Over the last few years, I have been a bit inconsistent with updating my baseball databases, for a variety of reasons. To produce more content in 2026 I need to keep these sources up to date, starting with data from the great retrosheet.org site. I found (to my dismay) that not only had I not updated the 2024 game log data last year, but was missing 2023 as well! The problem is now solved, as I was able to add not only 2023 & 2024 records, but also the 2025 data, and to run the multiple code updates (in MySQL, if you’re wondering) I created years ago.
So what is Retrosheet game log data? It’s a thorough summary of every Major League Baseball (MLB) game played in a season – typically 2,430 games in the current era. The data covers everything from the game date to the umpires and players at each position. In short, it’s a very rich data set for building a variety of analyses and visualizations. Let’s take a look at some of the data attributes, starting with extensive game summary information, including dates, home and away teams, and more. Note that I have also created a handful of calculated data fields to aid in analyzing the data, but the rest is all available from Retrosheet.
Here are more attributes, as we now begin to see some game details – the number of errors, home runs, walks (BB), and double plays (GIDP), for both the home and visiting teams.
Some more team details are next, followed by information on the umpires for each game:
And more…now with detail on the winning and losing pitchers, and the start of the batting order for the visiting team:
Additional batting order detail…
And finally, some fields created by me to aid in analyzing the data:
Obviously, there are numerous opportunities to conduct interesting and fun analyses with this robust data set, which now encompasses data from all seasons between 1921 and 2025. Next up is to pull in seasons from the other end of MLB history, specifically the 1901 through 1920 campaigns. After that comes the fun part of analyzing and visualizing the information.
See you soon, and thanks for reading!