Baseball Stats Center

Welcome to Rhino Software's Baseball Stats Center. All files provided on this page are in ZIP file format. To open ZIP files and extract/copy the baseball player stats files that are stored inside, you'll need an unzipping program such as WinZip, PKZip, or EasyZip (which is a free program).  

All files provided for download are the exclusive property of Rhino Software. Any reproduction, redistribution, retransmission, or resale of these files, without prior written consent from
Rhino Software, is strictly prohibited.

Important Announcement for 2009 Season:
Starting this season, there will be a major change in the weekly baseball stats service. Player stats files will be  published every SUNDAY (5:00 PM EST), and the Stats Week runs from SUNDAY-thru-SATURDAY (i.e. weekly and year-to-date stats are now thru Saturdays).

For Rhino Baseball users, that means you will need to change the "day when roster moves take effect" setting in the League Setup screen to SUNDAY (instead of Monday like in past seasons).  

About the Stats Files | Tips for Rhino Baseball Commissioners 

About the Stats Files

Stats are Stored in ZIP Files:
The Baseball Stats Table (provided below) includes links to downloadable baseball stats files that are currently available for the 2009 major league season. These files are provided in ZIP format. After downloading a ZIP file, you will need to Unzip it to get at the actual stats files that are stored inside. You'll need an unzipping program to do that such as WinZip, PKZip, or EasyZip (which is a free program).  

Create a Folder to Store Your Stats Files:
We strongly recommend that you create a folder on your PC's hard drive for storing both the ZIP files that you download and the actual player stats files that you extract/copy from those zipped files.

For example, you might create a folder on your C:\ drive called MLB2009 to hold baseball stats for this season. You can easily create a folder to store your stats files by using the Create New Directory function found under the Tools menu in Rhino Baseball, or by using the New Folder option in the Windows operating system. 

Naming Conventions for Stats Files:
After downloading a ZIP file from this website, you'll need to unzip it and extract the baseball stats files that are found inside to your stats folder (e.g. C:\MLB2009). The major league baseball player stats files adhere to the following naming conventions (where mmddyy represents the Stats Date in Month/Day/Year format): 

Example:
NL041109PIT_YTD.TXT is the stats file for NL Pitchers stats thru 4/11/2009. Notice that all stats file names end in the suffix ".TXT", indicating that they're plain Text files.

YTD Stats Files contain Full Season Stats:
All stats files denoted as YTD contain player stats for the entire season. These are officially called Year-to-Date (YTD) player stats. You can download YTD stats from the links provided in the green section of the Stats Table.

    Important! Users of Rhino Baseball should ONLY import the YTD stat files into their database.                        

Last Week's Stats:
All stats files denoted as WEEK contain player stats for one week of the season. The stats week starts on Sunday and goes thru Saturday. The Stats Date on a weekly stats file coincides with a Saturday date (end-of-the-week).
You can download Weekly stats from the links provided in the violet section of the Stats Table. 

    Important! Users of Rhino Baseball should NEVER import the WEEK files into their database!
        Rhino Baseball computes its own weekly stats based off the YTD stats. There's no need to import
        weekly stats; doing so will cause you problems when computing your fantasy stats.             

Be Careful! -- Use the correct Stats Date:
When importing stats files into your Rhino Baseball database, be careful to specify the correct Stats Date.
For instance, if you're importing a stats file named ML041109BAT_YTD.TXT, then the Stats Date = 04/11/2009.

Specifying the wrong Stats Date when importing stats files into your Rhino Baseball Database will result in your fantasy stats calculations being incorrect. Along with recording roster moves for the wrong move roster date,
this is the most common mistake that Rhino Baseball users make. So please take your time and be careful when entering dates into the software!

Should you ever accidentally import the wrong stats file or specify the wrong stats date for it, you should delete that set of player stats using the Mass Change/Delete function in Rhino Baseball, and then re-import again using the correct stats file and correct Stats Date. 

Stats Published on Sunday Afternoons:
Updated Major League Baseball player stats files are typically published by 5:00 PM Eastern Standard Time every Sunday during baseball's regular season. Should any problems arise that will cause the player stats to be published later than usual, please check the ALERTS section at the top of this web page to get the scoop on when the stats files will become available. Our webmaster is also a longtime fantasy baseball commissioner who uses these stats files to run his own rotisserie league, so rest assured that he does everything in his power to make sure the stats are posted here in as timely a fashion as possible.   

Tips for Rhino Baseball Commissioners

This section provides helpful tips for fantasy league commissioners who are using the Rhino Baseball software to manage their fantasy baseball leagues this season.  

Tips about League Management:

IMPORTANT DATES:   
For the 2009 season, there are two important dates you need to know:

STATS are thru SATURDAY:
Player Stats are through Saturday's games. So when you're importing a player stats file into Rhino Baseball, always be sure to use the Saturday date (the one shown in the Stats Table) as the Stats Date for that file.

ALWAYS import YEAR-to-DATE STATS:
Users of Rhino Baseball should ONLY import the YTD (Year-To-Date) stat files into their baseball database.
NEVER import the WEEK files into your database (those available in the violet column of the Stats Table below), as doing so will only cause you problems when computing your fantasy league stats.     

ROSTER MOVES always effective on SUNDAY:
All weekly roster moves that you record in Rhino Baseball should take effect on Sundays. This should make sense to you because it's the day after the Saturday stats and the start of a new weekly reporting period.

PLAYERS who are ACTIVE to START THE SEASON:
All players on fantasy team rosters to start the 2009 season should have their Date Acquired transaction date occur before Opening Day 2009 (transaction date should be 4/04/2009 or earlier). If you need to correct a player transaction that you incorrectly recorded during a prior week, simply use the Transaction Log function in Rhino Baseball to make the correction (adjust the Transaction Date or Roster Status of the given player).   

Use MASS CHANGE to Fix Mistakes made when Importing Files:
If you ever accidentally import the wrong stats file or specify the wrong stats date for a file you've imported, delete that set of player stats using the Mass Change/Delete function (use option #14) in Rhino Baseball, and then re-import using the correct stats file and be sure to use the correct Stats Date.

Tips about In-Season Trades:
Do you play in an NL-only or AL-only fantasy league? If so, please make sure to read this tip.

When players are traded from the American League to the National League, or vice versa, it's important to make sure that you go into the MLB Player Maintenance function and change the Pro Team of the affected players to their correct value (the major league team that the player was traded to).

After updating the MLB player info, be sure to open the Free Agent List function to refresh your free agent pool (Rhino Baseball picks up any players who have switched leagues and automatically adds them to your pool).
 

Baseball Stats Table   

PLEASE REMEMBER!  Users of Rhino Baseball should download and import the YTD (Year-to-Date) stats into their Rhino Baseball database. You may certainly download and review the one-week stat files (files with names such as ML041809PIT_WEEK.TXT), but DO NOT import the one-week stats files into your Rhino Baseball database. Doing so will only cause you data-related problems. 

New or Matching Players for Rhino Baseball = OCTOBER 6 - FINAL 2009

When importing stats into the Rhino Baseball Database this week, a popup window might appear and ask if the following players are New, or Match a rookie or injured player that's already in your database:  

Need to see the list of New or Matching Players from previous weeks? Click here to check it out.
 

Thanks and Farewell...

Today (OCT 7) is the final day of the 2009 season for us here at Rhino Software. I just wanted to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has faithfully supported Rhino Baseball over the years, and to those other stats-service only customers who have returned year-after-year to satisfy their weekly baseball stats fix. Your patronage and kind words have been much appreciated.

Without a doubt, 2009 has been a very trying year for myself and the company. I moved on to full-time work with The Hershey Company, which relegated me to a part-time role with Rhino Software. The transition has been personally challenging, and I felt more than a bit sad having to leave Rhino Software behind as my full-time occupation. But most frustrating of all were the problems we had to deal with during the midseason. Our formerly reliable 3rd-party data provider suddenly imploded, and we were forced to find a viable alternative on very short-notice so that we could continue to run the stats-service arm of our business. We recovered and most users weren't affected by the switchover to our new provider. Unfortunately, a small subset of our non-software users weren't able to get Weekly files on a regular-enough basis (since our new provider didn't offer those, and our old source was hit-or-miss from the All-Star Break onward). Also, the cost to me in money and extra-time spent to generate stats files each week was quite high. That's not something I'm willing to go through again.

By next January 2010, we'll make an official decision as to whether Rhino Software will continue to offer the baseball stats service. At this point, my guess is that answer is a NO. We'll keep you posted on that decision, and feel free to email me next January to see what's up. If we don't provide stats, I do have another company in mind that users of Rhino Baseball could use as a stats-download alternative, although the seasonal cost is 2.5 times what we charge annually and they only offer AL/NL mixed files. But we'll cross that bridge later.

Thanks for your support this season.

STEVE SEVERINO
Rhino Baseball Creator and Rhino Software Founder

 Other Special Notes:

Tips about In-Season Trades:
Do you play in an NL-only or AL-only fantasy league? If so, read this tip.

When players are traded from the American League to the National League, or vice versa, it's important to make sure that you go into the MLB Player Maintenance function and change the Pro Team of the affected players to their correct value (the major league team that the player was traded to).

After updating the MLB player info, be sure to open the Free Agent List function to refresh your free agent pool (Rhino Baseball picks up any players who have switched leagues and automatically adds them to your pool).

July 26/27  = New Stats Source (UPDATED):
UPDATE 7/27 -- We were finally able to get updated GBP data from our old provider. The data is actually through the games of 7/26 (which doesn't really matter since GBP stats don't affect anyone's fantasy stats; they're just used as reference data). Anyway, I generated new GBP files (for AL and NL) that you can load into Rhino Baseball like you're used to doing. Hopefully, our old provider will keep these coming on a regular basis!   

Starting this week (7/25 stats), we have switched to a new source for raw baseball stats data. This was done to ensure better accuracy and reliability than we had been receiving this year from our other raw data provider. Producing the Rhino Stats Service files is more tedious at this point than under our old system, but we're hoping that improves after this initial week of work, and we're thrilled to have 100% accurate/reliable data again.

UPDATE 7/27 -- Since our old data provider is now back online, we will continue to provide the WEEKLY stats snapshot bonus files that we offered before, assuming our old provider publishes them on a regular basis. The old provider hasn't been feeding us that data 3 out of the past 4 weeks. Very few people download/use this data since it's not something you would load into Rhino Baseball (plus Rhino Baseball can calculate Weekly stats on the fly anyway, so you don't need this data). But there's a small handful of people who download it, so we'll publish it for them if we can.          

July 20 = Stats Alert (Week #15, 7/18/09 Stats):
Re-uploaded this week's stats files to correct the YTD stats for RYAN FREEL and MIKE MACDOUGAL.

July 19 = Stats Alert (Week #15, 7/18/09 Stats):
Our 3rd-party raw data provider is currently experiencing problems with their web server and was unable to provide us with stats this week. I used stats from another source (Elias) to produce this week's batting and pitching stats files for Rhino Stats Service. That was an EXTREMELY labor-intensive effort that took me well over 10 hours to complete. I will NOT be doing that again! This week, I will be investigating other data providers to see if I can find a legit alternative to my current data provider. I have very bad vibes about my current provider since these past 3 weeks have been a mix between troubling and all out disaster from my perspective. I'm very hopeful that I'll have an alternate plan in place for a new source by the end of this week. Stay tuned.

July 4 = Stats Alert (Week #13, 7/04/09 Stats):
Since we did NOT receive the baseball stats feed thru JULY 4 from the Associated Press (our 3rd-party raw data provider), we decided to process the Week #13 stats as follows:

May 30 Stats Alert: Before importing the 5/30 pitching stats files, users of Rhino Baseball should do 2 things:

(1) Open the MLB Player Maintenance window and manually insert a new record for Martinez, Crist.
He's on the Florida Marlins, Starting Pitcher, 27 yrs old, Bats=R, Throws=R, Hit/Pit=Pitcher,
Yrs in Majors=0, and his full name is First=Cristhian, Last=Martinez.

(2) Open the Cross Reference Maintenance window, retrieve all PLAYER xref records for Rhino Software,
and then manually insert a new record for Martinez, Crist. His Rhino ID will match that of the new record you created for him in Step-1. His File ID# = 1623, Name = MARTINEZ, CRIST., Team=FLA, Hit/Pitch=PITCHER, and Stats Service=Rhino Software.  

Failure to insert these records for this new player beforehand may result in him being mistakenly matched up
with Carlos Martinez, another pitcher on the Florida Marlins.

Test Links: 
The last row in the Stats Table provides download links to sample files from last season. These files are provided so customers signing up for the coming season's Rhino Stats Service can do a test-download if they wish.