President's Report for June 4, 2023 Retrosheet Board Meeting

I want to begin by thanking you all for the faith you put in me, entrusting me with this position. I want to thank Dave for his assistance through this transition. I want to thank Rob for stepping up and increasing his already prodigious volunteer efforts and providing a valuable sounding board for me in this transition. In day-to-day operations, I like to think of Dave, Rob, and me as the Retrosheet Triumvirate. I look forward to continuing to work closely with both of them, and the rest of you, in the coming year(s).

I also want to thank Tom Ruane for his extraordinary contributions to Retrosheet, especially over this past year after he had already decided to step back. He very graciously prepared two final releases this year. Working with him on our December release was extremely gratifying and provided me with crucial insight into the details of preparing and proofing Retrosheet data.

One of the unexpected delights of this year was Joseph Callahan stepping forward and volunteering to take over Tom Ruane's role. Tom was extremely helpful to Joe and me through that transition. Thanks to Tom's help, we are on schedule for a regular release, hopefully the weekend of June 16-18.

In terms of the nitty gritty of Retrosheet's core mission: providing data, as of our upcoming release, we will have released play-by-play data for the following AL/NL seasons.

• Full play-by-play data, including some deduced games, for all seasons from 1919 – 2022
• Play-by-play data for the majority of games from 1913 - 1918

In addition to our continuing work in the 20th century, we have begun proofing the 1900 season. Dick Cramer and Cliff Blau have generated play-by-play accounts (including a number of deduced games) for the 1893 – 1900 seasons. Because we are starting from scratch on these seasons, their proofing will take longer than the proofing for 20th-century seasons. But I hope to begin to release some 19th-century data perhaps as soon as our Fall 2023 release.

I have also begun to work on some improvements to the website. Some of these may be released as part of our upcoming summer release. The exact extent of that remains to be seen. I am working with several volunteers on that front and look forward to continuing that work through the coming year.

Finally, my work on the Negro Leagues has continued to be extremely gratifying and I am thrilled about our upcoming alliance with MLB. Our upcoming summer release – which is timed to hopefully be complete prior to MLB's announcement of our alliance – will extend our Negro League seasons back to 1940. I am also hoping to make the Negro Leagues portion of the website, and our Negro Leagues data, more accessible – partly as a bit of a preview of some anticipated improvements to the overall site.

I look forward to continued developments on all of these fronts in the coming year. Thank you, again, for the faith you have put in me to lead this wonderful organization through this exciting time in our history.