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Posted by Neil Paine on March 29, 2010
With the season starting in a week, it's time again to share with you some features of the Play Index (PI), a set of research tools that allow you to create customizable queries on our database, save the results, and share them with others. Using the PI, you can:
- Search full-season or multi-year totals to find your own custom leaderboards - Look at the entire history of baseball from 1871-2010 with every year, team, and position available, or filter the results in a vast number of ways: by specific years, by age, by first six seasons or last ten seasons, by American League only, by Cubs only, by switch-hitters, by catchers, by outfielder or infielder, by year of debut, but active or retired, by Hall of Famer, by height and weight, by living or deceased, or by a range of common statistical categories. Then sort the results by any common statistic, by the teams with the most players matching that category, by players with the most seasons matching that category, or by most recent, youngest, oldest, final year, or year of debut, and others.
- Search player game totals - Filtering on any of a dozen or more choices, search for games on a single player level, or on any batter from 1920-2010 (excluding 1940-1951), or on any pitcher. The same can be done for Team Batting or Team Pitching Totals.
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- Search the records of a specific player - Output a detailed summary and play-by-play list of all events of a specific type from a single year or an entire career. For example, you can see all of Harmon Killebrew's triples or even his outs to the second baseman.
- Search Batter vs. Pitcher Matchups - This tool presents a complete sortable list of batter or pitcher with totals for every opponent they faced by career or by year. Clicking on the player's name will lead you to a detailed output of their head-to-head plate appearances.
- ...And more!
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So go ahead, give the Play Index a try -- we're confident that once you start using it, you'll wonder how you ever got along without it.
March 30th, 2010 at 8:53 pm
I hope you don't mind my insertion of something off-topic in reply to something posted here several days ago. I remember it came up in a slight straying off-topic even in that blog entry's comments.
Someone mentioned that there were a few one-game series played on July 11, 1990. I noticed that all were in the American League. One of the games involved the Orioles. Because I still own and rent out a former residence in the Maryland suburbs of DC, I qualify for a public library card in that county. It's not convenient for me to actually check out books from that library system, but this does give me access to some online databases that only cardholders can access. A couple of them contain articles from the Washington Post dating back to the 1800s. In 1990, the Post would have covered the Orioles as a home team. (In fact, this paper still does, not just because some of the area residents have not switched allegiance to the Nationals or have decided to be fans of both teams but also because the paper circulates into the fringes of the Baltimore area. Although the DC area is Redskins-crazed, the Ravens are also covered as a home team.)
The night this subject came up, I tried to access the Post databases on this library's website, but as luck would have it, they were down. I finally remembered to do it tonight. And even before I brought up the game article from the July 12, 1990, edition, as soon as I saw 1990 as the year in which this occurred, I remembered that there was some type of labor stoppage at the beginning of that season. The teams that didn't play that day may have found other ways to make up their lost games.
That July 11 Orioles game was against Kansas City. Their 1990 gamelog shows that they played their first two games of the season against the Royals. They only played 161 games that season. I don't know if they lost a game to the labor stoppage or to rain at some other time. (One result of this was that Ripken's record-breaking consecutive game came one day later than it could have been. Of course, there was a bigger labor stoppage later than this. And while someone posted here the other day about not being impressed by consecutive game streaks, I am impressed by them.)
The Post article from July 12, 1990, confirms that this was a "game postponed by the spring training lockout." This game was also notable for being Curt Schilling's first major league victory. Ben McDonald, the overall first pick in the draft the previous year, was the starter, while 1989 AL Rookie of the Year Gregg Olson got the save. Just as Kyle Abbott was considered to have more of a future than Curt Schilling in 1992, both McDonald and Olson were regarded as more likely future stars than Schilling in 1990. Both of them were derailed by injuries rather than ineffectiveness, if I recall correctly.
Another highly regarded young pitcher who did have a pretty decent major league career, Mike Mussina, was the team's highest draft pick this year. The Notes section at the end of the article mentioned that he would be making his first start for the Hagerstown farm team at Williamsport, not far from his home town of Montoursville, on July 13 or 14.
April 2nd, 2010 at 8:07 am
Thanks for that research...very interesting. I had totally forgotten about that lockout.