Archive for the 'Administration' Category

Along with the sitewide updates I just posted on, I also added some upgrades to the Play Index.

After you get the summary table of information from an event finder search, selecting two or more headings of the same type (click on the red text) will now cause the search to perform an or on those two options. So you can now answer questions like show me all the hits by Derek Jeter In Fenway or Rogers or Camden or Tropicana all bunched together.

The summary options now show more complete data like all opponents not just the top 10 or so.

In batter vs. pitcher you can now select ranges of years.

and on the event finder you can now columns for WPA, li and Re24 and summaries for pulled/opposite field, ahead and behind in the count, and leverage level (low, medium, high), so you can ask how many of Ryan Howard's Home Runs were high, low or medium leverage.

I've also updated and attempted to make the looks of each of the tools much more consistent. There was an astounding amount of redundant code in the original Play Index code and the code is now at most half the size of the previous code.

More importantly is that the Play Index code is now integrated with the standards of the rest of the site and I'm free to do new Play Index tool development. Before I knew I was going to have to do a massive rewrite and it kept me from doing anything new. Now I can go ahead and do that new work.

Yesterday afternoon. we update the full site with some new functionality, new look and new performance upgrades.
Read the rest of this entry »

Assuming tonight's build runs as expected, we'll be doing a sitewide update around noon tomorrow.

This update will:

1) update (very slightly) the look and feel of the site. I've cleaned up much of the css on the site and made some updates and what I hope will be improvements in the appearance of the site. For example, we are removing underlines for links. I researched this and found the 99% of the top 100 sites traffic-wise no longer have underlined links.

2) we will be switching from prototype to jquery for a javascript framework. For 99% of you this should mean nothing other than all of the sports-reference sites will soon have a more unified look, feel and functionality. With this switch made you should also see more improvements and bug fixes made as all of the Play Index code has been upgraded, and

3) we've made a number of tweaks to page structure and formatting that should result in improved site performance. We are still somewhat at the mercy of our ad providers, but we've tried to wring all of the performance improvements out of what we have control over.

If all goes well, these updates should go live around noon ET tomorrow. There may be some unplanned downtime involved, and we apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

Just a quick note to let everyone know there will be a brief site downtime at 4AM EST tomorrow morning. As always, send us an e-mail if you have any questions or comments, and hopefully everything will go smoothly with minimal inconvenience to all.

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.

It's the final month of the season, and that means it's time for me 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, 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 ninety 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.

OK, I've gotta toot our own vuvuzela for a second here: I just found out that the Sports-Reference family of sites has been named to TIME Magazine's list of the 50 Best Websites for 2010! It's a great honor for us, and a thrill to know that our users get so much enjoyment & utility out of the sites. Here's to being your favorite sports stats destination for many years to come...

The note below is a call for volunteers from RetroSheet President Dave Smith. If you like box scores, gamelogs, and splits from baseball's history on this site, you have Dave and his crew of volunteers to thank as their research has provided most of the information for that work. RetroSheet is a completely non-profit volunteer organization, and if you have some free time and love baseball history they have some ways you can help. You can e-mail Dave with an offer to help at dwsmith@retrosheet.org.

Retrosheet’s need for volunteer help
by Dave Smith

As we have accumulated more data, Retrosheet’s needs for volunteers have shifted.  At the present time our most critical need is for help obtaining scans of newspaper stories from newspapers that are not available on-line. There certainly are many internet resources with newspapers and the good news is that these should continue to increase.  However, there are some excellent newspapers from the 20th century that to this point are only available via microfilm. That means going to a library, sitting at the microfilm reader, finding the relevant story (we occasionally find some play by play accounts this way as well) and making a scan.  In many cases it is necessary to get the paper via interlibrary loan.

Until now, our primary mode of operation was for me to collect information and distribute it to volunteers for processing (game entry, deducing game accounts, digitizing of official records, etc).  Volunteers then donated huge amounts of their time to complete the tasks.  However, we are rapidly approaching the point that this model needs to change.  In the past several years, we have relied more and more on newspaper stories, especially for deducing play by play accounts.  The problem is that I have become the bottleneck in this process, since almost all the scanning has been done by me.  I have access to a great library and excellent interlibrary loan services, but the task is just too large for me to keep up with alone.  Others have provided substantial help, especially Bob Kistler in Boston, Jim Herdman in Seattle, Cliff Blau in New York and Walter LeConte in Kansas City, just to name the four most active.  However, the job before us is huge and it would be extremely valuable if others could help us collect the newspaper information.  I realize this is a much more demanding task than our “traditional” pattern of volunteer work at home.

I am therefore asking for help from anyone who can help with scanning from the following newspapers, mostly prior to 1950:

New York Daily News
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
St. Louis Globe-Democrat
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Pittsburgh Press
Boston Globe
Boston Record-American
Cincinnati Enquirer
Detroit Free Press
Detroit Times
Washington Times
Philadelphia Evening Bulletin

Over the years, I have worked on these papers in a rather disjointed way to address specific projects.  Therefore, we need selected dates from selected years and not just blanket copying of all issues of the Globe-Democrat from 1928, as an example.  If you can help with this difficult, but absolutely vital effort, let me know which papers you can access and I will provide you with exact dates that we need.

Dave Smith

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.

With the trade deadline coming & going this weekend, teams are now digging in for the home stretch of the season, and it's time for me 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.
• 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 ninety years (excluding 1940-1951) 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.