If you're a Baseball-Reference addict, chances are you've seen the link for our Game Day Previews on the front page of the site. And who knows, perhaps you've checked them out on the odd occasion, or maybe you even use them religiously like I do. But I get the feeling that they're somewhat underexposed in comparison to the rest of the features we provide, and I'd hate to see such a useful tool go unnoticed by a lot of people because they don't really know about it.

The game previews are great because we pack them with just about every piece of pertinent data on the game in question. In fact, it's almost like having a very condensed version of Baseball-Reference with you for the game. If you're going to a game in person, for instance, don't shell out a lot of money for a program that has scarcely any relevant information -- instead, just print out the B-R game preview on the front and back of a sheet of paper, and you'll have the most up-to-date stats on both teams, every player on the rosters, the night's starters, plus detailed performance reports on games over the past month, righty-lefty OPS splits for batters and pitchers, etc. It's truly a gold mine of information if you're taking in a game live; I did this for a Phillies game a few nights ago and was able to instantly find everything I needed to know about the Diamondbacks (a team I don't get a chance to watch very often) and their players, all on paper, with no mobile device required. Every baseball fan should try this if they're attending a game.

But you certainly don't have to be there in person to utilize the previews to their fullest extent. If you're accessing them on your computer or mobile device, you can use the wealth of links we put on the preview pages, which can call up gamelogs, splits, and more with a single click. You can also do a lot of cool things from the main previews portal if you're at your computer. You can subscribe to the RSS feed for our previews, or you can sign up to have them delivered to you automatically via e-mail. And if you don't want to sort through the whole league when trying to find your favorite team, you can bookmark the link to your favorite team's page, which gets updated daily for each upcoming game. Finally, if you want to see who was on a roster at an earlier point in the season, you can call up archived copies of previews for every game this year by using the "Find Date" drop-down menus at the top of the previews portal.

I hope everyone who didn't know how good these things are will start using them when they watch a game, and if you already knew about the previews, maybe you learned something new about their content or our delivery methods. Because it's all about sharing the sabermetric-style game previews with the masses, am I right?

This entry was posted on Friday, August 21st, 2009 at 1:11 pm and is filed under Site Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.