Historical minor league baseball boxscores Prepared and maintained by Chadwick Baseball Bureau (http://www.chadwick-bureau.com) Contact: Dr T L Turocy (ted.turocy@gmail.com)
This package contains transcriptions of historical minor league boxscores. Please read the description below carefully to be sure you understand what these data are (and what they aren't).
These files are copyright by Chadwick Baseball Bureau. They are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The source code to transform the original transcriptions into standardised formats (found in the src/ directory) is copyright by T L Turocy and Chadwick Baseball Bureau. It is licensed under the GNU General Public Licence, version 2.0 (or later, at the user's discretion): https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.en.html
Historically, the published averages for many minor leagues in baseball omitted players who appeared in only a handful of games ("less-thans"); other leagues never published complete averages at all. In these cases, the only way to document the participation of these players is by capturing a published boxscore. In addition, there are other reasons why having a compilation of game-level data for some historical minor leagues may be of interest.
We have developed a simple, text-based format for capturing boxscores efficiently. This format is similar to the structure of a typical newspaper boxscore, allowing transcription of the data, with only a minimum of markup required of the inputter. These files are organised in the transcript/ directory. Each source is included in separate subdirectory. For example, a source might consist of all boxscores found in a particular newspaper in a particular year.
There is a parser, implemented in the Python 'boxscore' package included in this repository, which takes all of the boxscore transcriptions from a source, and processes the data into CSV files, which are placed into a corresponding directory under processed/. This process does not add or interpolate any new information, but simply extracts and interprets the information found in the original transcriptions. The resulting CSV files are then suitable for further editorial processing.
The objective of these files is to render the content of those sources in a way that is as faithful as possible to the originals. It is important to recognise that THE GUIDES AND OTHER SOURCES CONTAIN ERRORS AND INACCURACIES. This collection of files does not attempt to identify and/or propose corrections to those errors. The scope of this collection is to document the contents of sources in a standard and systematic way, and therefore provide the inputs required to editors who wish to produce cleaned, corrected, or improved accounts of the performance data for these leagues. The files in this collection therefore provide one essential component in the chain of evidence required to produce such improved data.
The structure of the input files is intended to facilitate transcription from newspaper boxscores. It imitates, to the extent possible, the structure of newspaper boxscores, with the intention that a human can read the transcribed file and compare it visually with the source.
The best way to understand the file format rules is to look at existing files, as it is intended that transcription can be done without having to read long documentation first.
In preparing files in this format, the key principle is to type what is in the source. In doing so, you will inevitably find information which is inconsistent: player names will be spelled in various ways, statistical totals will not balance, and so on. Likewise, there are inferences that can be made from the data in a game. A common example is if a team uses two pitchers Smith and Jones in a nine-inning game, a boxscore may list Smith with 8 innings pitched and not mention Jones. Obviously, it follows logically that Jones should be credited with one inning pitched. You should not transcribe Jones with one IP in such a case, unless the boxscore explicitly lists him as such.
Keeping a clear distinction between the data-capture and editing stages of research has many benefits. It is beyond the scope of this note to list them all. In short, transcribing sources exactly - warts and all - helps to make every data value in your dataset traceable back to a source, and therefore makes the research process fully reproducible.
We collect games by source; one source may contain games from many leagues (especially if a paper had very extensive baseball coverage), and conversely a league may have games recorded in many sources. Organising games by source makes it easier to track which sources have and have not been consulted and transcribed.
For sources with a large number of games, we usually use one text file per day. For sources with thinner coverage, it is sometimes convenient to use one file per week, usually dated with the Monday of that week.
Within a file, games are separated by a line consisting of three dashes, ---, and nothing
else.
The structure of a game transcription is mainly line-oriented; each line in the text
file corresponds to one type of information.
Lines generally are of the form label: value.
The game-level data fields date:, number:, away:, and home: are
required, and have their standard meanings. The field source: is not required,
but encouraged to be included - although the overall source is implied by the file
organisation, this can be used to mark, for example, the edition of the newspaper or
page number.
The league: field indicates the league in which the game was played.
This is omitted if the game was not part of a league regular season or playoff.
The status: record provides information about the progress of the game. It is adapted
from the status attribute of games used by MLBAM. A status record has the format
type or type, reason. Valid values for type are:
final: the game completed normally at the end of the scheduled number of innings (or extra innings if required). This is the default; astatusrecord does not need to be included for this, the most common case.completed early: an official game completed earlier than the scheduled number of innings. Thereasonattribute should explain why, if knownabandoned: a game was started but terminated before it was considered an official game (usually less than 5 innings). Thereasonattribute should explain why, if known.postponed: a game was scheduled but did not start. Thereasonattribute should explain why, if known.
Common values for the reason field are weather-related such as rain or darkness.
More detailed reasons can be given where appropriate, such as by agreement so Springfield could catch train.
The lineup for a team is started by a line listing the team name (matching either the away: or
home: record) as the label, and then a list of column headers matching the column headers in the boxscore.
The most common list of headers is ab r h po a e, but some sources will have fewer (or more).
Within a team, each line corresponds to one player. The general format is name @ pos: stats.
Where a player's initials or first name are given, name should be surname, firstname.
The stats are separated by whitespace; they do not need to align visually with the column headers
(but inputters are free to do so if they find it helpful).
In the event a statistical value is missing or completely illegible, use an x for the value to indicate
missing data.
Where substitutions are indicated (by asterisks, daggers, and the like), the indicator is placed before
the substituting player's name just as in the boxscore, e.g., *Smith @ ph.
Acceptable values (so far) for indicators are *, +, ^, &, and $.
Optionally, lineups can be marked up to indicate batting order position. For example, some boxscores
list the starting nine first, and then substitutes below, while others list the substitutes immediately
following the players they replaced. Notation for this is placed at the start of the line.
So if Smith pinch-hit for Jones, who was in the 8th spot in the order, you could write
(~8.1)Jones @ c: and (~8.2)Smith @ ph:.
This again is especially useful if Smith shows up a few lines later in the player list.
Remember, to indicate this, transcribe the players in the order they appear on the page, and use this
markup to connect the batting order slots.
A team's lineup ends with a line with label TOTALS. In the event a boxscore does not provide a totals
line, the TOTALS line is still expected; fill the line with x for all stats categories to indicate
the data are missing.
Runs by inning are indicated in line: records. These have the format line: team: scorebyinnings - total.
The score by innings is whitespace-delimited; if you find it useful to group innings by putting an extra
space e.g. after each group of three innings (as is sometimes done) this is fine.
If a team does not bat in an inning, indicate this with x.
Where scores by innings are reported, list them in the order they appear in the source, noting that in historical sources it is not always the case that the home team (or the last-batting team) is listed last.
Most boxscores list statistical credits beside the core stats in text format. We capture these by providing a record with one line per type of statistical credit.
The general format for these is credit: Player1 #count; Player2 #count. For example,
B_2B: Jones #2; Smith credits Jones with two doubles as a batter, and Smith with one double.
Credits are separated with semicolons. The # notation indicates counts; if the source does not
list a count, it is assumed to be one (and the # should not be used; only use #1 if the source
has an explicit count of one printed).
If a player is listed with an initial, the initial goes before the surname in the credits.
That is, in the player list, you would write Smith, J. @ cf, but in the credits you write
B_2B: J. Smith.
The most common categories for credits are:
- Batting:
B_LOB,B_ROE,B_2B,B_3B,B_HR,B_HP,B_SH,B_SB - Pitching:
P_IP,P_R,P_H,P_BB,P_SO,P_WP,P_BK - Fielding:
F_PB,F_DP,F_TP - Game:
T,U
For double and triple plays, separate the names of players in the same play with commas, and
separate different plays (or combinations of players) by semicolons. So for example,
F_DP: Tinker, Evers, Chance #2; Russell, Lopes, Garvey means 2 double plays for Tinker to
Evers to Chance, and one for Russell to Lopes to Garvey.
The time-of-game credit T has the format H:MM, e.g. T: 1:55.
Umpires are credited as a semicolon-separated list. Umpires are the one exception to the rule
about ordering initials; umpire initials should follow the surname, e.g., U: Smith, F.; Davis.