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http://baseball1.com/

or for mysql

http://www.baseball-databank.org/

or just for fun

http://www.retrosheet.org/

Baseball statistics are easily downloadable in a database format with one line for every player season in MLB history. That is an amzing treasure trove of information, even for casual fans. Highly recommended.

the lahman database is probably what you speak of. thats actually how i learned python: wrote a little app to search for a person, a range of a certain stat, players by college they attended, etc.

...if the game imports the latest stats database. Too bad the big companies believe in built-in obsolesence.

Information like that can't be copyrighted. That's why you can download something like the Lahman baseball database for free.

What's at issue is names and likenesses. There's nothing stopping Sega from producing a football game that plays identically and uses real stats but it would have to have differently named teams and players.

I don't think anyone would consider it reasonable for Boeing to give Microsoft "exclusive rights" to simulate their aircraft.

They probably could, actually. You'd probably be able to get away with simulating a very similar craft, but you couldn't call it by its name or identify it as a Boeing craft.

Sports stats are always good.

Frankly, 20 MB is not going to give you performance issues. To realistically test the performance of your engine and your queries/schemas, you need at least enough data to fill main memory and cause disks to be used. Much more would be much better.

I suspect it means that Google's algorithm is better, still. The baseball almanac site has a tremendous quantity of baseball trivia, statistics, and anecdotes. Records on the site date back to the nineteenth century.

The Major League Baseball site (Google's second result, by the way) is certainly an important result, too, but I wouldn't be surprised if the real baseball addicts found the almanac site more useful, and linked to it more often.

I note that Google (correctly) returns the Major League Baseball site as the first result for searches for 'major league baseball' or 'mlb'.

Incidentally, it seems that Microsoft is continuing to update their index and/or tweak their algorithm. The current top results are now to The Baseball Archive, Baseball Prospectus...and so forth. The Major League Baseball page is actually on the second page of hits, after a number of significantly less relevant results....

Of note--if you click on a result, you get bounced through msn.com servers first. I presume that they're using that information to refine their search algorithm.

Discussion of baseball physics would be incomplete without a serious treatment of modeling team performance through (useful) statistics. Bill James (literally) wrote the book on the subject.

I realize this is slashdot, but maybe there's other stats geeks out there that like baseball. Baseball-Reference is hands down the best stats site out there. And it's based on the Lahman database which is freely available (newest version coming soon).

-Gabe

I'm not sure about NBA, but the kick-ass free Lahman MLB database is available at baseball1.com. It's got stats going back to 1871...