Retrosheet's First Semi-Annual Release of 2025

Retrosheet is pleased to announce its first semi-annual update of 2025. Major thanks go out to Joe Callahan for generating the "Games/People/Parks" portion of the website and to Rob Wood for his significant efforts in helping to prepare the data presented here.

What's New in This Release

• 2000 - 2019 seasons Location data have been added to our event files for approximately 98% of balls-in-play for the 2000 - 2019 season. Retrosheet event files already included location data for the seasons immediately before and after these seasons. Thank you to Pete Palmer for providing us with these data.


• 1911 and 1913 seasons Event files, including some deduced files, are now available for all of the 1911 and 1913 American and National League seasons (event files were already available for all of the 1912 season). Special thanks to Rob Wood for leading this effort and thanks to our team of deducers: Cliff Blau, Jim Herdman, Dave Smith, and Rob Wood.
  
  One note regarding the 1911 season. Official daily statistics compiled by the 1911 American League did not include batter walks or batter strikeouts. Rather than arbitrarily assign strikeouts to batters based on mere whims, we have decided that, in cases where we are not sure exactly which batters struck out in a game, we would make no effort to assign such strikeouts. Instead, these strikeouts are implicitly treated as "out on an unknown play" within these games. Pitcher strikeout totals are still reported within our box-score event (.ebx) files and on our game pages.


• 1899 and 1900 seasons Box-score files are now available for the 1899 and 1900 National League seasons. Thanks to Dick Cramer, Cliff Blau, and Pete Palmer for their help with 19th-century seasons.


• Negro Leagues This release includes the 1936 Negro League season. Retrosheet has identified 327 Negro League games played in the 1936 seasons and has deduced play-by-play accounts for 134 of these games. In addition, Retrosheet has added 4 additional Negro League games played in other seasons and has added deduced play-by-play accounts for an additional 325 games. This brings the total number of Negro League games in Retrosheet's collection to 7,375. Retrosheet has line scores and batteries for 5,781 of these games, box-score level detail for 4,020 of these games, and (mostly deduced) play-by-play accounts for 1,740 of these games. Thanks to Alan Cohen, Dean Esgrow, and Wes Tervo for their help compiling these games. Thanks to Jim Herdman and Andrew Jett for their help in deducing Negro League games.


• Individual game updates In addition, Retrosheet has updated our event files for 1,747 games across other seasons through the discovery of new scorecards, new newspaper sources, and a growing number of radio and television accounts that are being made available online. In some cases, edits to games are quite small: an added attendance figure, a clarification of one or two plays. But these improvements include the promotion of 123 deduced files to full event files, the removal of 435 games from our 'most wanted' lists, and the addition of pitch data for 249 games (between 1970 and 1995). Special thanks to Mike Cantor, Bill Ivimey, Jay Wigley, Rob Wood, Bob Yahr, and others for their help in this work. A detailed description of most of these improvements can be found here (this list does not include detailed updates for the 1911, 1913, and 2000 - 2019 seasons, or Negro League games, and may be incomplete).

• Parsed Play-by-Play Data. Several additional fields have been added to the parsed play-by-play files available for download based on user feedback. The contents of these files are described here. In addition, Retrosheet has put together a crosswalk between these parsed play-by-play data and the output generated by Retrosheet's parsing tool, bevent.exe. This crosswalk can be found here.


• Event-file parsing tools: Retrosheet has updated its parsing tools, BEVENT.EXE and BGAME.EXE. These tools are described and can be downloaded from here. The latest updates to BEVENT and BGAME primarily deal with some issues related to 19th-century play-by-play files (of which Retrosheet has not yet released any). But it is good practice to download the latest version of these files before conducting any new analysis.


• Using Retrosheet Data: Retrosheet continues to add sources to its page listings, Resources for Using Retrosheet Data and Websites Using Retrosheet Data, as we become aware of them. If you have or know of a website that you think should be added to either of these pages, please reach out to me at tthress@retrosheet.org.


• Research Papers: Retrosheet posts original research using our data. Since our last semi-annual update, Retrosheet has added new research by Tom Conlon, Brien Kocsis, and Steve Scott. If you have original research that you would like to publish on our website, please reach out to me at tthress@retrosheet.org. Our only requirement is that the research use Retrosheet data.


• Retrosheet has also updated several additional pages since our last major release to add and update historical data based on ongoing research. These include pages on batting out of turn, lost home runs, and non-pitchers on the mound.

If anyone knows of any additions to any of our pages, please reach out to me at tthress@retrosheet.org.

Thank you to all of Retrosheet's volunteers. My apologies to any that I failed to identify by name.

Retrosheet is an all-volunteer organization. We are always looking for more volunteers. If you would like to help us with any of this work, please reach out to me at tthress@retrosheet.org. We are also funded entirely by donations. If you would like to make a donation, the details of how to do so can be found here

Tom Thress
Retrosheet President