Value Over Replacement Database

January 3, 2012 9:28 AM

Sports nerds of MeFi: where do you go for your downloadable sports statistics database needs?

I'm looking for sports statistics that I can download in CSV files (or similar) to play around with on my own computer. I'm not looking for websites like baseball-reference.com that just have a web interface.

I'm particularly interested in baseball and basketball, but would love to find data on other sports too -- pro, college, hell, even high school. I'm interested in any level of detail, from win-loss records to advanced metrics.

This is for personal, non-commercial use; I'm just tired of writing scrapers to get the data and want something that's easier to download and load into a database.

posted by no regrets, coyote to computers & internet (8 answers total)

baseball-reference.com is the standard for baseball statistics.
posted by dfriedman at 9:33 AM on January 3, 2012

Sorry, the data tools are kind of hard to find on baseball-reference.com. Here is the direct link.
posted by dfriedman at 9:36 AM on January 3, 2012

I don't have any advice aside from "write scrapers", which it seems like you're already doing. But if anybody has hockey data, I'd love to see it.
posted by vasi at 11:12 AM on January 3, 2012

Thanks dfriedman. The sports-reference.com sites (understandably) don't release their data in bulk. The sites that are linked to on that page are mostly paid subscription type sites, which I'm not interested in at the moment. Baseball-Databank.org does seem to have some good free downloadable files (though I'd already run across them prior to asking).
posted by no regrets, coyote at 11:20 AM on January 3, 2012

You may, or may not be aware of the Lahman Database for MLB statistics. Football reference has their data available for download through 2008.
posted by nulledge at 11:44 AM on January 3, 2012

Massey has a list of all of the data sources he uses for various sports in his ratings.
posted by SNWidget at 12:29 PM on January 3, 2012

Thanks folks, those look cool.

A mefite didn't want to self-link, but she MeMailed me a link to her dad's site dougstats.com which has some nicely organized NBA and MLB stats.
posted by no regrets, coyote at 12:54 PM on January 3, 2012

rsssf.com is the only and only resource you should need for scraping soccer/football statistics.
posted by Errant at 11:33 PM on January 4, 2012