Archive for the 'Announcements' Category

I'm pleased to announce that Mike Kania has joined Sports Reference as a web developer. Mike previously worked as a developer for SixApart and AOL and also designed the very valuable reference site HasTheLargeHadronColliderDestroyedTheWorldYet.com. He dramatically increases the number of Cleveland fans on staff (bringing us to one) and works in our Philadelphia office. Mike will be focusing on football initially. He's been on the job a couple of weeks and is already close to rolling out a couple of new features on the football site.

Quick announcement about the Minors section of the site: we ran the most recent SABR update yesterday, so stats from the Dominican Summer League and Venezuelan Summer League are now updating daily.

Dodgers 1B James Loney hit his 2nd HR of the year tonight, off Javier Vazquez.

What next? -- the McCourts reconcile?

Now that he's (ahem) "out of his slump," let's have a look at the worst qualifying seasons by a 1B in the live-ball era:

OPS+ of 75 or less by a qualifying 1B, 1920-2011

Five current seasons on that list.  It's early yet, but it's getting pretty late for Adam LaRoche, Aubrey Huff, Daric Barton, Loney and Justin Morneau.

How about that Johnny Sturm? He gets one season in the big leagues, starting at 1B for the Yankees, ending the 2-year tenure of Babe Dahlgren; sullies the sainted Lou Gehrig's position even more than Dahlgren did; and winds up a World Champion.

Sturm is the only one of the past players here whose team won it all. Pete Rose made it to the Series.

2011 New York Yankees Batting, Pitching, & Fielding Statistics - Baseball-Reference.com.

Last year in August, there was a bit of a debacle when I started incorporating 2010 season stats into the park factors. Yankee Stadium III had been a much better hitters park and SafeCo a better hitter's park and adding in the 2010 season stats swung the AL pitcher WAR race (temporarily) in Sabathia's favor.

To avoid a similar problem this year and in future years I am going to begin updating the park factors around Memorial Day.

UPDATE: The Win Probability Added calculations for 2011 will also be updated daily to reflect the 2011 park factors and run scoring environment.

The Park Factors on B-R are 3-year factors when appropriate, so 2000's park factor relies equally on 1999, 2000 and 2001.

So now for 2011 since it is underway, we start with the PERCentage of the season played and

PF_2011_3yr = (PERC*PF_2011 + PF_2010 + (1-PERC)*PF_2009)/2

PF_2010_3yr = (PERC*PF_2011 + PF_2010 + PF_2009)/(2+PERC)

This should prevent violent swings in the park factors and at the end of the season we will end up with PF we were going to have throughout the offseason.

2011 pages will of course be updated daily. 2010 pages will be updated less often. To see what goes into each team's park factor you can look at the various one-year park factors listed on their team/year pages.

A quick note to let everybody know that we now list WHIP and ERA+ on the Cy Young Award voting tables:

2010 NL Cy Young Voting

1969 AL Cy Young Voting

Special thanks to B-R user Brendan for the suggestion!

Baseball StatHead: May 4, 2011

Today's Stathead entries include links to The Hardball Times, SweetSpot, and Baseball Analytics, plus many reactions to Liriano's no-hitter.

Baseball StatHead: May 3, 2011

Today's Stathead entries feature research from Baseball Prospectus, Fangraphs, The Book, and a new edition of JQAS.

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.

I have not checked in here in a while, principally because (a) I have learning a new computer architecture and tools, and porting several year's work, (b) SABR's new web site has taken some of my thunder--it is now announcing things I used to announce, and with nice pictures, (c) I have been bummed about the Red Sox, and (d) I have been lazy.
Read the rest of this entry »

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!