# /lib-works

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Geoff Messier's Projects & Ideas

# Baseball Data

It’s nice to have a dataset to practice machine learning techniques and the baseball community provides a huge amount of data on major league baseball (MLB) games. In particular, a group of very committed volunteers maintains the Retrosheet project where the outcome of every at-bat in every MLB game going back to 1921! In addition to Retrosheet, there is even more data that can be downloaded directly from the MLB servers. In particular, MLB provides access to the pitchf/x system data that contains detailed information on every pitch thrown in the MLB since 2008 (speed, ball rotation, movement, pitch type, etc.).

While the Retrosheet data is more than sufficient for testing whatever machine learning algorithm you’re interested in, a good overview of all the data available for download can be found on the SABR website.

## Baseball on a Stick (BBOS)

While it is possible to download the play-by-play event files for games directly from Retrosheet here, you would spend a fair bit of time loading them into a MySQL database. The BBOS program does this work for you and delivers a MySQL database populated with any year of Retrosheet data you’d like. This software downloads both pitchf/x data and retrosheet data.

For Linux/Mac people, this package only works on Windows. My work-around was to run BBOS in a windows virtual machine on my Mac and have it populate a MySQL database running on OSX. Also, there’s a bug in the package that prevents it from working with MySQL 5.7 but the fix is discussed in this post.

Once you’ve populated your Retrosheet database, the table with all the play-by-play data is events. The table that links player ID’s to their names and positions is rosters.

## Working with Retrosheet

Let’s assume that we want to start with a supervised learning algorithm. How do we translate the Retrosheet data to the training set $x$ and observation vector $y$? There are many ways to do this but one way is to treat each individual player as a single observation where the size of our training set, $m$, is the number of players in the MLB.

You can then choose what you would like your algorithm to determine. Perhaps you’d like to predict the offensive impact of a player (RBI’s+runs) in a particular week based on the performance of previous weeks.

If so, you will first need to mainipulate the database to get a timeline of the offensive performance and all the possible input features you’d like to consider for your algorithm. Note that you should gather as many features as possible at this stage since you’ll reduce them later in the design process.

At this point, you will be working with a combination of SQL queries and a python program to consolidate the data. The SQL queries will give you a single entry per at-bat in every game and your python program will use this data to populate an offensive timeline for each unique player. At this point, you will be getting much of your information from the event_tx field which corresponds to the retrosheet event field. Using regular expressions is super handy for decyphering these event strings.

Once you have your offensive event timelines, you can decide how to convert them into a training set $x$ and observation vector $y$. One option is to use a time window of a certain number of weeks, average or sum each feature over that window and use that training data to predict the offensive impact of a player in the following week. This is useful for fantasy baseball leagues that allow you to change your roster once per week.