purposes.

[DrArbiter]

The SABR database is indeed extensive; the version I'm looking at right now has about 150,000 players and 700,000 or so player-seasons. Much of it, though, will still take some time to be complete enough for OOTP to make much sense of. Back to 1993, it's essentially complete (or will be shortly) in the sense of having all the statistical categories you'd expect. Prior to that, not all categories are present yet, including data like walks and strikeouts. That'll indeed be improved over time, and sooner rather than later -- but when you do the math as to how many league-seasons we're talking about here, it won't be overnight.

Hence, my earlier assertions as to the likelihoods of various levels of minor league databases being available at what times.

[Le Grande Orange]

Originally Posted by DrArbiter

The SABR database is indeed extensive; the version I'm looking at right now has about 150,000 players and 700,000 or so player-seasons. Much of it, though, will still take some time to be complete enough for OOTP to make much sense of.

Personally, I'd argue that the way OOTP works in regards to the major-minor relationship would need to be overhauled and upgraded in order to make the most of such a minor league player database.

OOTP cannot as yet recreate the way the major-minor relationship evolved over the decades in the real world.

[DrArbiter]

Originally Posted by Le Grande Orange

Personally, I'd argue that the way OOTP works in regards to the major-minor relationship would need to be overhauled and upgraded in order to make the most of such a minor league player database.

OOTP cannot as yet recreate the way the major-minor relationship evolved over the decades in the real world.

I'm thinking of a *much* more limited objective here: simply being able to have players come into your universe in the year they entered pro ball, and have their ratings more or less match up with their real-life accomplishments.

I don't expect there will *ever* be the ability to run the type of historical replay some do with the majors, with historical franchise movements, players debuting on the same teams they debuted with historically, etc. But, anyone doing more of an "alternate history" project would still find an expanded database product attractive.