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The SABR Home Run Encyclopedia

Posted by Sean Forman on May 19, 2009

Career Home Run Leaders

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.

We can also see the progressive career leaders in Home Runs Allowed

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.

22 Responses to “The SABR Home Run Encyclopedia”

  1. dave Says:

    no 2009 entries yet?

  2. Sean Forman Says:

    Just got the 2009 data entered. Should be all updated within a half hour or so, and tomorrow on its own.

  3. KJOK Says:

    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.?

  4. dave Says:

    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.

  5. Raphy Says:

    Dave- these go back to 1876 not just 1954.

  6. frankman Says:

    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.

  7. smittany Says:

    Fantastic addition to the site.

    Team home run logs would be very cool.

  8. Sean Forman Says:

    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.

  9. JohnnyTwisto Says:

    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.

  10. JohnnyTwisto Says:

    Clutch Dog Alex Rodriguez's average HR has increased win expectancy by 12.1%. Maybe there is something to all that.... 🙂

  11. JohnnyTwisto Says:

    While Clutch God Derek Jeter is 12.3%.

    OK, I'm done for now. This is fun though.

  12. BunnyWrangler Says:

    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)

  13. BunnyWrangler Says:

    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.

  14. JohnnyTwisto Says:

    I already have no memory that Nick Green played for the Yankees. This is very disconcerting.

  15. tomepp Says:

    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).

  16. redsock Says:

    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?

  17. BunnyWrangler Says:

    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.

  18. BunnyWrangler Says:

    Unless you're asking about the pre-Retrosheet years. In that case, I have no idea.

  19. dave Says:

    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)

  20. Sunday Baseball Notes | The Voice of Yankees Universe Says:

    [...] Link of the Week: Click here [...]

  21. Breadbaker Says:

    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.

  22. Sean Forman Says:

    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.