Original Schedule Files Now Available at Retrosheet!

[gmo]

Originally posted by Le Grande Orange
Could you clarify what you mean about handling postponed games?

That was more just a thing for how I was converting. There seemed to be just one season in those I had looked at (later in 20th century was where I have focused mostly) where there were several lines noting games that were put off for later. I can't remember the details now. Plus, I got distracted from this by the whole home field advantage thing.

[Le Grande Orange]

Ah, okay. I think that was only the 1960 schedule file. Another person had donated to Retrosheet all of the information he had on the postponements of something like 10,000 games. Part of this information was integrated into the 1960 file as a test study.

Eventually, all of the original schedule info and postponement/rescheduling information will get integrated into the main Retrosheet game log files so that a full and complete picture of how each season unfolded can be had. But that's a long way off.

I still have to gather all of the post-publication schedule changes first, and that is a huge task in itself...

[Tresclub]

...Since the schedule files at Retrosheet are simply CSV text files, you could just open them in Wordpad and run a search and replace to change the various abbreviations to whatever you want, and then save the changes.

LGO, can you simply change the file extension from .txt to .csv, or do you have to open the .txt file in Excel, and then save it as a .csv file?

[Le Grande Orange]

The original schedule files at Retrosheet, while set up as CSV files, are saved in plain text format. So, for example, the schedule for the 1955 season when downloaded will be saved by default as, "1955sked.txt".

Since it has the .txt extension, the file can be opened directly into Notepad without issues. Once there, you can run a search and replace to change team abbreviations (at least in Win2000 you can. I don't think Notepad in Win98 has search and replace functions). After making any changes you can just save the file in its .txt format.

When in Excel, you can choose to have it open .txt files, and you'll then get the Text Import display where you select it as a comma delimited file. After that, it will open in Excel fine. The only trouble I run into is that the dates in Retrosheet files are without any separators, and I can never get them to import into Excel as dates. They always show up as a number, e.g. 19450418.

I suppose there's a way around this in Excel, but I can't seem to find it. I usually just end up running a search and replace on the Retrosheet file to insert hyphens at the right places in the date string. When I do that, the date field will show up in Excel as dates.

Of course, since the OOTP importer keys off of team ID numbers rather than team abbreviations, I'm not sure there's much benefit to changing team abbreviations at the moment...

[Tresclub]

Originally posted by Le Grande Orange
Since the schedule files at Retrosheet are simply CSV text files, you could just open them in Wordpad and run a search and replace to change the various abbreviations to whatever you want, and then save the changes.

Can you just change the file extension from .txt to .csv, or do you have to open it in Excel, and then save it as a .csv file?

[Riverdawg]

Originally posted by Le Grande Orange

When in Excel, you can choose to have it open .txt files, and you'll then get the Text Import display where you select it as a comma delimited file. After that, it will open in Excel fine. The only trouble I run into is that the dates in Retrosheet files are without any separators, and I can never get them to import into Excel as dates. They always show up as a number, e.g. 19450418.

Le Grande,

When you are doing the import via Excel, on Step 3 of 3, highlight your date column (the 1st column), and then in the upper right corner, there is an area called Column Data Format, click on Date and pick the type of Date format you want. That should enable your days to show up in a Date format.

Hope this helps. I am trying to see if I can make this transition of your schedule to the format OOTP 6 has it easier via Excel. I'll let you know what I find...

G

[BleacherBum]

Originally posted by fearofmimes
Calculate or update fatigue at the end of a game rather than at the end of the day. This does not appear to be entirely inconsistent with the game model since it does appear that next starter is incremented once the starter is selected (either when the game starts or after the game).

If something like this was done, I see the potential for moving toward full support of doubleheaders.

This sounds like you hit it right on the head - nice research.

My guess is that there is some "end of day" routine that updates the fatigue data, updates statistics, evaluates CPU decisions, and prepares the next day's rotations (among other things that I'm sure I overlooked). It appears that carving out the fatigue portion as a game to game item has been overlooked as a Doubleheader solution, or is just too damn difficult. I hope its not the latter. I'd like to see this solved too. I do know one thing - I wouldn't want all that end-of-day code running game by game or simming a season would likely take 10 or 20 times longer than it does now.

[BleacherBum]

Hey Orange, how closely related is the Retrosheet format to your format that we worked with last summer? And are you still using the same format for your original schedule files?

It looks like the OOTP schedule format didn't change this year, so I may take a look at that schedule writer I built last year.

[Le Grande Orange]

Originally posted by Riverdawg
When you are doing the import via Excel, on Step 3 of 3, highlight your date column (the 1st column), and then in the upper right corner, there is an area called Column Data Format, click on Date and pick the type of Date format you want. That should enable your days to show up in a Date format.

That's what I was doing before, but it didn't have any effect. I tried it again just now, and it worked. I must've missed a step somewhere or been clicking on the wrong thing... d'oh!

Originally posted by Riverdawg
I am trying to see if I can make this transition of your schedule to the format OOTP 6 has it easier via Excel. I'll let you know what I find...

Sounds good. I look forward to any positive results!

Originally posted by BleacherBum
Hey Orange, how closely related is the Retrosheet format to your format that we worked with last summer? And are you still using the same format for your original schedule files?

Yes, I always type out the schedules in the same format for my own use, as it's the quickest and easiest way to transcribe the data from the published schedule charts. And whatever schedules are posted on Retrosheet I still have in my own format on my computer.

I still use that file format converter you built in Excel almost every day. Each time I finish typing out another minor league schedule, I'll usually run it through your converter to doublecheck that all the dates are correct, especially if the published source was of poor quality and the dates were hard to make out or partially missing. The second template with each team in its own vertical column is great for checking the dates and matchups, though probably not that useful for converting over to the OOTP6 importing format.

The first template in your Excel converter is fairly similar to the Retrosheet format. The main difference would be that Retrosheet has a league column for both the home and away team (necessary for those years with interleague play), while yours only had it once, linked to the home team. The Retrosheet format also has a game number count for each team, so one can see how many games have been played by the team at each matchup. Yours of course shows the total number of games played on any given day, along with a couple of columns related to getting the data reorganized in Excel.

Originally posted by BleacherBum
It looks like the OOTP schedule format didn't change this year, so I may take a look at that schedule writer I built last year.

Well, if you do, that'd be great! You were working on some pretty cool things as I recall...

[Riverdawg]

Originally posted by Riverdawg
Le Grande,

When you are doing the import via Excel, on Step 3 of 3, highlight your date column (the 1st column), and then in the upper right corner, there is an area called Column Data Format, click on Date and pick the type of Date format you want. That should enable your days to show up in a Date format.

Hope this helps. I am trying to see if I can make this transition of your schedule to the format OOTP 6 has it easier via Excel. I'll let you know what I find...

G

No success. The biggest stumble block I ran into was when I tried to import the schedule, you have to put "," beside each entry. Thats a lot of commas!

Needless to say, I ended up creating a fake league in OOTP 5, setting it up in the format I have it in OOTP 6, used the Stickware Schedule Generator, v4.1, to create the schedule, and then import the fake league into OOTP 6.

I tried but until Markus and Co make the schedule importer easier to do, its a lengthy job...

[Le Grande Orange]

Just a little bump to let folks know a few more seasons have been added to the list of available years.

I hope to plug that hole left by the lack of a 1965 file before too long.

[jbmagic]

does it work well with ootp 6?