APBA league historical record-keeping and documentation: it’s worth it

O.Z. League manager Dom Provisiero and I have been in contact the past few weeks on the issue of keeping historical stats and other relevant for leagues.  This has been an interest of mine for a while so I thought I’d share my thoughts.

Accumulating the Data

Documenting your APBA league’s history of stats, transactions, standings and anything your league deems important and worth remembering can be a tedious task in the short run.  However, I’ve found that once the process is in place, it’s well worth it.  Our league, the Illowa APBA League, has kept lifetime stats for every player and pitcher in our 33 year history.  We keep them in an Excel spreadsheet that updated every year.  

We didn’t always do this though.  Sometime in the 80’s, (The APBA co-Blogger) Tedd spent hours/days inputting years of our data from newsletters into digital format.  At the time, the best format available was Norton Textra, a DOS-based text editor.  But the important thing was that it was being documented.  Each year, the data was updated with new stats.

Taking Stats to a new level:  Sortable Data

Along came the 90’s and Microsoft Excel.  Our commish, Mike Bunch took the existing text files and with a lot of tough love, he converted it to the Excel format.  The difference of having our lifetime league stats in a sortable, filterable format was quite dramatic. 

Oh, the things that we could do!

• Sorting All-time leaders for all stat categories
• All-time single season leaders
• Leaderboards for a particular season
• (my favorite) all time worst "leaders"
• single season leaders by a particular team
• (for those who want to reminisce) filter by team and year and you have the roster and stats of any team for that year

The possibilities are endless.

Sharing the info

Of course, having this data is one thing.  Sharing it is another.  Among our league, we are content to pass around the Excel spreadsheet for managers to play around with.  But what if we wanted to share our wealth of info with other APBA fans and especially other leagues.  Of course, the Web is the obvious answer.  I’m not a database programmer but if you’re not too concerned about how it looks, Microsoft Excel will save a worksheet to web format.

So I cleaned up the database fields a bit (only the stuff everyone would be interested in) and put the Illowa APBA League Register on the web.  Thanks to the team effort of Mike and Tedd, it’s been updated every year and you can see it here. 

There are some side products of our league register that give it more meaning.  For example, our All-Time Leaderboard (both career and single season).  Also, our league Hall of Fame which we vote for annually.  Finally, I put up a manager register which included won-loss records plus all-time records for pretty much every skipper who has rolled dice in our league (caveat:  this hasn’t been updated in a couple years). 

Another project I undertook was something I called Season Spotlight.  Starting with our initial season, 1975, I would do a quick page on that season.  Each page would have the standings, leaderboard, and maybe a short writeup.  Here is the entry point for the IAL Season Spotlights.  A lotta fun for us old guard who like to reminisce about the old times.  The project is still in the works… I’m up to 1986. 

Collaboration

Enter Dom Provisiero, from the O.Z. League.  Now I’ve known Dom via email since the early 90s.  He and I have been seem to correspond with each other say, every three or four years.  The last time I heard from him, he asked about our league database and was asking how we did though he said their league wasn’t QUITE ready to go through with it. 

Well, two weeks ago, I heard from Dom again and it seems his league was ready to document their league stats.  So I emailed him our league spreadsheet in case it might give him some ideas.  We also set up a phone call. 

After all these years talking to Dom via email, it was nice to put a New York voice to the name.  It was indeed a pleasure to talk to him.  He had a chance to peruse the spreadsheet and passed it on to a friend with some Excel and database skills. 

In his research, Dom did find a web site which belongs to the Mid-West Baseball League that does a pretty incredible job of displaying stats, transactions, draft history.  If I knew anything about web programming, I’d want our leagues’ page to look a little like theirs.  Take a look at the MWBL’s page.  It might give your league some ideas. 

Summary

One piece of advice for any league… it’s never too early to begin documenting the stats and data for your league.  Even if you don’t make it look all pretty, at least make sure you collect it into one repository.  Down the road, you’ll be grateful.  While, we at the IAL have been pretty good about it, there are still some holes in our history.  There are years where we don’t know who won our MVP or Cy Young awards.  While we could probably obtain transactions and draft picks via most recent years via newsletters, those during our early years are gone.  There’s a lot of work that goes into it but if you have an APBA league with a rich history, it’s well worth it to document it. 

I’d love to hear how other groups have documented their leagues stats and/or history.  Let us know in the comment section.  If you have it on the web, leave a link… I’ll post it.