Sources for Baseball Statistics, Historical and Current?

[FM]

Where do you get/purchase raw baseball statistics, (including minors
and historical, current, and incremental) in digital (DB/spreadsheet)
format? I'm interested in doing some number-crunching/statistical
analysis, but I don't know what sort of services are available for
data gathering. I suppose I could write software to process baseball
websites that provide statistics, though it might be against their
TOS, not to mention that I'm not aware of any sites that provide
comprehensive historical minor league data. Thanks.

Dan.

[John Gilson]

"FM" <da...@dartmouth.edu> wrote in message news:aqc3pf$l9i$1...@merrimack.Dartmouth.EDU...

For complete MLB batting, pitching, fielding stats and more from
1871-2001, and better yet free if not for commercial use, then see
the Baseball Archive (http://www.baseball1.com). The data can be
downloaded in several formats including CSV files. This is just
a fantastic source.

If you're interested in finer grain data, then there's Retrosheet
(http://www.retrosheet.org) which has play-by-play event files
for each MLB game, mainly from 1974-1990. Each game's
play-by-play events are encoded using a textual scoring system.
These also can be freely downloaded as text files from this site.
Great for more detailed queries or even building a game
simulator.

This might be a bit off-topic for this group, but I'd be interested
in knowing more about the kind of analysis you're planning. I'm
a software developer and I do a lot of statistical analysis on
large-scale data sets in SQL, mainly financial data professionally
but have long had a desire to apply these ideas to baseball data.
Feel free to email me if you prefer.

Regards,
John