Strat-O-Matic Baseball 365

Dear Strat-o-Matic:

I downloaded, and am loving, the 2011 Baseball Player Ratings (2011BBratings.zip).

However, there are certain nightmarish aspects of this data set which I IMPLORE you to fix:

1) Use the same names in the IDENTICAL FORMAT as you use in the downloadable player lists via the player set browser
2) Indicate hitting (L/R/S) in a SEPARATE COLUMN and do not concatenate this data with the name
3) Break out and provide HBP data (the end-user presently has to create a column to extrapolate it by subtracting BB+HIT from OBP
4) Provide a separate column with SALARY (this is vital for draft analysis and free agency planning)
5) Provide a separate column with INJURY rating (also vital for draft analysis / free agency)

Both Salary and Injury are not currently provided and would be hugely helpful. The business of using the exact same names as the card sets (downloadable) will facilitate cross-sheet lookups if there is other data we should want to blend together into a single .xls.

Thanks very much!



Thanks very much!

Fixing this in Excel is pretty easy.

1. Insert a column to the right of the player names column
2. Use the RIGHT$ [that's a dollar sign, not an S] function in the new column <=RIGHT$(cell number from name column)> and copy it downward through the set
3. Sort on this new column [Data sort]
4. Replace all (*) with L, all # with (S) and all other last characters with (R).

You're done with that. You should be able to handle the rest with alpha sorts and a little manual editing.

(That doesn't mean Strat shouldn't start trying to be a little more customer-friendly. It rankles me to have to pay extra for the card data each year.

Oh, I've worked it all out - I've got a ton of Excel tricks. Conditional formatting to identify certain high performers, extrapolations of fielding by position in separate columns for each so that I can cherry pick out talent, and much more. But as you saw in my first note, there is certain VITAL data which is NOT included in the paid-for data, but IS included in the free data that you can download! That makes NO sense - and to make it worse, they don't harmonize the names, so you can't pull the numbers into two different spreadsheets - a Master Lookup won't work. They would solve ALL this if they would assign a unique player ID to each and every player, season by season. PeopleID is very common in database solution-sets, but if they're NOT going to that, at LEAST make the names be IDENTICAL. If it says Reyes, Jose in one set and Reyes, J in another, it does me NO GOOD!