Combination Baseball Statistics & Card Database?
 

I am trying to find a relatively easy way to create a database of cards by year, brand, etc. linked together with a general baseball stat database, like Lahman's or mlb.com.

The problem I am running into is figuring out how to match the names from say a Topps checklist with the playerID numbers and names found in general baseball stat databases. Any suggestions?

Thanks,
Mark

Email me: mike@cardtarget.com

any luck on this? just curious, thought it was a neat idea.

Not really. Mike has a very cool site, but it isn't quite what I have in mind. Thinking about starting an open source project to do it, though I don't have the best database skills.

I think we would need 3 tables;

1) Brands or Manufacturer, similar to the TeamFranchises table in Lahman. 2) a Set table, similar to Teams in Lahman, and
3) a Cards table, similar to Appearances.

Here's the fields I think would need to be in each table:

Brands:
Brand Name
Brand ID

Sets:
Set Name
Set ID
Card ID

Cards:
PlayerID (from Lahman)
SetID
YearID
Card#

I need to play with this a little to see if I can make it work. I would also want to add fields specifically to tracking cards that the user owns either in the Cards table or in a separate table, but want to see if I can make it work first. What do you think?

So, I've done a little work on this and found that there is a fair amount of manual verification needed to complete the matching process. I am going to plug away, starting with the sets I am most interested in first.

If anyone has a spreadsheet, .csv., or Access database file listing cards by set, year, brand, etc. that you are willing to share, please let me know. This would greatly reduce the time I need to spend searching for good lists online to download before performing the matching. In exchange, I'll send you a copy of my work as it progresses. Be forewarned, this may prove to be too large a project, but I am going to at least give it a shot.

Which sets are you looking for?

Baseball-almanac.com has a pretty good start on this. Don't know if they will share their raw data/files, but they do have links between baseball cards and player data.

http://www.baseball-almanac.com/base...ball_cards.php

How is this coming?

Have not been able to work on the project in a couple of weeks due to work travel. Hoping to spend some time on it Saturday. Will post an update on my progress next week....