Salary Data

- I am wondering, you said that the data has some errors in it, do you know where I could find this same data without errors, or do you believe that the salary data is accurate?

I'm afraid that if I knew where the errors were, I wouldn't hesitate to fix them. The problem is that sometimes I entered data well beyond my bed time and would enter data for the player before and/or after by mistake. So the inaccuracies are often hard to catch.

Furthermore, some of the keys on my keyboard have been giving me trouble for about a year now. To a touch typist who's been timed over 90 wpm, this is a real pain. Now I can't even type a sentence without going back and fixing something. So even though I'm sure I typed much of the data in correctly, a mechanical glitch may have been responsible for a missed and/or doubled digit. (I'll never buy a Sony VAIO again. The NEC PC-98x1's I've had have all lasted a lot longer without any trouble.)

So, What I'm trying to say is that I'm not sure exactly where the errors are. There may be none. But that's highly unlikely.

- Also, looking at the same player over the span of 1996-2002, the salary remained unchanged. Is this actually the case, or is the salary data from one particular year?

Hmmm. A quick experiment shows that I'm showing player data for the last year he played, regardless of the year specified. Guess I need to fix that. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.

- As an aside, I followed the link to the Nippon League website, looking to purchase this data directly from them, but I was unable to find a place where I could do that on the website, is there another place which might have it?

In its previous incarnation, there was a mail address to the webmaster@domain.com, but that was it. Now I can't even find that. With all of the references to NPB-BIS on official web sites and in newspapers and magazines, one would think that their contact information would be well know. But it appears to be a well guarded secret. I don't understand why they don't want anyone to contact them.

I think that Baseball Guru Tomarkin-san said it best in his BaseballGuru.com's Braintrust Newsletter, May 2002:

As for IBM-BIS (the official site of Japanese Baseball), we are dismayed to report that they've changed the site, and have made it even less user friendly than before for English speakers. They don't give ten percent of the data you'd expect from the official site. We wish they would do more for American fans, especially since they have the means.

They've been following my lead on making information available since 1995. I posted the batting and pitching leaders in 1995 every Sunday, they started doing the same on Mondays in 1996. I first had a player registry up in 1997, they finally got a decent one up this year. They actually have all the data one could dream of having, I have what ever I scape up and feel like entering in my free time.

Tell you what. To show that I provide better service than IBM-BIS (I mean, NPB-BIS), send me an e-mail stating what fields you want and I'll send you a CSV (comma or tab delimited) of all the salary data I have. (I'd like to see them follow my lead on this one!) If you're doing any numerical analysis on it, oddities may show up and I'll check them as best I can.

Are the fields I submitted to the Pro Yakyu mailing list of 2001 Salaries enough? I can add any field on the players' pages. (Note: I don't currently have a field for if a player is foreign or not. That's a suggestion that I'm still working on. I do have places of birth, though.)

I know that accuracy is important, but how much difference will a few errors out of 5,677 records make? Is there a way to factor that into your final thesis?

Unless you think others would be interested, we can continue this conversation off list. I look forward to hearing from you.