DiamondView is the name of the software the Indians use to collect and organize data about players.  It's supposed to be as automated as possible to save time and effort.  As the PD put it: “Consider it a kind of truth machine, whose function is to temper, or even override, subjective measurements with objective ones.”  I like the idea of a truth machine and have always wanted one myself.

Now, I'm no expert when it comes to spreadsheets and programming, but with a couple hours, I made some headway toward a DiamondView Lite.

Initial Desiderata

- to automatically keep track of the stats of the Prospects that Matter in a single spreadsheet.
- to upload the information to Google Docs or some such to share with the LGT community.

Implementation so far

Using Baseball Reference's minor league stats and Neo Office, I'm able to import the raw data for each player into a spreadsheet.  I can then select the specific row of information I'm looking for (in this case the basic stats for 2008) and collect it with the other players on one sheet.  I can then parse the raw row information into separate cells.

I'm not sure, but I don't think Google Docs allows extraction of web data, so I can't have the spreadsheet update itself online there.  I can, however, upload the already updated spreadsheet for everyone to see.

Results

1. I've got the 2008 data for most of the hitters on the Prospects that Matter list.  It should be fairly easy to continually update the data as B-Ref updates their stats.  It's not that hard to add or delete players.

2. Three hours lost not working on my dissertation.

Additional Benefits

The stats are sortable and allow comparisons among Indians prospects that ordinarily would be much more laborious to conduct.  The implementation is easily extendible to other stats, game data, and whatever else B-Ref offers. 


Issues for Discussion

1. I'm not sure about the legality of posting the spreadsheet on Google Docs or my website.  I don't, of course, intend to make a profit off the thing, but it might be bad to display B-Ref data elsewhere.  On the other hand, it's really just an extension of what we and many others already use the data for.

2. Would you find this a useful thing to have?

3.  Any additional hints on implementation or requests for features?