st: Calculating days between starts in MLB.

["N. S. Miceli, Ph.D." <micelin01@gmail.com>]

Hi all,

I'm working through Major League Baseball events data from Retrosheet. 
The data is formatted so that each observation contains the events that 
occurred on each play.
From that data, I've extracted the ID for each starting pitcher and the 
date the game was played. The data is formatted so that each of those 
variables is an observation.
I'd like to be able to calculate the days between each start for each 
pitcher. Do I need to reshape the data to do that, so that each start is 
a variable matched to the pitcher ID?
I'm pretty sure that I'm going to have to take each season's data and 
match merge the dates to the pitcher ID, then calculate the difference 
between the dates to determine days elapsed.
If anyone knows of a way to do this, keeping the dates in the original 
observations, that would be great. I would guess that can be done by 
programming in Stata, which I've never had to do, and haven't learned.
Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Regards,

Nick Miceli

--
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Nicholas S. Miceli, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Human Resource Management
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Park University
School of Business
8700 N. W. River Park Drive
Parkville, MO 64152
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nicholas.miceli@park.edu
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