Archive for the 'Administration' Category

Over the years, many users have written to us expressing confusion over the assignment of saves for seasons prior to 1975, the year the current save rule was put into effect. This post will hopefully set the record straight on what changes the rule has seen over the years, which version of the rule we apply to older seasons, and why the save totals on a player's main page might not always match those you find in the player's game logs and splits.

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With the All-Star Break rapidly approaching, I'd like to take the time 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.

In recent years, there have been a number of really great books that prominently mention baseball statistics, but not so many that are specifically about the stats themselves. For instance, Michael Lewis' Moneyball is a good story in which sabermetrics play a large role, but at its heart the emphasis is the story, not the numbers. And the books that do attempt to teach core principles of sabermetrics (notably The Book by Tom Tango, Mitchel Lichtman, & Andy Dolphin) are extremely detailed but not exactly intended for a casual audience with a limited background in math. What baseball really needs is a book that focuses on the advanced statistics but explains them in an accessible way to the average fan... A "Sabermetrics for Dummies", if you will.

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We've added a couple of sites to the player newsfeeds.

• Wezen-Ball
• Mike Scioscia's Tragic Illness
• Crashburn Alley
• Sabernomics.com
• BayCityBall.com
• Fungoes.net
• WalkOff Walk

Here's how your site can be added to our player newsfeeds. We've also added support for MovableType to our linker tool.

One of the things we pride ourselves on at Sports Reference is that we respond to every e-mail and comment that users send us. I've done that since I started the site 10 years ago and Neil Paine our User Affairs guru does that now. Unfortunately, I just discovered that our technology has been letting us down for the past few weeks. It appears that in a server update in late April, our feedback form stopped passing along the text included in the form. We thought it was just spammers attempting to send us ads for viagra (we get a lot of those and attempt to block them), but it now appears that we dropped 200-300 legitimate messages from users.

In an attempt to see if we could recover these messages, we then discovered another 150 or so messages stuck in our spam filter. These are just from the past month, so it appears we've been losing a lot of legitimate messages to our spam filter for at least five or six months. We believe we have fixed the problem, and if there is something you sent us that we did not respond to, please accept our apologies and resubmit it here.

https://sr.fogbugz.com/

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.

Baseball-Reference.com has been around a long time. Ten years now. In honor of the occasion, I am launching ten new features for 2010. They are listed below and you can click on the links to read a rundown of what I've done. I've only knocked a couple off the list, but I'll be tracking my progress here and this post will be linked to in the site's top header, so you can check back anytime. I expect to finish before the All-Star break (maybe sooner).

10 for 10 Features

1. Pete Palmer Database, the SABR Bio Committee DB and the SABR MILB DB updates
2. 1920-1939, 1952 & 1953 RetroSheet Data and improvements to the box score, split and gamelogs.
3. Player Uniform Numbers
4. Win Expectancy and Run Expectancy
5. Player Newsfeeds
6. Advanced Fielding Stats and Leaderboards
7. Player Wins Above Replacement
8. Player Photos, pre-1960
9. Gamelogs, Box Scores and Splits for 1920-Yesterday
10. MLB Contracts, MLB Agent, Player Service Time, and Historical Salaries

I hope you enjoy the new features. As always please let us know if you have suggestions, find errors, or have comments either here or via our feedback form

From the discussion that ensued in the previous post about this topic, it is pretty clear that while it may be a justified decision to split them, I'm going to need to study this a bit more. It seems to me that there are many such circumstances in baseball's primordial past that warrant further study. So my decision is to punt and do nothing. I'm going to leave it as is until we can come up with a reasonable process to study each and every one of these issues. Perhaps this would be a good job for the SABR Executives and 19th Century committees. Just a thought. Thank you to everyone who commented.

This is pretty far down in the weeds, but a lot of what we do when posting these numbers is far down in the weeds. At the prodding of an interested party, I've been asked whether the 1901-1902 Orioles should be part of the New York Yankees history. He argues no. We have shown them as such. I noticed that Palmer/Gillette now show them as not part of the Yankees history in their last ESPN Baseball Encyclopedia. Here is a response Gary sent to me when I asked him about it.

We discussed this at length when we did the first edition of our new encyclopedia in 2004. IIRC, the deciding factor was that the Baltimore franchise went bust during the season and was turned over to the league. After the season, the league then sold a new franchise to investors in New York City. We felt that wasn't really a relocation or a transfer; it was simply filling the gap in the league that was opened when the Orioles' franchise disintegrated.

Of the 39 players who appeared for Baltimore in 1902, only five appeared for New York in 1903. Jimmy Williams was the regular second baseman for both clubs. Herm McFarland, a utility player in '02, became a regular outfielder in '03. Ernie Courtney played one game for Balto. in 1902, then 25 for NY in 1903. Harry Howell was the only pitcher of consequence to make the transition. Snake Wiltse (4 G in '03) also appeared for both.

So right now, I'm probably going to switch the 1901 and 1902 Baltimore teams to their own franchise and have the Yankees start in 1903. Anyone want to convince me otherwise?

David Neft (r), head of the first Macmillan Baseball Encyclopedia.

Last Thursday, I had the great pleasure of being invited by Marty Appel to attend the monthly baseball writers' lunch started 20 years ago by Lawrence Ritter. The authors of 100+ books were at the lunch, and another guest was David Neft, the head of the Big Mac, Baseball Encyclopedia. We got to share notes and exchange stories about how our separate projects got off the ground. David is still at work putting together a major set of biographical data for NFL players.