Site Features: Check Out Our Postseason Section!
Posted by Neil Paine on October 4, 2010
The playoffs are finally going to be upon us this Wednesday, so now seems like as good a time as any to point out that we have an extensive Postseason Section here at Baseball-Reference.
First, we have complete boxscores and play-by-play records for every postseason game ever played (if you don't believe me, check out the first World Series game ever). Not only that, but the play-by-play accounts even feature Win Probability.
And that's not all. Beyond the box scores, you can take a broader view of each playoff matchup in history using our series pages, which contain basic linescores for each game of the series, as well as composite series pitching and batting stats. These pages are current as of the previous day's action, so by Thursday we will have generated pages for all of the 2010 matchups.
Also, be sure to take a trip around our leaderboards to learn about all-time postseason records:
- Batting and Pitching Leaders for World Series Career and Single-Series
- Batting and Pitching Leaders for LCS Career and Single-Series
- Batting and Pitching Leaders for Division Series Career and Single-Series
- Batting and Pitching Leaders for Playoffs Career and Single-Year
As always, let us know your questions or comments, so that we can continue to be your go-to baseball website all year long.
October 4th, 2010 at 10:29 am
Cy Young sure got roughed up in that first WS game. Might have turned out differently without those three first-inning errors, though. Wonder how many of those were due to the state of baseball glove development at the time ...
October 4th, 2010 at 10:54 am
Off-topic question: When will all the final season stats on the site be updated? I see that the ROE and GIDP values of WAR are still all zeros. Are the park factors (and all the stats that depend on them) up to date now?
October 4th, 2010 at 10:57 am
Sean's going to re-run the entire site this afternoon, so by 4 PM ET things like park factors and similarity scores should be updated for 2010.
October 4th, 2010 at 1:10 pm
Speaking of that first WS....
-- Thane: Cy Young got his revenge with a CG, 0-ER win in game 5 (he also paced the offense with 3 RBI and a triple) and another CG win in game 7.
-- How come nobody ever mentions Boston's stunning comeback from a 3-1 deficit in that inaugural Series? They won the last 4 games, 3 of them on the road, to win the best-of-9 Series by 5 games to 3. (OK, it happened 107 years ago.)
-- Pittsburgh's Deacon Phillippe started and completed 5 of the 8 games in that Series. He won games 1, 3 and 4, and lost games 6 and 7. In games 3 and 7, he was pitching with 1 day of rest. He's the only pitcher ever to start 5 games in one Series, and his record of 44 IP in one Series will likely stand forever. (Just for context ... Josh Beckett was named MVP of the 2003 Series with just 16.1 IP, 1 win and 1 loss.)
-- The 1903 Pirates really missed pitchers Jesse Tannehill and Jack Chesbro, who had both jumped to the brand-new NY Highlanders after teaming with with Phillippe and Sam Leever from 1900-02. Tannehill was a fine pitcher and a good hitter (not just "...for a pitcher"); in 6 years with Pittsburgh, Tannehill batted .277 and averaged 82 runs scored per 600 PAs. Chesbro had led the '02 Pirates with a record of 28-6. Without those two, the '03 Pirates leaned more heavily on Phillippe and Leever during the regular year, which may have affected their WS results. In the Series, Pittsburgh lost all 3 games started by Leever (2) and Brickyard Kennedy, a 35-year-old on his last legs whom they'd signed as a free agent that year. Leever and Kennedy both had WS ERAs over 5.
-- Deacon Phillippe, Sam Leever and Jesse Tannehill all had outstanding careers that were freakishly similar to one another. For both Phillippe and Leever, the other 2 men top their Similarity Scores list, while Tannehill's list has Phillippe at #1, Jack Chesbro at #2 and Leever at #4. It's ironic that Chesbro is the only one of these 4 to make the Hall of Fame; by overall career numbers, he has the weakest credentials.
http://www.baseball-reference.com/players/p/phillde01.shtml
http://www.baseball-reference.com/players/l/leevesa01.shtml
http://www.baseball-reference.com/players/t/tanneje01.shtml
http://www.baseball-reference.com/players/c/chesbja01.shtml
October 4th, 2010 at 2:07 pm
I've always found that Pittsburgh staff fascinating. I think I brought them up on here before for some reason. Also, in 1900, they were supported by a young Rube Waddell, whose career numbers are also very similar to the other guys. That was the second team in history to have five pitchers throw at least 200 IP. That has only been done 22 times. Only three teams have done it since 1930, most recently the '80 A's and '77 Dodgers.
October 4th, 2010 at 2:21 pm
Interestingly, Tannehill, Chesbro, and Phillippe each received 1 vote on the 1946 HOF nominating ballot. 39 votes were needed to get to the final ballot. Waddell received 122, but no one on the 20-man final ballot received enough votes for induction. But the Old-Timers Committee then inducted 11 players that season, including Waddell and Chesbro. Tannehill and Phillippe never received any subsequent votes (I am not sure about their eligibility rules). Leever had received a vote in '37 but that was his only one.
October 4th, 2010 at 4:49 pm
If I remember right from the last time I looked into it, some of those Pittsburgh pitchers are not only high on each other's pitching similarity scores, they are also high on each other's batting similarity scores.
October 5th, 2010 at 10:40 am
@5
Johnny T. -- Excellent point re: 1900 Pirates having 5 pitchers w/ 200+ IP.
Most baseball fans think the 5-man starting rotation is a recent invention.
In fact, in the dead-ball era of 1901-19, there were 47 teams that gave at least 20 starts to 5 different pitchers. This group includes 2 WS champs and 7 pennant winners.
One of my favorites in this group is the 1907 Cubs. The WS champs had 5 pitchers with 22 to 30 starts, another with 15, another with 13. Those 7 pitchers logged from 123 to 268 IP; the Cubs used just 8 pitchers all year, with Kid Durbin pitching just 16 innings.
The only thing new about the 5-man rotation is the "rotation" aspect. In those days, managers had more strategic flexibility in deciding whom to start on a given day and in a given series.
October 5th, 2010 at 11:27 am
Yeah, it's my understanding the rotation didn't really come into effect until the early '60s, when there was a more regular schedule with fewer off-days and fewer doubleheaders. That was a 4-man rotation, of course.
I would be very interested in seeing how the Pirates deployed their men. We don't have the boxscores but we can see who started which games. Who got the tough matchups? Who was used on shorter rest?
October 5th, 2010 at 3:43 pm
[...] I gave a big-picture overview of all the features we have in our Postseason Section, so today I wanted to talk about a really [...]
October 14th, 2010 at 10:17 pm
when i started reading i thought it was going to be filled with obvious information, but really it turned out to be quite useful. good job!