Archive for the 'Administration' Category

Sports Reference's New Blog: Stathead

I have to admit that I find it very hard to follow all of the great research that people people are producing every day on the web. Just for baseball, culling through the good stuff on Baseball Prospectus, Hardball Times and FanGraphs is hard enough, but when you add in team blogs, other stathead blogs and everything else, it becomes impossible. This doesn't even include trying to locate recent research in hockey, basketball, football and soccer.

So we've decided to do something about it. Every weekday, the Stathead blog will summarize the best research-related studies, news, conferences, and resources for baseball, basketball, football, hockey and soccer.

The blog will primarily be edited by Neil Paine and will typically feature 20-30 links to analytic content around the internet. We've been working out the format over the last two weeks, and we think you'll soon appreciate our concise summaries for all of the articles we write about.

Feedback as always is welcome.

Automatic Player Linker / Add your site to our newsfeeds

This weekend, we added a version of our Linker Tool that will work on Spanish-language sites:

B-R Linker.es Bookmarklet

When you use that bookmarklet on a post, it will now find matching names with tildes and accent marks, ensuring that players like Magglio Ordóñez, etc. will never again go unlinked again.

And if you like this feature, be sure to email us to let us know you want to be added to our player newsfeeds. ¡Muchas gracias!

Sponsoring a page is fun, fast, and easy way to support what we're doing here at Baseball-Reference. With a sponsorship, you can:

• Show your support for your favorite player or team.
• Drum up traffic for your own site & draw in fans with a common interest.
• Get some well-deserved recognition for your support of B-R.
• Make your voice heard by the tens of thousands of people who visit Baseball-Reference every day.

Here's all you have to do to get involved:

1. Create a membership account.
2. Find the page(s) you'd like to support, and click "sponsor" (available pages).
3. If the page you want is already sponsored, click "Alert Me!" to be informed when the current sponsorship expires.
4. Follow the instructions to create your message and make your payment.
5. Your message and links will be visible on the page after we approve them (usually in less than 24 hours).

And who knows, if you're clever enough, your message might end up on lists like these (or podcasts like this).

2011 Wins Above Replacement data is now live on the site and will be updated daily throughout the season. This includes the league pages, player pages, team pages, and Play Index, among other locations.

In the very early going, here are your 2011 WAR leaders:

Position Players

Pitchers

A B-R user recently wondered about the source for our pre-1910 batter strikeout data (example), given that those stats were not officially kept track of until 1913 in the AL and 1910 in the NL. I posed the question to Pete Palmer, stat legend and season-data provider to Baseball-Reference, and here was his reply:

"The strikeout data came from Jonathan Frankel, who did a tremendous amount of work with a number of helpers checking box scores in various newspapers. He identified about 90% of NL batters and 80% of AL batters from 1897-1909. The results were then prorated for the remainder of the season. Work is continuing on digging up more boxes and also on 1910-12 AL.

I was surprised that Jonathan was able to find so much data. What happened is that the local papers often carried the strikeouts for their games, so it required volunteers all over the country to check the papers, plus some inter-library loans. It was a terrific undertaking."

It turns out that Jonathan has a blog where he posts updates about the progress of his batter strikeout research. He says the 1910 AL is 89% complete right now, and that he has begun work on the 1912 AL as well.

Just a quick Play Index note: Sean recently added a "team's first ___ games" option at the bottom of the Team Game Finders and a "to start season" option for the Streak Finders.

This will allow you to find things like how many other seasons the Reds scored 7 or more runs four times in their first 5 games, or that Baltimore's season-opening 4-game streak of allowing exactly 1 run was the longest since 1919.

The 2011 season opens tomorrow, so now is a great time to tell you about Baseball-Reference's Play Index . In case you don't already know about the PI, it's 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 1871-2011 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 1919-2011, or on any pitcher. The same can be done for Team Batting or Team Pitching Totals.
• Search player games looking for the most consecutive games matching a particular set of criteria - This can be done either on a single player level or on any batter in the last 92 years or on any pitcher. The same can be done for Team Batting or Team Pitching Streaks.
• 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!

Personal Subscriptions to the Play Index cost $36 for a year, $6 for a month, or $2 for 24 hours. Subscriptions may only be used by a single user, and there are discounts for users sponsoring at least $35 in pages.

Organizational Subscriptions can be set up for either an unlimited number of users ($600/year, this includes three hours of custom programming and reporting to be used at your discretion), or for up to five users ($125/year, this includes one hour of custom programming and reporting to be used at your discretion).

There are Two Steps to Subscribe to the Play Index:

1. Login to or create a Sports-Reference.com account (the same account used to sponsor pages).
2. Already logged in (or just created an account)? Go to our subscription page to sign up.

Our Always-Available Free Trial: Non-subscribers can use the PI's features as much as you like. However, your outputs will be restricted to a limited number of results.

The Play Index comes with a money back guarantee. We will gladly return the unused portion of any Play Index Subscription should you be dissatisfied with the Play Index.

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.

To get you prepared for the matchups in this year's NCAA Tournament, we now have printable game previews at SR/College Basketball:

Game Previews | College Basketball at Sports-Reference.com

Each preview contains key information about both teams, including SRS ratings; offensive and defensive ratings; and player statistics from the 2010-11 season. Check them out, and increase your knowledge when watching the games this month!

Jobs @ Sports Reference: Web Developer

Sports Reference is hiring a web developer this spring. Please see the link above for details and how to apply.

Jobs @ Sports Reference: Web Developer

Sports Reference is hiring a web developer this spring. Please see the link above for details and how to apply.