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A Call for Help

Before I get to the meat of the nub of my gist, as it were, I have a mild bit of self-analysis: I'm not good at asking for or taking help. This is true in basically all areas of my life -- whether at home, work, or play, I tend to want to do everything myself. Part of it is being a bit of a control freak, part of it is a feeling that I'm the only one that cares if some stuff gets done, part of it is just self-centeredness, but one way or the other, the result is that I get stressed and stuff doesn't get done some times, so it's something I'm working on.

This site is a lot of different things to a lot of different folks, and one area that's been getting short shrift is the historical records and research portion. There's some good stuff in there, but there are several areas that need to be extended, and I'm going to take some time over the next few weeks to try to kick off some efforts to get some of you involved in building up our knowledge. It'll just be a matter of describing the materials needed and setting up some common file formats at first, but I'll be glad to do some air traffic control work to prevent duplication of effort if things really take off, and I can also throw in some effort to build tools for data entry if the need becomes clear.

I'd love to hear any more ideas that you have for data sets that would be useful, but after some recent discussions with a loose-knit group of occasional (and some more serious) researchers, it seems like these are the main areas where contributions might be welcome:

• The Holy Grail, as it were, is a database of all college baseball games ever played -- a version of The College Baseball Game Score Database that goes all the way back to 1859. I already have the tools to pull together the separate team records for a year if I get them, so what would be needed here would be for someone to create those season records -- you could take your favorite team's media guide and get the data from that into a useable format, for example. Full season records could be quite fun, from my warped point of view. For example, those who complain about an East Coast Media Bias now should go back and read the press from the early 20th century, where the implicit assumption is that the best teams are those that went on to be in the Ivy League and everyone else was just pretending. Wouldn't you like to know who the best team in the country was in 1907?

• A simpler version of that, but still useful, would be full season win-loss records for everyone going back to the beginning of time. The annual conference standings over in The Filing Cabinet are a good start on that, but they're incomplete and occasionally erroneous, and filling in the gaps would help a lot. One of the curious areas for me is that time before the NCAA separated into divisions in 1967; were the teams that went on to the College Division and then Divisions II and III always clearly separate (not that they are now) or were they even more intermingled?

• On the money-making side of the house, the big desire is for individual player stats going back farther than 2002. I wouldn't use volunteer labor to increase my small consulting income, of course, but making the player stats databases more comprehensive would have all sorts of benefits to the research community as well, and if the Major League teams can find a way to benefit from the data, that's probably a good thing as well. This one would be a little tougher, since it would require access to either old media guides or to a cooperative SID (if you are a cooperative SID, of course, get in touch).

• One area that doesn't interest me as much but that I'd be glad to act as a conduit for if it's where you'd like to plug in is the SABR Collegiate Database, an attempt to identify the college experience of every Major Leaguer in history.

To some extent, what I'm calling for is time sacrificed in service to the college baseball fan community, but there are pleasures that can come from this sort of work -- I once was entering an old season record for my alma mater when I found myself drifting off into space reliving an absolutely incredible game from Memorial Day, 1990. Those kinds of triggers are worth quite a bit some days.

Boyd's World-> Breadcrumbs Back to Omaha-> A Call for Help

About the author, Boyd Nation