Archive for the 'Administration' Category

It's still to early to say it was successful, but we started directing requests to the new server (named pedro, b-ball is on mikan) at about 10pm ET tonight and so far, I'm not seeing any issues. As I said there is still some work to do, but I think we've managed not to mess things up too badly. Hopefully, you'll notice a quicker response time and improved uptime as well.

Pete Palmer is the godfather of baseball statistics. His old Total Baseball database (via the Baseball Archive) long formed the backbone of our site. We are now very honored to have his latest and greatest database on the site. The Batting, Pitching and Fielding stats now follow Palmer's data. The changes are subtle (a strikeout or two here, some RBI's there), but we believe the Palmer/Gillette database represents the most accurate view of baseball's history which we are always striving to present.

The site's birth and death data which was woefully (and embarassingly) out of date has now been synced (and will continue to be) with the SABR Biographical Committee Database which is the gold standard for biographical information for ballplayers. In addition, we have now added information on the player's burial following their death. This can be found on the player pages and in the bio directory.

One last update, we've added a number of tweaks and improvements to the minor league data as well. We now show appearances on Baseball America's top 100 list on player and affiliate pages.

With an update this massive it is very hard to check every possible contingency, so please let us know if you come across something that doesn't quite add up.

These are the first in a long line of changes and improvements coming down the pike. As always, thank you for supporting the site.

We have five sites in the Sports Reference family (soon to be six) and keeping everything in sync can be a big challenge at time. I recently switched the B-R pages over to the "S-R official page template". As a user, you should have seen almost no changes, but if you find anything a bit off let us know.

We have a few more under the hood things to change between now and April 1 (mainly switching over to more powerful servers), but we should shortly be rolling out more data and more features which I know is news everyone wants to hear. Thank you for your support of Baseball-Reference.com.

Minor League Baseball

The minor league db has been updated with the latest information from SABR's Minor League Research Committee. This has fixed a lot of bugs and added additional data. List of completed leagues. If you would like to volunteer or have data to offer contact them on their website. We will be syncing this data more often than in the past. There was a database schema change that required some work on my end to get the site up to date. I hope you enjoy the additional data.

Baseball-Reference.com Play Index / Subscribe to the Play Index

We did a major reworking of nearly the entire website last April. One area that remained unchanged was the Play Index. It took seven months, but the Play Index has finally been updated to match the rest of the site including features like in table sorting, the Share Tool, and pre-formatted and csv text. I have also reworked a number of the tools allowing for more types searches.

The main advantage to this update besides those listed above is that these changes will speed the development of new features dramatically. I've basically been on hold for new Play Index features for 18 months as I worked to move the entire site over to our new platform. Thankfully, that is essentially done now, and we can focus on improvements and additions rather than refactoring old code.

Some of the new features.

I've added a fifth criteria for the game and season finders allowing searches like seasons with "HR > SO" or "CS > SB". This is still pretty crude, but it is a first step toward full arithmetic searches.

The season and game finders now have more matching options at the top of the forms. Most of these options were already in the tools, but were buried in the sort options. These are for searches like "Most multi-hit games in career, 1954-2009" or "Most 20-HR seasons".

For the game finders there are additional new features. When doing a matching search (like "most games with a home run in first 50 games"), you also get a summary line for all of the games matching that search, which allows you to definitively say that Wally Joyner has the most home runs in a player's first 50 games since 1954. This also gives you a way to do a reasonable good split search ("Most wins against the Blue Jays in the last ten years"). There are also more matching options for things like most players with a multiple hits in a single game for one team or both teams.

I've also re-organized the front page and now show only the last 30 days of saved searches by default.

We are also going to add a few more photos to Play Index, so look for those later this week.

Special thanks to our team of bloggers who put these updated tools through their paces. They will be highlighting some of the new things you can do in upcoming blog posts. There are definitely still bugs in there to be ironed out. There are millions of potential searches to do, so we just can't test every possible combination. You can report issues you find through our bug system. Suggestions are also welcome there. Please be as specific as you can.

Subscribe to the Play Index

To celebrate the update, we are offering a free trial for the play index through November 20th. Give it a whirl for free and we hope you'll find it worth your while to subscribe after the 20th. Also, it has been three years since we launched the Play Index and our prices have held constant during that time. We have increased the prices with this update, so that a full year subscriptions has gone from $29 to $36/year.

If something isn't working as before and you really, really can't wait for it to get fixed, the old version is still available.

Thank you for your support of Baseball-Reference.com and your feedback is always appreciated.

B-R User Survey

Most all of the good ideas on Baseball-Reference.com have come from user suggestions or comments. It's been awhile since we ran a survey to get user feedback on what you think of the site and what things you would like to see added. So I would like to take this time to ask you for your feedback. The survey should take 5-10 minutes, and you should feel free to leave anything you want blank.

Users with a sponsorship account will get a $2 bonus upon the completion of a survey.

Monday, October 12, 2009 Game Previews - Baseball-Reference.com

There are a lot of balls in the air behind the scenes at Baseball-Reference.com and one of the places they tend to hit the ground is at the interface between regular and postseason stats.

I've fixed a couple of issues with the regular and postseason stats. The game previews for postseason games now combine regular and postseason stats in (what I think) is a sensible way.

The batter vs. pitcher tools now include an option for including postseason stats as well. For example, here is Cliff Lee vs. the Rockies including postseason stats or just with regular season stats. Please let me know whatever issues you find.

I ran the numbers through our park factor calculator today. Basically, the new parks come out as neutral. Citi get a 98/99 (batting/pitching) park factor and New Yankee gets a (98/97) park factor. Hyperventilation aside they are both very slight pitcher's parks. Whenever possible we use 3-year park factor which are an average of year N-1 and year N+1. When only two years are available we use year N-1 and year N and in the case of New Yankee and Citi we just use the current year. I also only use intra-league games since there is a home and home with every team in the league. Interestingly, if we include the inter-league games in our totals, we have only a percentage point change here or there.

I think we need to seriously rethink park factors and I've done a little bit of that, but don't have anything ready to use.

For now, I'm not going to tweak the park factors in the db. You should assume that Yankees and Mets hitters are slightly better than shown and the pitchers slightly worse, since I've been using 100/100 for the two parks.

Here are the 2009 3-year park factors if the season ended last night.

team_ID BPF_tot PPF_tot
ARI     109.000 109.000
COL     109.000 109.000
CHC     108.000 106.000
BOS     106.000 104.000
SFG     104.000 104.000
TEX     104.000 104.000
DET     103.000 104.000
PHI     103.000 101.000
CHW     103.000 103.000
CIN     102.000 103.000
TBR     102.000 102.000
LAA     101.000 100.000
FLA     101.000 101.000
BAL     99.000  101.000
HOU     99.000  99.000
MIN     99.000  98.000
ATL     99.000  99.000
STL     98.000  97.000
TOR     98.000  98.000
OAK     98.000  98.000
NYY     98.000  97.000
KCR     98.000  99.000
WSN     98.000  99.000
NYM     98.000  99.000
MIL     97.000  97.000
SEA     96.000  97.000
LAD     96.000  94.000
PIT     96.000  97.000
CLE     94.000  95.000
SDP     88.000  89.000

The Baseball Early Bird - Tuesday, September 22, 2009

The Baseball Early Bird is a joint project with Gary Gillette of 247 Baseball that provides a daily e-mail with:

• recaps of last night's games,
• a trivia question,
• a list of players born, died, or debuted on this date,
• current standings,
• pitching performances, and hitting performances from last night's games,
• assorted editorial features, and
• e-mails optimized for html, text, or mobile.

We aim to be out by 8am ET every morning in-season with fewer issues during the off-season. You can opt-out of the e-mail at any time and we will never sell or share your e-mail address with another party. Hope you enjoy the Early Bird.

As the Sports Reference sites have grown, so has the level of interest of our users. And so has the time committed to responding and working with users. I'm not complaining as that is an important part of our job. I've always felt that the best ideas come from users telling us how they want to use the site and where we aren't meeting their expectations.

But....this aspect of the job has soaked up more and more of our time, so much so that when I come to work on Monday, most of the day is spent just cleaning out my e-mail inbox. So we've done what any growing company would do. We hired a really smart, knowledgeable person to take over this job.

Neil Paine started this week as our user affairs coordinator. He is going to handle most user e-mail, work on user education and training initiatives, and work on lots and lots of special projects. Neil is a recent graduate of the Georgia Tech's Science, Technology and Culture (STAC) Program, and he'll be based near Atlanta. He possesses a broad knowledge of all of our sports and is perhaps best known as our stellar basketball blogger. Besides being a good writer, he has a lot of math savvy, so we are really excited to have him onboard.

As a user, not much should change for you other than your e-mails will get answered sooner and bugs will be fixed faster.