Unique Player Names???

[Kstan]

Hi ... When a player starts appearing in MLB's official stats, is their name unique only to them during their active career in published stats? So if there is 2 players with the name Jose Cruz, will MLB give them unique published names?

I am going to attemp to create a relational db of player info to do analysis on (my Excel skills suck!). Im just wondering how to automate loading data into the db on a yearly basis (would include some past years to maybe).

Any suggestions you might have or who to contact would be greatly appreciated.
If this is successful I would be willing to share my SQL DB schema with you, if you are interested, As I am fairly new to HQ, I really like the way you approach the game and enjoy your insights. Thanx

[GoldenEagle]

Have You Checked Lahman?

In case you weren't aware, there's a massive historical archive database already in existence. Check out the below link before burning too much fuel on your own data gathering endeavor. Hat tip: Andy Andres.

http://baseball1.com/statistics/

[Kstan]

Thanx for the link I will check it out. I wasnt really looking for raw stats so much, although your link should make it real easy to take advantage of the raw stats.

I am more interested in cataloging some of the #'s that HQ is creating by player. Being lazy, I dont want to manage the Primary Key for a player, so I was hoping that MLB was already doing it by player name.

[hqforums]

Neither MLB, nor anyone else for that matter, indexes their databases by player name. Everyone uses unique numeric IDs. However, there is no standardized system. Our information provider, Baseball Info Solutions, has their own system; STATS Inc. has a different set of ID numbers, etc.

RON@HQ

[Michael@HQ]

Player names are not unique, even during a player's career. Baltimore one time had two pitchers in Spring Training camp both named "Michael Anthony Smith."

Starting your own database sounds like a ton of work to me. You're already aware of Sean Lahman's database, right? It was the subject of another thread quite recently on these BBHQ message boards.

[NICK@HQ]

Ron is right. In DB design, it's bad form to pick something non-unique as a key field. Even SSN is not guaranteed to be unique, though it is often treated as such. Names are very much problematic. You usually create a unique numeric key instead.

[Kstan]

Thanx

Thanx for everybody's replies!!! I will look at Lehman's DB further and see how I can leverage it. Thanx again!!!