Biographical Encyclopedia

Retrosheet maintains the authoritative biographical encyclopedia of all players, managers, coaches, and umpires who have appeared in Major League Baseball, including historical Negro Leagues participants.

The master dataset (biofile.zip containing biofile0.csv) provides 32 standardized, strongly-typed fields including vital records, debut and final appearance dates, physical attributes, cemetery records, and Hall of Fame status.

Python API Usage

import retrosheetpy as rs

# 1. Fetch biographical master into Polars
bio_df = rs.bio(backend="polars")

# Filter Hall of Fame players
hof_players = bio_df.filter(bio_df["hof"].is_not_null())
print(hof_players.select(["player_id", "use_name", "last_name", "debut_player", "hof"]))

# 2. Ingest into DuckDB
rs.to_duckdb("baseball.duckdb", datasets=["bio"])

# 3. Export to Parquet
rs.to_parquet("biofile.parquet", dataset="bio")

CLI Usage

# Download and cache biographical master
retrosheetpy download -s bio

# Export to Parquet or CSV
retrosheetpy export -s bio -f parquet -o biofile.parquet
retrosheetpy export -s bio -f csv -o biofile.csv

# Generate Snowflake SQL DDL
retrosheetpy ddl -s bio --dialect snowflake

PyArrow Schema (BIO_SCHEMA)