Building a Retrosheet Database — Part 3 (The Easy/Mac Way)

I’ve worked in technology pretty much all my life, but my first job was on the support desk of a software company. It was consumer software, too, so anybody and everybody called in — professionals, novices, little kids, people who wanted to learn, people who wanted us to do their work for them, and people who didn’t understand how computer mice worked. It was challenging. But I think the hardest part was that our department didn’t have remote software. This meant that every time a person had a problem, they had to just explain it to us. We couldn’t see what was happening, so we had to trust what the person was saying was accurate. Everybody sees a computer screen differently. Very rarely did a customer see it in the same fashion I was used to seeing it.

When I published the first two parts of this Retrosheet series (Part 1 | Part 2), I did not monitor the comments well enough. I apologize for that. Some people had legitimate questions and I wasn’t there to answer them. I also learned that I was making all of you trust my explanations of things. I was making you see everything through my eyes, and some people got a little confused. This stuff happens. I’m hoping to fix that here.

I also promised a way for Mac people to have access to this, so I’m doing that as well. This article/video is for:

1. Mac (and Linux) users

2. Windows users who had trouble with the first two parts

Some caveats for Windows users looking to use this method:

1. The whole point of the first two parts was to show how the SQL files can get made using Chadwick. The idea being that you could grab the 2015 (and all subsequent season) data when that became available. The method mentioned in this article involves installing one flat file. That means that you’ll need to delete all the data and reload it for 2015 next season. I have no problem making this file for you folks, and will continue to do so as long as TechGraphs and I are around. It’s not a big deal, it’s just a different approach and I wanted to be transparent about that. Mac users basically have to do this method since the Chadwick tools aren’t available for OSX.

2. The video walks Mac users through installing and setting up a MySQL database. Your method differs, and it was explained in parts one and two linked above. I try to make it clear about when I’m dealing only with Mac users, but I wanted to give you a heads up on that.

Everyone using this method will need to download this file. Just save it to the desktop. The video will walk you through the rest.

You will also need these two lines of code. The video will tell you how to do it.

cd /usr/local/mysql/bin

./mysqladmin -u root password ‘password’

I will be monitoring the comments more closely, so let me know if you have any questions. Thanks, and good luck.