Do you ever wonder where the CSBAstat data comes from each season? Most of you don't and assume that the elves perform magic a few weeks before the draft.
Here's the elves.
APBA (pitcher grade, steal rating, etc)
A young Joe Blake wrote a program 30 years ago that extracts draft-day data, from the APBA data file, into a CSV file. Alas it only runs on Windows XP (or older). Steve wrote a new program two years ago so that we can run it on modern Windows operating systems.
Joe manually removes all of the teams that are not in the draft. He also removes XP players. He includes MVP/CY if not already present.
Since the data file does not contain ZZ R K or +-, Ron and Steve manually enter the data into Joe's spreadsheet.
If mistakes are made anywhere along the above path, the draft XLS overrides anything printed on the cards.
Player Card Columns
An acquittance of Becky Blake at Prudential wrote a program 31 years ago that extracts the 36*2=72 result lookups from the APBA data file. Alas it, too, only runs on Windows XP (or older). Steve wrote a new program two years ago so that we can run it on modern Windows operating systems.
Player Images
In September of every active MLB season, Steve runs an internet program called ScrapeStorm to "scrape" MLB data. There are two scrapes:
1. A player salary for the current season
2. A player list for the current season and the associated URL for the player image
Scott Moore then runs a program to copy the JPG from the www and build a spreadsheet of player's name and JPG file name. He wrote the program.
All of this is done before the MLB season ends so that the player image reflects their final team jersey/hat and before the MLB regular season ends..
Player Rosters
The draft produces a spreadsheet of your picks, however bad they may be..
Schedule
Terry Parsons has various schedule templates, depending on the # of teams. He builds the current CSBA season after the Annual Meeting.
And then the real magic happens with all of the above
It all goes into a multi-tabbed spreadsheet that does a ton of lookups. This results in creating loadable CSV files for CSBAstat.
Alas, the common connection between everything is "player name" ... MLB website and APBA frequently don't match up.
And sometimes, the data is missing from the internet (eg salary) .
More work for Steve...
Team Images
And then there's all those JPGs that reflect the personality of your teams. There is roughly 700-800 of them for each team. They were manually gleaned from the internet over many years.
