OT: Seeking Data Sources for a Newbie!

[celoknob]

Eric,

Nice to see someone post about some quantitative baseball research!

I just took my first look at the Lahman's database--pretty nice actually. Don't know him, but I would think that Lahman would have software that was designed to extract data for purposes such as you need, so maybe if you contact him and offer a donation he would provide it.

Otherwise, it seems you would have two choices.

1) Go through all the pitcher's data manually and extract the data you need. Go to the pitcher's data and search for 1909 and extract the data by hand. To get career stats you would also have to extract all the other seasons for pitchers that played in 1909, and then sum these stats in a spreadsheet. This is cumbersome, fraught with possible errors and frustration, but possible.

2) Find someone to write a program that can extract the desired data, perform calculations and export it into files. This second option is not trivial either, but would be best because the program could be used not just for this particular application but almost any other application you might want in the future.

I used to write many programs similar to what you would need. However, I now have some rather severe limitations. If you cannot fiind better help send me a message and I might be able to guide you further along.

K W