Retrosheet's First Semi-Annual Release of 2024

Retrosheet is pleased to announce its first semi-annual update of 2024. Major thanks go out to Joe Callahan for generating the "Games/People/Parks" portion of the website. I would also like to thank Rob Wood for his significant efforts in helping to prepare the data presented here.

What's New in This Release

• 1915 and 1916 AL and NL seasons as well as 1915 Federal League. Event files, including some deduced files, are now available for all of the 1915 and 1916 seasons. Special thanks to Rob Wood for leading this effort and thanks to our team of deducers: Cliff Blau, Dick Cramer, Jim Herdman, Dave Smith, Wayne Townsend, and Rob Wood.
  One note regarding the 1915 season. Retrosheet does not have official daily data for batter strikeouts for the Federal League. Rather than arbitrarily assign strikeouts to batters based on mere whims, we have decided that, in cases where we are not sure exactly which batters struck out in a game, we would make no effort to assign such strikeouts. Instead, these strikeouts are implicitly treated as "out on an unknown play" within these games. Pitcher strikeout totals are still reported within our box-score event (.ebx) files and on our game pages.


• Improved Fielding Credits. A major undertaking by Retrosheet in recent months has been to improve the individual fielding credits within our files. As part of this effort, missing fielding plays have been filled in for 1,558 additional games. In addition, box-score event files with complete game-level fielding credits (putouts, assists) have been created for all games prior to 1980. Special thanks to Rob Wood, Jay Wigley, and Mike Grahek for their help with this project.
  Retrosheet is still missing some fielding credits for some games between 1981 and 1996. A list of the specific games and plays in question can be found here Any help that anyone can provide regarding any of these plays would be greatly appreciated.


• In total, improvements have been made to the game accounts of more than 3,500 games, through the discovery of new scorecards, new newspaper sources, and a growing number of radio and television accounts that are being made available online. These improvements include the addition of 4 new accounts in 1913 - 14, the promotion of 95 deduced files to full event files between 1919 and 1968, the removal of 462 games from our 'most wanted' list between 1914 and 1968, and the addition of pitch data for 162 games (between 1962 and 1982). Special thanks to Wayne Townsend, Jay Wigley, Rob Wood, Bob Yahr, and others for their help in this work. A detailed description of most of these improvements can be found here (this list does not include detailed updates for the 1915 and 1916 seasons and may be incomplete). The file detailing updates is included in the full download available on our home page and described below.


• Data Downloads: Beginning with our June 2023 release, Retrosheet has introduced the option to download all of Retrosheet's data within a single zip file. The link to this zip file is available on our front page, as the last option from the "Downloads" menu, or here. This file is approximately 350 Mb. The data within the zip file take up approximately 2.0Gb of space unzipped.
  The data download zip file includes two new features with this release. First, box-score event (.ebx) files are now available for all seasons from 1901 - 2023. As noted above, for games prior to 1980, these files contain complete game-level fielding (and other) data even in cases where some fielding information may be missing from our play-by-play accounts. Box-score files also contain complete pitcher strikeout data even for games for which batter strikeout data may be missing or incomplete. Second, an alternate version of our biofile, biofile0.csv, is included. This contains the exact same information as biofile.csv but is more compatible with Excel. In biofile0.csv, dates all take the form yyyymmdd (e.g., April 15, 1865 would be 18650415) and heights are expressed in inches, as well as a few other cosmetic differences.


• Negro Leagues: The Negro Leagues portion of our website was updated last month. This update included the 1939 and 1949 seasons as well as the addition of more than 100 additional deduced play-by-play accounts for the 1948 season. See here for a detailed description of our Negro Leagues data.

• Using Retrosheet Data: Since our last major release, Retrosheet has added several sources to its page listings, Resources for Using Retrosheet Data and Websites Using Retrosheet Data. If any of you have or know of a website that you think should be added to either of these pages, please contact Tom Thress at tthress-ATsign-retrosheet.org.


• Ballpark firsts: We have updated the MLB firsts pages for several historical MLB stadiums. Thanks to Jim Herdman for compiling these data.


• Retrosheet has also updated several additional pages since our last major release to add and update historical data based on ongoing research. These include pages on batting out of turn, lost home runs, and non-pitchers on the mound.

Thank you to all of Retrosheet's volunteers. My apologies to any that I failed to identify by name. Retrosheet is always looking for more volunteers. If you would like to help us with any of this work, please reach out to me at the e-mail address below.

Tom Thress
Retrosheet President