Back in July the Retrosheet website released its new
Daily Logs set of files. To a large extent these are a repackaging and reorganization of the data contained in the Game Logs collection, but there is new information as well.
Of note here is the
gameinfo.csv file which includes the field description "starttime -- starting time of game, if known". I've downloaded the files and gone through them. Here are the MLB seasons which have starting time info for all regular season games:
1988-1990
1993-2001
2003-2023
This means the as played schedule files in OOTP can be upgraded to show the actual game start time for the above years.
(In terms of the
scheduled start times for the original schedule files, that is a different matter. I have full records for the 2009-2024 seasons, and raw files with start times going back to 1996, and have data for select years prior to that [1964, 1969, 1975, 1978, 1982, 1989, 1993]. For anyone interested in researching the topic, I can offer a few tips.)