Frequently when you have to put a feature "out of sight" in order to save room on a page, it also becomes "out of mind" for users who no longer have an easy way to navigate to it. unfortunately, that's been the case with the Bio section of the site, which is tucked away under the "more [+]" drop-down menu and consequently gets overlooked all too often. Since we get a handful of requests per week about player birthplaces and places of death, I thought I'd shine the spotlight on the Bio page to help our users know about the tools it offers.

First, we break down every player by their place of birth. Using the links at the top of the page, you can sort the batting, pitching, and managing totals for every U.S. state (did you know that Pennsylvania boasts the most Hall of Fame pitchers in MLB history?), and for every country as well (for instance, Ireland has provided the most career games without producing an All-Star). You can also see more detailed breakdowns for each state, including a sortable list of every player born there and his career MLB stats (aside from Chad Santos -- career PA: 8 -- Benny Agbayani is Hawaii's all-time leader in career OPS with .807), and each foreign country/territory as well (Ed Porray's birthplace was apparently "A Ship on Atlantic Ocean," making him unique among major-leaguers). We also provide the same tools/breakdowns for each player's place of death, although this section is understandably less complete and/or accurate than the birthplace database. Meaning that if you ever wanted to know that Jackie Jensen hit more career HR than any other player who died in Virginia, this is the place to look.

So feel free to look around and experiment with the various states and territories, and I'm sure you'll dig up a piece of trivia in the process that will stump even the most hard-core of baseball historians.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009 at 10:20 am 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.