Many thanks to John Kalous for writing this great tutorial!

 Set up League in BallStat

1.       Click “Create new league” from BallStat opening screen

2.       Enter Name for League or click “Major League Baseball Replay” button and add year in name box.  Click Next.

3.       Click number for normal length of game.  This is the number of innings for the normal length of a league game.  Click Next

4.       Enter name for Divisions, or under Major League Baseball, click correct button for your league (No divisions, 2 divisions or 3 divisions).  Click Next.

5.       Set the path for your league to be stored in.  You probably want to keep the default.  Click Next.

6.       A message will appear saying the directory doesn’t exist and asking if you want to create it.  Click Yes.

7.       Your league information will now appear.  Verify it is correct.  If not, click the back button until you get to the screen that needs correcting and go through the steps again.  Once the league looks correct, click Finish.

8.       Another pop up will appear asking if you would like to set up the default paths for all of the other league folders (HTML reports, roster, scoresheets, etc).  Click Yes (this is very important!)

9.       Another pop up appears saying that an empty backup for your league was created.  This will be useful if your league file is ever corrupted and you need to rebuild the league.  Click OK.

10.   The “League Complete” box pop-up telling you BallStat needs to exit to set up your league will now appear.  Click OK.  BallStat will briefly shut down and then re-open with your new league set up.  Your league has now been set up in BallStat.  Teams and players will be added when you import a completed game from BallScore.

Gathering rosters and lineups

1.       Your first stop is www.retrosheet.org

2.       Once at the Retrosheet site, click on Data Downloads at the top of the page.

3.       Click on the year you want to download at the bottom of the page.

4.       You will be asked to save the event file or open it.  Check “Save the file” and click OK.  (since I’m doing this in a Firefox web browser, it automatically saves it to the “Downloads” directory.  If you are using Internet Explorer, you should be prompted for where you want to save the file.   You can save it directly to the rosters directory under the league directory you created above.)

5.       The file you downloaded is a zipped file, which means there are probably a bunch of other files within this one zipped file.  Go to the directory where it was saved and “extract” the files to wherever you would like to save them.  You should be able to do this by right clicking on the file name and selecting “extract” or “extract to”  The same directory where you saved the zipped file is fine (extract) , or you can extract them to another directory (extract to). 

6.       Once you have extracted the files, look for the files with the file type of “ROS File”.  The files you want will have a team abbreviation, the year and a .ROS extension.

7.       If you did not extract the files to the “Roster” directory in your league directory, copy them and save to the directory under BallStat where your new league is saved and under the “Rosters” directory (As an example my new league was created under Documents\Major_League_Baseball_1977 and I saved my rosters under Documents\Major_League_Baseball_1977\Rosters.)  That Rosters directory should have been created for you when you created your league in the previous section.

8.       Next we will go to www.yahoogroups.com  to help us create lineup files for our rosters.  Sign in at this website and go the ATMgr for BBW group.  (If you are not a member, click on the “Join this group button” .  That will send an e-mail to the moderator who will have to “approve” your membership.  This could take a day or two depending on how busy the moderator is and how often Yahoo sends out the notification.  Once you are an approved member, you can continue with these instructions)

9.       Click on the files section and find the year you want to download.  Not all years are available, but many are.

10.   Download the files and save them to the directory of your choice.  (The only file you really need is the AnnTran.LUF file.  You can delete all the others if you wish, or you can use them with ATMgr program for BBW and view the transactions from the year in question.  This is useful for replayers!)  Again, the files will be zipped, so extract them to the directory of your choice.  You may want to use the “Rosters” directory under the new league directory.  Regardless of where you save the files, remember where you saved them!

Create Rosters in BallScore and Attach Lineups (and some other BallScore stuff)

1.       Open BallScore and on the initial screen under “Export League”, click the long gray bar and set the path for your newly created league.  Click on the league file (*.lge) that you created in Ballstat above.

2.       When the pop-up appears, set your league folders to the default path by clicking “Yes”.

3.       Under “Export Database” on the main screen click the down arrow at the far right and select Regular Season.

4.       Now click on the “Game Setup” icon (the big red wrench).  (The “Discard scorebook” box will pop up.  I always click Yes.) 

5.       A “Set Game Date” box will pop up.  For now we can ignore this, so whatever date it has, just click OK.  However, if you are ready to play a game, select the date for that game.

6.       The Roster and Lineup Manager box will appear  for the visiting team (also known as the RLM).  On the far right hand side there is a list of options to choose from.  Select “Tabletop functions” near the bottom of the list.

7.       Click on the “Open Roster” button and a list of all the rosters saved in your Rosters directory will appear.  Select one of the rosters and click “open”.  This will bring you back to the Tabletop Games menu and you will notice the long box below “open roster” button now has a file directory path in it.

8.       Click OK at the bottom of the screen.  You should now see in the middle of the RLM the players names with a red box with a white letter x in it.  That is what you should see!  (The red box with the white x simply means these names do not appear in BallStat.  They will change to a green box with a white arrow after we have played a game with this team and exported the scoresheet to BallStat)

9.       In the upper left hand corner of the RLM, type in the team name.  I usually use YYYY Team Name, where YYYY is the four digit year of the team.

10.   On the list of options on the far right of the RLM click “Save Roster”.  Your roster is now saved in the BallScore format.  Now we will add lineups to the roster file.

11.   While still in the roster file in the RLM, click on “Tabletop functions” again.

12.   Under the “Import…” menu, click the “LUF lineups into current roster” button.  You select this option because you have already saved your roster, all you want to do now is add the lineups to the roster.

13.   If you saved your AnnTran.LUF file in the Rosters directory, it should be the only file available for you to select.  If you saved the AnnTran.LUF somewhere else, browse to the directory where it is saved and select the file and click open.

14.   A menu will pop up with all of the teams from the LUF file listed.  Select the name of the team that you want (best if it’s the same team as the roster file you have open!) and click OK.  Your lineups for this team and roster have been created.  (If you blink, you may have missed it.  Don’t worry they really were created!)

15.   Click OK to exit out of the Table Top Games menu and you will be back in the RLM for the team you created.  Click Save Roster button again.  This will save the lineups with the roster file.  (I know you still haven’t actually seen the lineups yet!  That’s in the next step)

16.   While still in the RLM, click the Load Lineup button and voila, your lineups are there!  If you were ready to play a game, you would now select the lineup for the proper date of your game and click OK. 

17.   You can either go through steps 4 through 16 for each team in your league now, or you may choose to do this whenever you are ready to play each team’s first game.  You only have to do this once for each team.  The lineups are there for every day in the season (if you saved the roster file when I told you to!)