How I keep my APBA replay stats Part IV

In my last article in this stat keeping series, I’m going to tie up some loose ends, give out some handy tips and hints on how I make stat keeping that much easier and answer a couple questions that have come my way in the last couple days. 

Plan ahead

Make sure you determine ahead of time what stats you want to keep.  Do you want to keep HRA for pitchers?  CS for hitters?  Make sure you include that in your tables.  Inserting them later gets messy and time consuming. 

Be consistent

I touched on this before.  Once you have a list of what stats you want to keep, make a standard order of how you want to display them in a table.  For example, you hitters table for all your teams should have stat categories that match and they should also also match your hitters register.  This makes copying and pasting easier since you know everything is in the same order.  

Backing up stat data

Here’s a joke that my friend, Pastor Rich would appreciate…  “Jesus Saves… and does periodic backups!” 

The point is I’m always making backups of my stat files.  I just copy the whole folder and rename it.  This goes for pretty much any replayer whether you are using spreadsheets, BallStat, or BBW.  No matter how you do it, your stats reside in some file somewhere and you can’t rely on them not becoming corrupted or getting deleted by mistake.  This is especially true if you do use spreadsheets and are constantly tinkering with them like I am.  If you totally mess them up, you have a backup to resort to. 

Online Storage

I’ve hit on this topic before, I know and it’s along the same lines of the security that backups give me.  There are online storage services out there like Dropbox, Google Drive, Box and SkyDrive which you can store your data, often for free.  Most of these services offer a computer client which will allow you to store your data on a folder on your computer and will then sync it to your online storage. 

I personally use Dropbox and find it useful.  An added bonus:  it also has file sharing capabilities for others using the service. 

Simple things

There are simple things that make my life easier when doing stats.  I mentioned in Part I of this series that I keep a Word document of my score sheet so if I need to print out more, I can. 

Set up a bookmark in your web browser that links directly to Baseball Reference’s web page of the season you are replaying.  Again, it sounds simple but searching for the 1966 season page takes that much more time in my day. 

My folder with all my files is buried deep in my folder structure.  Rather than drill down and find it every time I want to access it, I could create a Windows shortcut.  Even better, Windows 7 and 8 allows me to add a shortcut to the taskbar so that when I click it, a pop-menu appears and allows me to choose among all the files in that folder. 

Like I said, some simple things that make it a little bit easier and faster. 

Some questions I’ve been asked:

Do I still keep score with paper and pencil?

God, yes!  I’ll admit, some ten years ago for one league series, I thought I’d be “high tech” and actually type my results into the boxscore on my laptop.  Well, it worked but for me but once it was over, I knew I wouldn’t be doing it again. 

I love keeping score on paper “the old fashioned way”. 

How long does it take to enter stats for one game?

Not long at all.  It helps if my keyboard has a number pad.  Some laptop keyboards don’t and I’ll admit that’s almost a deal breaker for me when I’m shopping for one.  If I’m not making any stupid mistakes, I can get through both teams in probably 10 minutes. 

How periodically do I enter stats?

This is something that my friend Chuck Lucas brought up in a comment.  He mentioned that he’ll play a month’s worth of games then update his stats.  My friend Brando is quite the opposite.  It was his feeling that “playing ahead” led to the demise of our 1979 replay because our stats got out of whack and we couldn’t get them back in order. 

Now, he just plays one maybe two games and then updates his stats.  I’m not saying one way is wrong or right but for me, I’m heading towards Brando’s direction.  I play one game per team and do the stats. 

If you want to read the whole “How I keep stats for my APBA replay” series, you should be able to see all four articles at this link.  I hope this has been useful to some of you!