Please Stop Changing Player Names

[Patioboater]

I just wanted to second the enthusiasm for persistent player IDs, once they're available. There's a lot of stuff I don't do with the stats because it's just not worth the hassle of trying to use the names as a primary key.

[Rook]

For those who care about such things, here is the list of today's name changes:

After two weeks of being a Benjamin, Zobrist has gone back to Ben, Jared Schumaker is back to being Skip, and Christopher Young is once again a Chris. New changes are Joshua to Josh Barfield, Mike to Michael Cuddyer, Howard to Howie Kendrick, Nicholas to Nick Markakis, Kazuo to Kaz Matsui, Michael to Mike Napoli, Alexis to Alex Rios, Daniel to Dan Uggla, and Joshua to Josh Wilson.

[koonzp]

Five years later, here is a follow up question!!! Is the table of playerIDs available for download? I'm looking to link from a personal database that utilizes the Lahman data and it would nice to have a quick link to a players HQ page.

[RAY@HQ]

If you download the CSV version of the proj+YTD stat files, our player IDs are there. Obviously that's only currently-active players, but that's the best we have to offer at the moment.