Open Source Sports

Sporting Statues Project

Sean Lahman — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 17:08:52 +0000

A group of researchers in Sheffield, England are behind the Sporting Statutes Project, an effort to catalog public statues around the world which depict athletes. They’ve cataloged hundreds, including a large dataset covering baseball statues in the U.S.

The website includes an interactive map, and you can view pictures and descriptions — such as the memorial to Casey Stengel on the campus of Hofstra University.

This is a fascinating niche, and one of the great things about the internet is that it provides an outlet for a project like this.

Women in Baseball

Sean Lahman — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 17:30:33 +0000

In 1994, I wrote a short little blog post about the All American Girls Professional Baseball League. Not a month has gone by that I don’t get an email from a student somewhere who’s writing a report on the subject and looking for more information. I thought I’d take this opportunity to list a handful of good sources, most of which weren’t around 20 years ago.

A number of universities have collections relating to the league, and one of the best websites among those is from the folks at Ball State University. it’s got a detailed history, photo galleries, and a bibliography that points to other good sources.

I mentioned two books in my blog article. One was by Sue Macy, who continues to write about the AAGPBL at her blog from time to time.

Barbara Gregorich’s book Women at Play was one a highlighted in my blog post, and since then, Barbara had the brilliant idea of publishing her notes and source material in eBook form. It’s an invaluable resource for researchers.

More recently, some of the women who participated in the league have formed The AAGPBL Players Association. Their website has a fairly exhaustive player register, a record book, and a treasure trove of other information. It’s also a way to get in touch with former players.

Baseball on a Stick

Sean Lahman — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 02:10:45 +0000

Kyle Willkomm has announced an update to his wonderful toolset called Baseball on a Stick. It allows you to download daily updates from the Gameday data at mlb.com into a local database. You can also use it to work with data from all affiliated minor leagues.

Be clear: this is pretty advanced stuff. It requires some knowledge of Python and MySQL, but there is enough documentation to help you learn if you are determined. There’s a support forum, and Kyle just posted a series of videos to help walk you through it.

Part 1: http://youtu.be/rnv2VLcG-eI
Part 2: http://youtu.be/eFudbMWHNlQ

Online Cycling Database

Sean Lahman — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 19:46:11 +0000

Thinking about Lance Armstrong today after he made his televised confession to Oprah Winfrey. I’m told that the sport of cycling is tremendously popular in Europe, even though most of us in the United States pay little attention except when American riders are winning the Tour De France.

I haven’t done an exhaustive survey, but there is a pretty good online resource with cycling statistics that is worth noting. Cycling Archives.com is run by a group of fans in the Netherlands. You can see Lance Armstrong’s race-by-race results, or browse the results of the first Tour De France in 1903. I don’t know enough about cycling to know how exhaustive this is, but there is a phenomenal amount of information here.

Research groups and reference sources

Sean Lahman — Mon, 14 Jan 2013 14:00:48 +0000

This is a list of established organizations that are involved in sports research, as well as a number of sites that have downloadable data sets. I put this together sometime in 2012, and it probably deserves to be updated. If you think there;s something that should be added to this list, send me an email and let me know.

Research Groups

Research Organization Websites

SABR - Society for American Baseball Research
PFRA - Pro Football Researchers Association
APBR - Association for Professional Basketball Research
Society for International Hockey Research
Canadian Football Research Society
International Society for Olympic Historians
International Boxing Research Organization
The Society for Sports Uniforms Research
Intercollegiate Football Researchers Association

Message Boards

These are a great place to ask questions and get in touch with researchers

Research Tools

Data Sources

Baseball
- Lahman Database – Access , SQL and CSV versions
- Retrosheet – play by play files, game logs, schedules
- Transactions Database
- Japanese Baseball Data – Jim Albright

Football
- The Football Project – Play-by-play data

Basketball
- Doug Reynolds Basketball database
- DatabaseBasketball database

Hockey
- Hockey Databank – Yahoo Group
- Doug Reynolds Hockey Database
- Transaction data

College Football
- College Football Data Warehouse

Reference Sources

Data from these sites is browsable, but not downloadable.

Baseball Card Database – Baseball-Almanac.com
American Soccer History Archives
Negro Leagues Baseball

Online Interactive: NFL Play Effectiveness tool

Sean Lahman — Sat, 12 Jan 2013 23:18:04 +0000

There us an interesting new interactive tool that lets you analyze the effectiveness of NFL team’s drives and individual plays.

It was built by Scott Sawyer, and it uses some of the play-by-play data made available by Brian Burke at his Advanced NFL Stats website.

Sawyer shares some examples of things his tool can identify, like this analysis of the 2012 Philadelphia Eagles play calling.

The stats show Andy Reid’s Eagles performed poorly when down a score in the final 2 minutes. The biggest problem seems to be the terrible 34% pass success rate and a below average plays-per-drive (4.4 compared to 4.7). Two-minute drill drives ended in 11 picks (21.2%), 12 turnovers on downs (23.1%), and 10 TDs (19.2%). They ran out of the clock 9 times. Their scoring percentage was 25% compared to a league average of 33.4%. Good luck Kansas City!

College basketball stat sheets

Sean Lahman — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 16:51:38 +0000

Interesting new collection of original source material compiled by Justin Kubatko at Basketball-Reference.com. He’s collected and posted scans of stat sheets from hundreds of Division I schools, some dating as far back as 1945. Justin describes the challenges of doing research in this area, and hints at the possibility of eventually converting these to data files.

College basketball is a difficult sport for statisticians. There are currently 347 Division I programs, more than 11 times the number of NBA teams. Due in part to the large number of teams, complete college basketball stats are hard to come by (we currently have complete Division I stats back to the 1998-99 season).

We have had scans of historical college basketball stat sheets for some time, but the process to get them on the site was a bit laborious. However, I happy to announce today that we have added scans of stat sheets for 326 different schools, accounting for 8404 team seasons .

Our hope is to one day replace these scans with stat tables that you can sort, etc., but for now we hope you enjoy this addition to the site.

There are gaps, but this is a considerable step forward for those interested in college basketball research. Here’s a look at Pete Maravich’s senior season at LSU, or George Mikan’s junior year at De Paul. This is a treasure trove.

Baseball Database 2012 update

Sean Lahman — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 20:00:47 +0000

An updated version of the new baseball database is available for download. All of the tables have been updated with 2012 statistics, including the voting results for the 2013 class. It also includes a number of new awards, including the Baseball Magazine all-star teams and the annual Sporting News awards.

It’s available in three file formats:

If you’re interested in contributing to the efforts to maintain this database, or would like to interact with other folks who are using it, please consider joining our Yahoo group at: http://sports.groups.yahoo.com/group/baseball-databank

Horse Racing data

Sean Lahman — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 13:32:50 +0000

I’m not a huge horse racing fan, though I’ll admit I have enjoyed an occasional day at the track. Last week, I worked on a story with two colleagues at Gannett, looking into the spike in horse racing deaths in New York State last year.

I received a couple of emails asking about the source of our information, which we used to build a database of 600+ deaths and more than 1,000 injuries at New York tracks between 2009 and 2012.

We actually got that information as the result of a FOIL request — New York’s Freedom of Information Law. But there is a pretty good source for horse racing data available online — Equibase. They’ve got the results of all of the thoroughbred races in North America back to 2000. they also have video of most of these races. I suppose that’s a great tool for handicappers, but it was also a useful resource for our research, allowing us to see for ourselves the deaths and injuries that were described in the state’s incident reports.

Olympic medals database

Sean Lahman — Sun, 01 Jul 2012 04:59:01 +0000

Spotted this open data set that lists all of the medal winners from the Summer Olympics, published by Simon Rogers at the Guardian.

It includes both individual and team medal winners, with summary tables by country. It’s a pretty cool data set, and one of the few I’ve seen that cover Olympic athletes.

If you’re not familiar with the Guardian’s data blog, or Simon Rogers’ book “Facts are Sacred: The Power of Data,” then you should definitely check them out. Simon is doing some of the most interesting work in the field of open data.