Archive for the 'Announcements' Category

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.

Amazon.com: Flip Flop Fly Ball: An Infographic Baseball Adventure 9781608192694: Craig Robinson: Books.

I've enjoyed Craig's website Flip Flop Flyball for a long time now, so I was very excited when a preview copy of him book showed up this weekend. After I finish reading it and digesting the graphics, it is going to go on my bookshelf next to my Edward Tufte collection. I believe it is the best book of sports graphics ever produced.

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.

Here's another new addition to the Play Index -- the Team Batting & Pitching Game Finders will now output a team's composite batting or pitching stats from the games in question. This will allow you to find things like the teams who drew the most single-season walks in the 2000s:

Similarly, you can use the Pitching Game Finder to look for team leaders like 2000-2011 teams that allowed the most HR in a season:

While we don't have a full-fledged Team Season Finder yet, this is an easy way to get some of the same results.

Two quick site announcements this afternoon:

• We've updated the draft data to include results from earlier this month.
• Short-season minor leagues like the Appalachian, Arizona, Gulf Coast, and Pioneer Leagues (in addition to the Dominican & Venezuelan summer leagues) will now be updated daily.

Here are two recent additions to the Play Index Event Finders (batting and pitching):

• Sean just added Balls in Play and Balls Not in Play as event options. This means you can search for things like all playable balls hit to center field against the Twins, etc.
• We also now have Pulled, Opposite Field, and Middle breakouts in the event finders, so you can call up a list of every ball Jose Bautista hit the other way this season.

Major League Baseball & MLB Encyclopedia - Baseball-Reference.com

We have historical totals for major league baseball on our leagues directory and I noticed that we are fast approaching the 200,000th game in major league history.

There is probably some room for interpretation on when exactly it will occur.  How do you count forfeits, suspended games etc. And I'm including the National Association in my total, but the fact remains that some time between July 1 and the end of the season MLB will have played 200,000 games, no matter how you count it.

UPDATE:

I'm using NA, UA, AA, PL and FL in my calculations. If you use all of those we are 266 away. using what I have of the schedule, it appears we'll hit 200k on July 4th. Assuming there are less that 5 rainouts between now and then. The second question is when do we mark a game as completed? The 5th? The end of the game?

Two notes:

- We have added minor-league player newsfeeds to the site, so now the names of any active minor-leaguers will be linked when you use the Automatic Player Linker Tool. Click here to read more about the linker program, and to learn how to submit your content to the B-R newsfeeds.

- Also, please welcome the following sites to the linker program:

Read the rest of this entry »

After months of technical difficulties, we're happy to say that the Oracle of Baseball is once more operational.

For those who don't remember it, the Oracle is a tool that allows you to find connections between any two major league players via teammates. (As an example, here is the shortest possible chain of teammates between Joe Tinker and Starlin Castro.)

For more information about the Oracle, click here. Thanks for your patience as we worked to get the Oracle up and running again.

Francisco Rodriguez, Ryan Braun and Carlos Pena have always been difficult cases for our linker. We've now come upon a solution for that.

Previously we would link Ryan Braun's name with the following.

http://www.baseball-reference.com/player_search.cgi?search=Ryan+Braun

This is now updated to:

http://www.baseball-reference.com/player_search.cgi?results=braunry01,braunry02

The id's in the results parameter are for the Pitcher Ryan Braun (Braun the lesser, braunry01) and the Brewers' Ryan Braun (Braun the greater, braunry02). Someone like Francisco Rodriguez has 8 results or so. The results are ordered by last_year played descending and length of career descending (I figure I would weight it towards active guys who have played awhile).

If you do nothing, these links will auto-forward your readers to the most popular player (as measured by all-time page views as a major leaguer) among the players with id's in that list. If there are only minor leaguers or just one player listed in results it will send you to the player page for the first id listed (which is ordered as above).

Now if you want to link directly to Ryan Braun the lesser, just delete the other Ryan Braun's id (braunry02) from the link.

http://www.baseball-reference.com/player_search.cgi?results=braunry01

And now the link sends you to the other Ryan Braun the lesser (braunry01). This will require a bit of memorization of id's, but really you will only need to do that for cases where you are linking to the lesser player with that name.

This has been rolled out already. I also added an html comment at the beginning that states the above more succinctly. The comment can remain in the post as it won't show up when published.

Sometime later today or next week, I will start using these in the page feeds, so Ryan Braun will finally have his own page feed. This may cause some players to show incorrect page feeds (mismatches of Ryan Braun news, etc), but short of artificial intelligence scanning of writer intent, I don't see a way around that.

Apologies to Braun the Lesser. I'm sure he is a better guy than the other one in every way except baseball ability. 🙂