Posted By:
Tom HuffordIts not online, but a fellow names Pat Doyle, in the Kansas City area, has compiled a "Professional Baseball Player Database" and sells it through his company Old-Time Data, Inc. You can purchase it online, but to avoid any problems or conflicts, I'll not give the link here. You can easily find it with a Google search, however.
The database comes on a CD, and lists player data from 1922-2004 (it may have been updated by now, but I just have the one that goes through 2004). You can search by player name, to find his full record; by team and year, to get team rosters; by year and league, etc.
A word of warning - the data was taken from old baseball guides, which didn't always list first names in the early years, and didn't always list players in less than 10 games or fewer than 45 IP. But this database is better than anything else thats currently out there.
And a heads-up for SABR members. Hopefully, within the next 6-12 months (maybe sooner!), the Baseball Encyclopedia on the SABR website will add the complete lifetime records of nearly 200,000 professional players (both major and minor league), which will be a tremendous asset (and represents an incredible amount of work on the part of SABR's minor league committee members).
Tom Hufford
By the way, the 1987 Gastonia (South Atlantic League) team produced quite a number of future major leaguers, for a team that low in the minors. In addition to Juan Gonzalez, Sammy Sosa, and Dean Palmer, the team included Bill Haselman, Wilson Alvarez, Roger Pavlik, Rey Sanchez, Terry Mathews, Bob Malloy, and Wayne Rosenthal. An 11th member of the team, Darrin Garner, finally made it to the majors late in 2006 when he was added to the Seattle Mariners' coaching staff.