June 12, 2021; start time 11:02 AM am EDT; adjournment 11:52 AM, EDT

Twenty-eighth Meeting of the Board

Present:						Missing:
	David Smith, President				None	
	Tom Ruane, Vice President	
	Trent McCotter, Secretary
	Tom Thress, Treasurer
	Scott Fischthal, Director
	Luke Kraemer, Director
	Tom Shieber, Director

Motions:

Sponsor		Purpose					Result
Shieber		Adoption of agenda			7-0-0-0

Shieber 	Approval of minutes			7-0-0-0

Thress		Adoption of Nominating Committee report	7-0-0-0

Thress		Election of President (Smith)		7-0-0-0

Thress		Election of Director (Fischthal)	7-0-0-0

Thress		Election of Director (Shieber)		7-0-0-0

Thress		Adoption of Treasurer's Report		7-0-0-0

Thress		Adoption of Secretary's Report		7-0-0-0

Kramer		Adoption of President's Report		7-0-0-0

Kraemer		Adjourn					7-0-0-0

Old Business:

Smith said he has uniformly renamed the electronic scans of daily sheets. He will next prepare a preamble to accompany the scans, explaining how they are organized, what is missing, and the presence of discrepancies. Smith will then contact Kelli Bogan at the Hall of Fame to restart talks about presenting the scans on the HOF's website for download. Smith will cc Shieber on those discussions. Shieber will then follow up with Kelli to move the project along.

New Business:

Smith has scanned approximately 40,000 of the original scoresheets in his possession but still has multiple times that amount left to scan. SABR expressed an interest in housing the electronic files in its digital archives.

Smith said he has already been spending reduced time on Retrosheet and may retire at some point in a year or so. Thress and Ruane are on notice.

Smith said 2021 will be the final season for which he will collect daily game data and put it into Retrosheet format. It takes 2 hours each day. He said someone else can do it, or we can have the website direct researchers to another site if they want recent seasons (e.g., Baseball-Reference.com).

Ruane said he won't keep up the website after the next few years, as each new season requires approximately 40,000 lines of code. That may be another reason to freeze the website for recent years and just not provide data for those seasons.

Thress noted that Retrosheet has largely accomplished its goal of having boxes for the 20th century AL and NL. The next steps will be Negro League data and 19th century data. Given the amount of missing information for those times (especially Negro League seasons), Thress proposed presenting game-level data as it is discovered but not presenting season or career totals because providing sums would be misleading when so much is still unknown/undiscovered.

Kraemer noted that he does some work for Diamond Mind Baseball and recently had discussions in that capacity with Kevin Johnson of Seamheads about licensing Negro League data. Kraemer indicated he would avoid any conflicts of interest.