How Long Do Perfect Games Last

Step 1

Download and unzip the play-by-play files from Retrosheet for any and all seasons you're interesting in and unzip them.

Step 2

Clone this repo:

git clone https://github.com/TimeMagazine/perfect-games.git && cd perfect-games
npm install

Crunch through those files calculating consecutive outs from the first batter for each pitcher in each game:

node crunch.js /path/to/retrosheet/data

The script will recursively walk through whatever directory you feed it, looking for files with an extension of .EVA or .EVN, so don't worry if different seasons are in different files

Step 3

The previous step outputs a large file called all.json with info for each game like so:

  {
    "id": "FLO201005290",
    "info": {
      "visteam": "PHI",
      "hometeam": "FLO",
      "date": "2010/05/29"
    },
    "starters": {
      "away": [
        "hallr001",
        "\"Roy Halladay\"",
        27
      ],
      "home": [
        "johnj009",
        "\"Josh Johnson\"",
        1
      ]
    }
  }

Do condense this down to a distribution of consecutive outs, just run:

node index.js distribute