Catobase: Is this possible/feasible or not?

[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?

[SandMan]

Originally Posted by 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?

I had the same idea and posted it on the board about a year and half ago. I tried to get the stats from Lahmans into the format to be used in the catobase but it just would not work. If I put just individual players it still looked as them as presimmed and would not put them on the leader boards or anything. If I tried to import them as a season using the format of the exporter the program would blow up because I did not have game by game stats for the players and I was not going to create all the records required, even if they were dummy records.

I think the best thing that can be done is a PC version of an encyclopedia, the encyclopedia would take all the data from the Lahman Database put it into a new database using the criteria entered - start and end year. Then simply use this new database program, creating a frontend program that reads the exporter files and loads them into the database. There you have it! An encyclopedia with history and a way of adding your current league into the database...... simple stuff really.....Then all we need is some one to write a program reading the database and creating those nice pages that catobase creates and perhaps someone writing a program that reads the data creates the winshares and writes it back into a table in the database.....

Uhm! The wheels are beginning to turn a bit - All along I was thinking about recreating CATOBASE. This may not be the right approach. Why not just start with a Maintenance program that writes all the data that the exporter exports and the data that lahmans has in it. Two little programs are needed to extract from the CSV files from the exporter and perhaps the access version of lahmans. A third program could then be wrote to CREATE a new DATABASE with the criteria specified bythe end user to create custom year ending and starting databases. Then all we need is a program that creates the winshare information and a program that takes the data from the database (with or without the winshare information) and creates the WEB Pages for users who prefer them. And another program could be written to extract reports in just a desktop version with forms instead of html pages.

DAMN, sorry about that. Just rambling but the more I think about it - We don't need to fix CATOBASE, we can create a MULTI purpose DATABASE and just write programs to produce the output we want and programs to maintain the database with a few programs to grab the data from various sources (exporter, lahmans, game csv files, game html files) Put this together with Anderson Utilities but break it down into smaller applications and we may be on to something.......

Custom databases for pre history of a league - for historical players and fictional players perhaps....

[ctorg]

I was hoping I was onto something. I wish I was experienced enough with programming to make something like that happen, but I'm not. I have found it fun (in my twisted sense of what is fun) to create a version of Lahman's that is basically in the format of Catobase. I've managed to get a whole lot of data in.

Seeing as how I'm certainly not going to be writing any programs anytime soon, I'm wondering if there's a way I can create dummy numbers of some kind that would make Catobase think it is reading season files. But if someone with your experience couldn't do it, I highly doubt I could.

Oh well. I'm probably still going to put everything I can into Catobase format, just because I'm enjoying it and I want to see how the program reads it. I wish I knew which of the tables the game gets data from for which things. It's obvious that not all of them are used and some are just placeholders.

[Operation Shutdown]

I had thought about this as well and had come up with a plan, but never went through with the execution of it. My thought was to import each year individually into OOTP, then run a season. Import from the OOTP files into CATObase and then make the modifications based on each player's actual stats. The game-by-game stats wouldn't quite work out the right way, unless you went in and modified each and every one of them, but I figured you could probably get at least the right season info in there if you modified the team's final record and each of the player's final season stats. Like I said, I never even got around to even trying it out, so I'm not sure whether or not it'd even work. Of course, instead of modifying the tables in access, you should also be able to modify the CSV files created by CommishJoe's exporters. Then of course you can import one season at a time and then have each season's CSV files separated, so you could start from any year you wanted to start your database in.

[ctorg]

Originally Posted by Operation Shutdown

I had thought about this as well and had come up with a plan, but never went through with the execution of it. My thought was to import each year individually into OOTP, then run a season. Import from the OOTP files into CATObase and then make the modifications based on each player's actual stats. The game-by-game stats wouldn't quite work out the right way, unless you went in and modified each and every one of them, but I figured you could probably get at least the right season info in there if you modified the team's final record and each of the player's final season stats. Like I said, I never even got around to even trying it out, so I'm not sure whether or not it'd even work. Of course, instead of modifying the tables in access, you should also be able to modify the CSV files created by CommishJoe's exporters. Then of course you can import one season at a time and then have each season's CSV files separated, so you could start from any year you wanted to start your database in.

I had thought of working with the csv files as well, and doing yearly imports. It just seems like such an incredibly long, tedious thing. I enjoy working with the Access database, but not so much having Catobase do all that importing.

I do wonder if it would work, though.