The SABR Home Run Encyclopedia
Posted by Sean Forman on May 19, 2009
I'm very pleased to announce that as part of our licensing agreement with SABR, we have acquired the online rights to the Tattersall/McConnell Home Run Encyclopedia. This database contains data for every major league home run hit from 1876 on. This has allowed us to create home run logs for all pitchers and batters (excepting those exclusively in the National Association, if someone wants to fill in the blanks for those 200 or so HR, we are definitely interested).
UPDATE @ noon ET, Wednesday: I just got the 2009 home runs working and the site is regenerating those pages, so you will see active players updating over the next 15-20 minutes. Now next up is a summary page and front-end for the general db.
We've always had the links to the HR log entries on those player's pages, but just never had them active. For example, here are the progressive career leaders in home runs hit. You can find links on every player page just below the Batting and Pitching headers on the main player pages.
- Lip Pike
- Jim O'Rourke
- Charley Jones
- Dan Brouthers
- Harry Stovey
- Roger Connor
- Babe Ruth
- Hank Aaron
- Barry Bonds
We can also see the progressive career leaders in Home Runs Allowed
- Tommy Bond
- Bobby Mathews
- Larry Corcoran
- Jim McCormick
- Pud Galvin
- John Clarkson
- Pete Alexander
- George Blaeholder
- Red Ruffing
- Murry Dickson
- Robin Roberts
All of the credit for this dataset goes to John Tattersall, Bob McConnell, David Vincent, and RetroSheet. Next order of business is to get this all updated every day.
I'm open to any suggestions you might have as to other outputs or presentations we might make with this data.
May 20th, 2009 at 9:49 am
no 2009 entries yet?
May 20th, 2009 at 10:59 am
Just got the 2009 data entered. Should be all updated within a half hour or so, and tomorrow on its own.
May 20th, 2009 at 12:18 pm
Any way you could incorporate the HR Log into PI, so we could do summary queries such as 1940 Cardinals HR's LH/RH, Home and Away, or # of HR's for Yankee Stadium history LH/RH, etc.?
May 20th, 2009 at 12:59 pm
I might get smacked with a frying pan for this but I'm not sure how this differs from the player "event finder" HR pages.
The layout looks the same.
May 20th, 2009 at 1:28 pm
Dave- these go back to 1876 not just 1954.
May 20th, 2009 at 1:34 pm
Is there a way to either search for, or getting listing of the leaders in inside the park HRs? I like that the info is there on a player's page, but difficult to compare multiple players.
May 20th, 2009 at 2:05 pm
Fantastic addition to the site.
Team home run logs would be very cool.
May 20th, 2009 at 2:28 pm
Dave, they are the same the difference is the extra 80 years of data.
Team home run logs, leaders (walkoffs, leadoffs, iphr's) are all things I want to add. Perhaps next week.
May 20th, 2009 at 3:18 pm
If I did this correctly: Barry Bonds's average HR increased win expectancy by 13.5%. Hank Aaron's by 14.5%. There are missing PBP accounts for several Aaron games, and thus no win expectancy calculated. I would assume the average HR in Aaron's time was a little more valuable because of lower scoring, but I have no idea how meaningful that difference is.
May 20th, 2009 at 3:20 pm
Clutch Dog Alex Rodriguez's average HR has increased win expectancy by 12.1%. Maybe there is something to all that.... 🙂
May 20th, 2009 at 3:22 pm
While Clutch God Derek Jeter is 12.3%.
OK, I'm done for now. This is fun though.
May 20th, 2009 at 5:35 pm
I like Johnny's idea. Here are some that I wanted to know, although only one of these guys has more than fifty career homers (I like the idea but not the work):
Chipper Jones : 12.81% (412 career homers)
David Eckstein: 14.4% (32)
Yovani Gallardo: 18% (4)
Duane Kuiper: 10% (1)
Steve Sisco: 35% (1)
Esix Snead: 39% (1)
May 20th, 2009 at 6:24 pm
OK, and then I looked for some guys who I guessed would have a lot of clutch homers:
Manny Ramirez: 12.64% (12.9% CLE, 12.4% BOS, 12.7% LAD)
Robin Ventura: 13.3% (13.9% CHW, 12.5% NYM, 11.7% NYY/LAD)
David Ortiz: 13.1% (11.655% MIN, 13.5% BOS)
Nick Green: 16.45% (30% ATL, 13.4% TB, 6% NYY, 12% BOS)
I don't know that this says much about a player. Surely there are guys who have hit relatively well in the clutch but done so by means other than the home run.
May 20th, 2009 at 8:43 pm
I already have no memory that Nick Green played for the Yankees. This is very disconcerting.
May 21st, 2009 at 8:36 am
The Yankees picked him up toward the end of May in 2006. Was a utility infielder who didn't play much (82 PA in 46 G playing mostly 2B, 3B, and SS).
May 22nd, 2009 at 5:01 pm
Is there a way to find out (for any given year) how many solo, two-run, three-run and grand slam home runs were hit?
May 22nd, 2009 at 8:55 pm
Yeah - you can use the play index. Select the year that you want, and search for "homers" by "all teams." Once you do that, there's a way to select how many runners are on and which bases are occupied, so you can see the number of homers with two men on, one man, or whatever you want.
Even if you don't have a subscription (I don't), you can still see the totals, just not a link to every instance.
May 22nd, 2009 at 8:58 pm
Unless you're asking about the pre-Retrosheet years. In that case, I have no idea.
May 23rd, 2009 at 11:57 am
I guess I'm saying that if two sections have the same stuff, one is not needed.
Sean can eliminate the 1954-2009 PI HR data for players and keep the new section since it includes the same data!
(For team data, it's different)
May 24th, 2009 at 9:06 am
[...] Link of the Week: Click here [...]
June 2nd, 2009 at 3:37 am
I wish I could say this stuff had great accuracy, but it lists Dan Wilson as having only one inside-the-park home run and I definitely witnessed two. This isn't some old codger misremembering his youth, they're both shown in video on the Mariners' website. http://seattle.mariners.mlb.com/sea/fan_forum/wilson.jsp
Plus, the one they missed was the extremely rare (and rarer for a catcher) inside-the-park grand slam. Just as I remember, they were both to left-center and both bisected the two outfielders, hit off the wall and rolled on the carpet away from everyone.
June 2nd, 2009 at 12:25 pm
Breadbaker,
I made the mistake of assuming the pbp had all of the IPHR's listed which it doesn't. The log from SABR does have two IPHR's for Wilson, so I've taken the step of fixing all of those.