Archive for the 'Administration' Category

Baseball-Reference.com » Sports Reference

We are moving all of our site and company news into a single blog for Sports Reference. We'll tag all B-R content, so you can quickly and easily find the content you want.

Also, our existing B-R blog rss feed will be redirected to the new site's feed.

Attention readers in the Delaware Valley -- we need users like you to come in and help us improve our sites!

If you're in the area -- our HQ is located in the Mt. Airy section of Philadelphia -- and can spare an hour next week to help us test out S-R sites (we'll even pay you $50 for your time), please email me your name, the SR site you use most frequently, and a contact phone number.

UPDATE: Thank you for the response. We've filled our quota of testers, but even if we don't use you now we may contact you for future tests. Thanks.

We are looking for 5 testers, so we may not be able to use everyone. Please remember testing will be done in Philadelphia only.

Thanks in advance for your help!

I've run the similarity scores for every mlb player to include the 2011 season. Enjoy.

User Survey - Sports-Reference.com

In an effort to better serve our users, we've posted a feedback form on our overall company site, http://www.sports-reference.com.

In addition to your feedback, we are looking for a couple dozen volunteers to sign on for occasional, additional surveys and perhaps some early beta testing of new features. We are calling these volunteer groups Sports Reference User Boards. You can still give us feedback without having an interest in being on a user board.

Thank you, as always, for your support and feedback.

I try to be very careful with how the site's code is structured, so that the pages will load and render as blazingly fast a possible. Users like it and it can have a direct impact on our bottom line.

One item that has been out of my control is the ad code we include on the pages. Some of these ads load 5-15 additional files and quite frankly some of the ad servers don't seem to have a good idea of what speed means, so the pages hang and we get lots of frustrated e-mails. As well as being frustrated ourselves.
Read the rest of this entry »

MLB Milestone Watch: Hits - Baseball-Reference.com

I'm a few weeks late for the countdown to Jeter's big hit, but don't miss another milestone as our Milestone Watch points out all of the batters, pitchers and fielders as they cross major statistical milestones and move up the career leaderboards.  This new feature will be linked on the front page just below the standings.

Any suggested additions will be welcome.  These pages should be updated daily as the site updates.   Please note that we include National Association stats in our leaderboard stats.  Thanks to Justin Kubatko, who had this on <a href="http://www.basketball-reference.com/">Basketball-Reference.com</a> quite awhile ago.

Thanks to Dave Davis and lots of bug reports from users we've updated the photos on the site with about 4,000 new images. This includes some previously missing images and some corrected images for players that were previously incorrectly identified.

As I've stated earlier I use pre-1960 images for copyright reasons, though I'm always looking through our options as head shots for every player would be a wonderful addition.

As many of you noticed over the past few days, the player newsfeeds stopped updating on July 6th, and were down entirely last night and this morning. We apologize for this outage and have worked to fix the bug, so your posts should now be showing up on the appropriate player pages again. Thanks for your patience.

Some of you may have noticed that we had a number of data issues this morning, so I just wanted to post a note to let you know things are fixed now, and explain why the issue happened.

This morning, we received new data about the playing record of an obscure 1890 American Association pitcher named Harry Stine. Unfortunately, because of a glitch in the process of incorporating this new info, we ended up with two Harry Stines in the database, which broke everything for players whose names came after Stine in the alphabet. (This is why searches for 'Thome' or 'Youkilis' returned no results, and why 2011 teams were missing players with surnames in that range.)

Fortunately, Sean was able to patch things up before jetting off to SABR 41, so the site should currently be back to normal. Yesterday's boxscores are on the front page, current players have 2011 stat lines, and Omar Vizquel is 3rd among active players in hits once more.

Thanks for your patience while we worked through this issue, and as always, please continue to let us know about any site bugs you see via the feedback form.

The Marlins-Mariners games for June 24-26 were originally to be in Florida, but due to a U2 concert they were moved. The games are played in Seattle without the DH and with the Marlins batting last. For purposes of splits and Home-Road records etc. We are treating the Mariners as the home team. We know the arguments the other way, but this is how we've chosen to handle these and previous games played under similar conditions.

Way back when, the home team actually had the option of batting first and did on occasion choose to do so, so this isn't without historical precedence.

The funny aspect of MLB's contortion to give the Marlins "home-field" is that I know of at least one study that shows that batting last is of no particular advantage. All of the information the offense gets to act on is similarly acted on by the defense, so at neutral sites the home team wins 50% of the games.