Blog

Saturday, June 20, 2020.

Finally making some honest headway with this website which has been in progress since April. With the focus on developing the primary data base (what I call the parent file) for the 170 games of the American Association Playoffs from 1953 to 1962, my time for developing other projects has been somewhat limited. I take pride in the spreadsheets I develop to organize the large amounts of data need to make the American Association Almanac a comprehensive baseball history journal. Below is an example of one portion of the parent database for the 1953 season. Each file is headed with a title, a sub-heading to describe the round of play, and a tag line to identify each game (e.g., Game 1 of the series). Each team's batting order is listed according to the box score (various sources were used for box scores, but those from the Sporting News were primary). The abbreviations used in each team's header are standard. Those that are not: BOP - batting order position, and R-G - round and game number. Each team's summary line presents the totals as per the box score. Attendance figures are provided for each game between team lineups. In the top row of the spreadsheet are the numbers 7-6-7 which represent the number of games in each round of the playoffs. For the 1953 season's two semi-final rounds Louisville and Toledo met for seven games, Kansas City and Indianapolis met for six games, and Kansas City met Toledo in the Finals for seven games. Each season's parent file (note the word "Batting" in the upper left corner) was used as the basis for developing a Pitching file which required re-locating each box score and entering the data for each pitcher. Sorts were then completed according to category, such as Batting which was performed by team as well as by player in order to obtain the records for individual players as well as the cumulative records for each team. This process typically took just under one week to complete for one season. Altogether, a data for 170 games were recorded for ten seasons in preparation for writing about the final decade of the American Association Playoffs to be published in late August 2020 for Vol. 16, No. 2 of the American Association Almanac.