Hello all.

As I did last year, I'll use this running thread to announce updates to the IRT historical database as they occur. I'll also announce known issues and database outages, and solicit suggestions or report requests.

For those of you new to this forum, the IRT Historical Website located at http://www.bossconsulting.com/irt contains a number of historical pages, including a list of past tour winners, tour history, season ending standings, and the like. More importantly, it contains a large database that contains every known pro tour result going back to the first pro event in 1973. I continually update the database adding in new events as they happen, and when time permits I enter in archive results for known missing events (mostly from the late 90s and early 80s).

9/14/09: Denver, the first event of the 2009-2010 season, is now in the database. Other recent code updates include a slight modification to the "Age of Tour Winners" query to bold active players, and in light of Beltran's injury I started a page listing major tour-affecting injuries over the years.

As always, please feel free to report any issues, errors, or suggestions either here or directly to me at (301) 237-0196 or tboss@bossconsulting.com

Thanks, todd
Todd Boss

bfr7kq6

Hello all.


9/14/09: Denver, the first event of the 2009-2010 season, is now in the database. Other recent code updates include a slight modification to the "Age of Tour Winners" query to bold active players, and in light of Beltran's injury I started a page listing major tour-affecting injuries over the years.

As always, please feel free to report any issues, errors, or suggestions either here or directly to me at (301) 237-0196 or tboss@bossconsulting.com

Thanks, todd
Todd Boss

Nice Todd....Real Nice.

Speedy Gonzalez...that is what I'm talking about.

Awesome Job!

Kentucky event input to the database. Congrats Jason on the tough win and congrats to Travis on his career best showing and biggest ever win.

Fyi; over the past two weekends I've done a ton of work on the database; i'll summarize in a few days once i finish things off. You may notice a number of missing events are in, especially from the 1999-00 season.

Thanks, todd

Major historical Database update announcement.

In the last 12 months, several people have really helped out in various points to
catch these results back up.
- Evan from http://theracquetballblog.blogspot.com/ has scanned in results from various older magazines.
- Vince Santilli sent me the magazines from 1999 and 2000 (Vince; i still have them,
safe and sound after all this time and will return them shortly).
- Marty Hogan and Scott Hirsch, who sent me many old magazines and scans.
- the use of archives.org, a website that saves off copies of websites as they
appeared from 1996-present. Its a fantastic resource and in some cases gave me
full round-of-32 results for missing tourneys.

As a result, here's what i've been able to update in the database in the past
few weekends of work:

1994-5 season:
- Thanks to Evan, who scanned in two missing events from 1994 Denver and Dallas
while visiting an archive of magazines in Vancouver.

1998-9 season
- fixed 8/9/1998 Summer Cooler event; was through quarters w/ no scores, now
complete through round of 32 with all scores.
- Added round of 32s for the 10/11/1998 Ralph's Pro-Am in Riverside from archives.org
- Added round of 32s for the 1/17/1999 Ralph Schomp Pro-Am in denver from archives.org
- Input the 2/21/1999 Boston Foxwoods pro am from scans sent to me by Evan
- Input 2/28/1999 Rochester Piehler Motors Pro am from scans sent by Evan as well.
- Input the 3/21/1999 Santa Barbara IRT March Madness Pro-AM event from archives.org

1999-2000 season
- Added round of 32 results for the 9/5/1999 17th Coors Light Pro-am from archives.org
- Added in as much detail for the 1999 US Open as I could get from the magazine article.
but at least Mannino's win is now documented.
- Added in some tourney detail for the 12/12/99 lakewood event.
- Fully added 2/20/2000 Minneapolis event thru rndof32.
- Added as much detail from 4/30/00 Pro Nationals in Las Vegas as I could from magazine.
- Fully added 6/4/2000 Tournament of Champions from archive.org
- Added in finals for other 5 tournaments still missing (Albuquerque, Chicago, Boston
Fairfield and Modesto).

I also updated the tourney_status.xls spreadsheet and link from the main page to
account for all the changes above.

I've also augmented the season_ending standings to add in the top 20 for 1998-9 and 1999-00, 2000-1, 2002-3 and every other season that I could find. Finally I've updated the sources file to acknowledge the help of those mentioned above.

there's still more work to be done; next up is to address some of the older tourneys that Hogan/Hirsch sent. I'm also planning to add in a season ending rankings table to join in to some of the reports (season summary specifically).

US Open results in. I've also started entering in women's results for a future possible women's database similar to the Men's tours. I've been working with Evan from rballblogspot who has been doing some data entry. More to follow.

10/31/09 quick update: the house took a power hit, and the machines are unavailable. I'm out of town til monday 11/2. My apologies.

Next todo items on database:
- fill in tourneys provided by Hogan and Hirsch
- Follow up w/ Ruben Gonzalez on a conversation we had a couple weeks ago about making copies of his cache of memorabilia.
- Follow up with Negrete to find what season-ending standings documentation he has that can augment what I have
- Follow up with Ganim to try to find the full draws for two of the US Opens that I have spotty information for (specifically 1998 and 1999).

I've been waiting for the US Open to finish up to call these guys, figuring they were pretty busy up until last weekend.

Happy Halloween, Boss
ps: as always, if you think you can help with the remaining holes, have more information or have suggestions for additional reports off the database, please email me. If you're a web developer and want to re-develop my site to be more graphically friendly and have some time to kill, i'm open to discussing the data.

Fyi, this is noted in another thread, but while talking about Kane's dominance this season the topic of his games won/lost on tour came up. So i've added a new report on the database report page (http://www.bossconsulting.com/cgi-bin/results_front.pl directly or the top link from www.bossconsulting.com/irt).

Go check it out: "Player Games and W-L record" by season and overall. 3rd report down from the player selection pulldowns. Kane is 49-1 in GAMES so far this year. Only guy to take a game off him was Jack in the Denver final. Thats pretty dominant.

Enjoy, boss

While working on the Match winning streak query, it became rather easy to do a "Tournament Win Streak" report too. So that is done as well.

Both queries are at the very bottom of the Report Options at http://www.bossconsulting.com/cgi-bin/results_front.pl . Enjoy!

11/13/09 update: reader Jim Trammell made a great suggestion that i've just implemented. On the report page http://www.bossconsulting.com/cgi-bin/results_front.pl there's now a report titled "Non-Trivial Player Head-to-Head Records With Results."

This extends the head-to-head reports to include all the actual results. The data is very cool; it can let you see trends in head to head matchups, see how dominant someone has been over various points in their careers, etc.

I'd love to add some functionality to the page to allow for more flexible head-to-head reporting, but I don't know how to do it in the current framework. Perhaps when I eventually re-do the graphics front end we can revisit this.

Keep those suggestions coming!

Todd
tboss@bossconsulting.com
(301) 237-0196

Hello all. Quick notification that i've put in the Long Island tourney to the database.

I also put in a couple of mods to links on the main page; the tour history and the list of commissioners to note the Negrete resignment/Mannino appointment.

Kane is now 66-1 in GAMES on the season. Just ridiculous. I may have to put in a consecutive games won query.

Thanks, todd
www.bossconsulting.com/irt

Fyi, apologies for delay but the Sarasota event is now in the database. With the win, Kane overtakes Hogan for the longest known match winning streak (now sitting at 50 matches in a row won on tour). Dropping a game in the final lowers Kane's "games" w/l record to 78-2 on the season.

Thanks, todd

bfr7kq6

Fyi, apologies for delay but the Sarasota event is now in the database. With the win, Kane overtakes Hogan for the longest known match winning streak (now sitting at 50 matches in a row won on tour). Dropping a game in the final lowers Kane's "games" w/l record to 78-2 on the season.

Thanks, todd

Wow!!

Thanks for the update.

I really appreciate it.

Manny

bfr7kq6

... Kane overtakes Hogan for the longest known match winning streak (now sitting at 50 matches in a row won on tour)...

Holy smokes! Probably time for updated debate on a "who's the greatest ever" thread.

St. Louis 2010 event entered into the database. One more Tier1 to go on the season!

Hello all Rball fans.

I never officially announced here that I had entered in the last tier 1 event and completed the season in the database. My apologies for that.

This announcement is to inform IRT fans that the bossconsulting.com site suffered a massive crash last night; a power surge at the hosting facility caught the file server that runs (among other things) bossconsulting.com's mail, database and webserver blew out its power supply and will not start. Unfortunately all our sysadmins are leaving town for the weekend, so the machines and thus the IRT historical site will be down until at least tuesday 6/1/10 and possibly longer.

I do have some data improvement plans for the offseason:
1. to augment the database a bit to add a master "season ending rankings" table and join that to all player summary reports (so you can see where each player finished each year while looking at the season's summary).
2. I also have the beginnings of the data to build a database of the Womens pro results going back throughout the years. It won't be as complete as the Mens but it should be good.
3. I still have a number of magazines on hand from various good souls with results to transcribe and enter. Hogan, Hirsch, Charlie Good and Vince; you'll get the magazines back i promise.
4. Jason and I have talked about a way to integrate the database and reports into irt-tour.com but it remains a longer term project.

thanks. Any questions/suggestions/comments email tboss@bossconsulting.com (except in the next few days until i get it back online) or call (301) 237-0196.

Todd Boss

sorry to hear about all the stuff your going through. Thanks again for your efforts!

Sorry to hear about the crash! I hope it didn't do any long term damage. I had Fleetwood ask me how to get to your database yesterday and Brumfield has seen it, so the players from the past are starting to check it out. I'm going to continue to ask around and see if anyone has IPRO results because we had two tours in the 70's and they would be a really good addition. My mother also just gave me a load of old magazines to look at and they go way back.

Marty

bfr7kq6

Hello all Rball fans.

I never officially announced here that I had entered in the last tier 1 event and completed the season in the database. My apologies for that.

This announcement is to inform IRT fans that the bossconsulting.com site suffered a massive crash last night; a power surge at the hosting facility caught the file server that runs (among other things) bossconsulting.com's mail, database and webserver blew out its power supply and will not start. Unfortunately all our sysadmins are leaving town for the weekend, so the machines and thus the IRT historical site will be down until at least tuesday 6/1/10 and possibly longer.

I do have some data improvement plans for the offseason:
1. to augment the database a bit to add a master "season ending rankings" table and join that to all player summary reports (so you can see where each player finished each year while looking at the season's summary).
2. I also have the beginnings of the data to build a database of the Womens pro results going back throughout the years. It won't be as complete as the Mens but it should be good.
3. I still have a number of magazines on hand from various good souls with results to transcribe and enter. Hogan, Hirsch, Charlie Good and Vince; you'll get the magazines back i promise.
4. Jason and I have talked about a way to integrate the database and reports into irt-tour.com but it remains a longer term project.

thanks. Any questions/suggestions/comments email tboss@bossconsulting.com (except in the next few days until i get it back online) or call (301) 237-0196.

Todd Boss

Todd,

That really stinks!

I assure you that we will get your database integrated into IRT's website!

Historical database update: the files are restored and the database is recovered (I think) but the web server is still not back. tboss@bossconsulting.com email is restored though. Hopefully fixing today or tomorrow 6/4.

I think the boss site is still down, glad to know its not my incompetence

fleetwood