“Modern baseball analysis has grown increasingly sophisticated in the past decade,” says baseball fan and associate professor in the Math and Computer Science Department John Aleshunas. “A number of new statistical categories have become popular resources for announcers and writers.”

The increased need is one of the reasons Aleshunas began a project this summer to improve the access of baseball history through Retrosheet data to Windows and Macintosh users. According to Aleshunas, many fans would like to compare modern player performances to those from earlier this century but have been unable to do so because play-by-play accounts have never been collected or organized in a systematic way. The organization Retrosheet, founded in 1989, now computerizes play-by-play accounts of as many pre-1984 major league games as possible. But Aleshunas found the final entry of the translated accounts did not make it accessible to all who wanted it.

“This last step is where my project started,” Aleshunas said. “The download files must be converted into event files for play-by-play analysis, box scores for player performance analysis or game files for team performance analysis. The existing Retrosheet data file processing applications are old DOS programs that aren’t easy to run for current Windows and Macintosh users.”

Aleshunas first noticed the problem at a workshop during the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) national convention this summer. Many current Windows users at the workshop were unfamiliar with “command prompt” programs, and Macintosh users couldn’t use the programs without additional emulation software. Aleshunas approached Retrosheet with the possibility of creating Windows and Mac applications to process the files, and he hit a home run with the president.

John Aleshunas

“This is something that we’ve wanted to do for more than 10 years,” says Retrosheet president David Smith, “But we didn’t have the time or the expertise.”

Aleshunas will now develop these programs using C++ (Webster University’s core programming language) and the Qt class library.   He plans to have the initial prototypes ready for review by Retrosheet before the end of December and ready for release by the 2008 baseball season.

Once this project is complete, baseball fans will have easier access to the detailed Retrosheet data. They can then see for themselves whether it makes sense to walk a batter, set up a double play or have a pitcher bat eighth rather than ninth in the lineup next year when the umpire yells, “Play ball.”

BACK TO TOP