SR and Data Use

We have seen an uptick in requests from students, academics and businesses looking to receive custom datasets from our sites, in some cases for free and in some cases for a small fee.

These requests occur multiple times a week and sometimes multiple times per day. These requests take a considerable amount of time to negotiate, specify and then produce. Generally we've only been asking for coverage of our time and have attempted to fulfill academic requests on generous terms. However, the rate of requests has forced us to reevaluate this stance.

There are a couple of additional mitigating factors. For some of our datasets, our licenses completely preclude any redistribution of the data. And, in some cases, we cannot even give you explicit permission to reuse en masse what you find on the site. Additionally, we need to block any aggressive spidering of the site to maintain site performance for non-bot traffic (i.e. actual people using the site).

As an aside, copyright law is clear that facts cannot be copyrighted, so you are free to reuse facts found on this site in accordance with copyright laws.

Moving forward, our data request policy is as follows:

We will not fulfill any requests for data for custom downloads, unless you are prepared to pay a minimum of $1,000 for any such request.

We realize this will be insurmountable for any student requests. However, I would point out that learning how to accumulate data is often a more valuable skill than actually analyzing the data, so we encourage you as a student or professional to learn how. We also realize that your request may not take that long by itself, but when coupled with everyone else's requests it becomes a significant expense for us. There are also many excellent, free data sources listed below.

If you are willing to meet our minimum fee, please contact us via our Feedback Form.

Here are some additional sources for data that may be able to help you as well:

If you are interested in obtaining a large amount of data, please contact one or more of the following companies or organizations. Please tell them that we forwarded you to them.

Baseball Info Solutions Contact: Jim Capuano, 630-235-3322 or at jimcapuano at aol.com. BIS provides a wide array of baseball data.

Sports Direct, Inc a Gracenote subsidiary.

Hidden Game Sports Hidden Game Sports focuses primarily on historical stats and can provide baseball, NFL, NBA and college football and basketball data. Gary Gillette, Hidden Game Sports, email: GGillette at HiddenGameSports.com

Baseball Databank. Unsupported free dataset for major league baseball full-season stats.

RetroSheet.org. RetroSheet has free downloadable files that allow you to create mlb play-by-play accounts of the games. They also have gamelogs for each team for every season in mlb history. You may be able to find help with the files on the RetroList yahoo group.

Hockey Summary Project. Game level accounts of hockey seasons.

Please do not attempt to aggressively spider data from our web sites, as spidering violates the terms and conditions that govern your use of our web sites: Site Terms of Use

If we notice excessive activity from a particular IP address we will be forced to take appropriate measures, which will include, but not be limited to, blocking that IP address. We thank you in advance for respecting our terms of use.