Archive for the '10 for 10' Category

This post is the tenth in our series of ten new features for our tenth anniversary.

Around the trading deadline, player contract info becomes a highly valued commodity, so we are very delighted to announce the addition of new financial information to the site.
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This post is the ninth in our series of ten new features for our tenth anniversary.

Thanks to the heroes at RetroSheet, we now have access to box scores and gamelogs for every major league game from 1920-2009, and play-by-play going back to 1950. Ninety years of major league history and more than 150,000 games. That includes over 80% of the batting seasons in major league history (back to 1871), 74% of the team seasons, and full careers for 72% of all major league players.
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This post is the eighth in our series of ten new features for our tenth anniversary.

Examples: Hank Aaron, Mordecai Brown, Bid McPhee

Every once and awhile an e-mail drops into my inbox that is wholly unexpected and opens up the possibility of something on the site I hadn't imagined before. David Davis (who is now a hero of mine) sent me one such e-mail. David has put together a mammoth set of files that has small headshot photos of about 90% of the players in major league history. Even better, it was structured in such a way to make placing them onto the site relatively easy.

Due to copyright concerns for more recent photos, we are currently only showing photos for pre-1960 debuts. This represents thousands of photos. You can see photos of players from Cap Anson to Don Zimmer, but we don't yet have Aardsma to Zimmerman. This may change in the future when I've had a change to weigh the issues. Until then, enjoy putting a face to players who for too long were just numbers on a page.

This post is the seventh in our series of ten new features for our tenth anniversary.

Sabermetricians have always been on the search for the best way to measure wins contributed by players. Baseball Prospectus has WARP, Bill James has win shares and now we are presenting Sean Smith's Wins Above Replacement or WAR data on the site.

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This is the sixth of ten features we are adding for our 10th anniversary.
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Automatic Player Linker / Statistical Sharing / Add your Blog/Site to our Newsfeeds

It has been a few weeks since the season started and I've found the time to return to our 10 for 10 anniversary celebration. We've added Newsfeeds to our active player pages. We've also added a linking tool that makes it very straightforward for you to add links to a player's Baseball Reference page from your blog posts or news stories.
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This is the fifth of ten features we are adding for our 10th anniversary.

I've managed to put out most of the fires from the start of the season, so I am once again back on our 10 for 10 project. Number five is a stream of player news now found at the top of the pages for active players. By default, we show the last four reports we have with a tooltip allowing you to see more if you desire. See Jacoby Ellsbury for a sample.

Our news comes from a couple of sources:

1) Tim Dierkes and MLB Trade Rumors
2) KFFL's Hot off the Wire
3) A feed of injury data we receive, and
4) our Blog, which isn't quite hard news, but does have interesting content related to the players.

That's it so far, but if you are a blogger or run a site, you may want to check out this post as you can very easily add your own content to our feeds as well.

We are working to integrate this into different areas of the site, so your suggestions are always welcome. For our next update, I hope to launch #6 sometime next week.

This is the third of ten features we are adding for our 10th anniversary.

Uniform numbers have been a long standing user request and if you are a user of our other sites you know that we have had uniform numbers and neat uni medallions on our other pro sports websites for quite awhile.

I'm happy to announce that B-R is joining them. From 1929 on, we have uni medallions on player, team pages (under the roster tab), and retired numbers on the franchise pages.

Here are a couple of examples.

Bernie Williams (the consistent),
George Brunet (the inconsistent),
1979 Astros (scroll down),
2009 Yankees (scroll down),
Braves Retired numbers

We've also provided links to the HOF's Dressed to the Nines Exhibit, so you can see a drawing of what the uniform looked like as well as the numbers for the players. Putting the two together gives you a fuller picture of what the player's uniform would have looked like.

The data is essentially complete and comes from multiple sources. Please let us know if you have any corrections or suggestions.

This is the second of ten features we are adding for our 10th anniversary.

Due to the tireless work of the RetroSheet volunteers (otherwise known as heroes) Baseball-Reference.com now has play-by-play (PBP) for the 1952 and 1953 seasons and box score level accounts (BSEF) of all games in the 1920-1939 seasons. This is the first time that I have incorporated seasons with just BSEF data, so it necessitated some changes which I'll try to highlight below.

Beyond that major change there have been many, many additional improvements to the
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This is the first of ten features we are adding for our 10th anniversary.

A month or so ago, I changed the underlying database for the statistics on the site. The site now relies on Pete Palmer's database for full season stats and team totals. Pete is a giant in the sabermetric community and was recently honored by inclusion in the inaugural class of SABR's Chadwick Award. His work is the basis for Total Baseball and the ESPN Baseball Encyclopedia. I am certain that his numbers are the most accurate representation of baseball history.

The site also is now updated with the Biographical and Minor League dataset from SABR much more regularly. On a weekly basis, the latest version of the SABR Biographical Committee's work (so our necrology data will be updated much more regularly), and SABR Minor League Committee's DB are incorporated into the site. You can follow the improvements to the minor league database on SABR's website. I generally incorporate these changes 3-6 days after the notes are posted there.