[ctorg]

I was using MS Access to look through a Catobase for an old league of mine, when a thought came to me. I'd had the idea before, but never an opportunity to play with it.

What if I cleared out the data from my league and replaced it with data from the Lahman database to create a Catobase of MLB history that would be updatable with our own league stats. That is, imagine having Catobase where you could actually have all of MLB history in it, and your leagues would build upon that.

So I started fooling around. I put all the batting, pitching, and fielding stats, along with Master information. I had to fudge a lot, filling in information where none was available. For instance, for guys with no birthday listed, I had them all born on January 1st. For guys with no height/weight, they got the median 6 feet, 180 lbs. That kind of stuff.

So all the basic stats are in. But the thing is, I know Catobase does a whole lot more. The Lahman database doesn't have splits or trades or any of that, and I don't want to go scanning though Retrosheet or whatever other sources to enter them individually. That's a bit beyond what I'd be willing to do. But how essential is the other info to running Catobase? If I blank out those tables, will it have an error and crash or will it still run? Does anyone have any idea? I'd hate to go further with this only to have it be a complete waste of time.

I wish I could test it, but they won't let us install software of our own here at work (where I have MS Access). I can't really come up with a good reason to install Catobase that would compel the IT guys to install it for me.

Does anyone have any idea?