• By   • and Agence France-Presse/Getty Images  To complete the
analysis of interleague Major League Baseball games highlighted
in this week’s “The Numbers” column, we needed detailed data for
decades of games, and we found it–for free!–on the website of
Retrosheet, an amazing resource for baseball/data junkies.
Retrosheet has compiled database-ready files with play-by-play
descriptions of most games from 1940 through 2013, and many
other games from prior years. We loaded all plays and all
available data points for each play from 1950 through 2013 into
a SQL Server table that has 9,772,477 records and takes up about
4.8 gigabytes of disk space, including indexes.  We also loaded
Retrosheet’s game logs going back to 1940 (136,459 games). The
logs have a summary of each game with every statistic
imaginable.  Once the files are imported into a database
manager, it’s a snap to create statistics for any scenario a
nerd can envision. Curious about Alex Rodriquez’s career batting
and slugging averages while batting