Archive for the 'Power Users' Category

Attention readers in the Delaware Valley -- we need users like you to come in and help us improve our sites!

If you're in the area -- our HQ is located in the Mt. Airy section of Philadelphia -- and can spare an hour next week to help us test out S-R sites (we'll even pay you $50 for your time), please email me your name, the SR site you use most frequently, and a contact phone number.

UPDATE: Thank you for the response. We've filled our quota of testers, but even if we don't use you now we may contact you for future tests. Thanks.

We are looking for 5 testers, so we may not be able to use everyone. Please remember testing will be done in Philadelphia only.

Thanks in advance for your help!

Find Franchise Trade History - Baseball-Reference.com

In honor of the trade deadline approaching, I've created a tool that will show you all of the trades between two franchises, or all of the most recent trades for any one franchise and every other franchise.

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 »

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. 🙂

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.

B-R reader Blake had an interesting question this morning:

"You folks are great at acquiring information like this, so I would like to ask:

Could you produce a list of the occasions when a visiting team starting pitcher has had an AB before he has thrown his first pitch in a ballgame?"

Using the Play Index Batting Event Finder, you can set up a search for all PAs in a given year range by a visiting pitcher in the 1st inning:

All of MLB: 189 Plate Appearances in 2003-2011, during 1st Inning, Away Games and As P

Of those 189 instances since 2003:

• All but two teams -- the Texas Rangers and Toronto Blue Jays -- had a pitcher bat before throwing a pitch. The leaders, predictably, are all NL teams; St. Louis saw this happen an MLB-high 15 times, while the Padres and D-Backs had it happen 14 times apiece. The Twins and Angels led the AL with 3 instances apiece.
• Pittsburgh pitchers allowed it to happen the most, as they saw their counterpart in the top of the 1st 25 times. Right behind them were the Rockies (20) and Reds (17).
• The visiting pitcher hit .110/.148/.134, which sort of hampers your chances of making it all the way back to the top of the order -- although away leadoff men also saw a second 1st-inning PA 96 times over the same time span.

Read the rest of this entry »

B-R reader James Sinclair sent this one in to us, so what follows are his words:

A conversation with a friend led me to look up the Braves-Pirates box score from July 25, 1992, a game any Braves fan who was around at the time would recognize for at least two reasons: (1) It was the Braves' 13th consecutive win, tying the franchise record at the time (later broken by a 15-game streak in 2000), and, (2) that mundane-sounding "Flyball: CF" with one out in the top of the 9th was this play—Otis Nixon's spectacular catch to rob Andy Van Slyke of a home run that would've given the Pirates a 2-1 lead.

What I had forgotten until I looked at the box score is that the Braves had just one hit, a David Justice home run. Even more unusual, they had just 25 plate appearances, which is the absolute minimum a team can have and still win a full-length game (Jeff Blauser drew a walk in the fourth, but was caught stealing). And it would have to be the home team—one run scored (by home run, most likely), 24 outs, and the top of the ninth ends with a 1-0 lead—while for a visiting team the minimum is 28.

I figured that's a pretty rare occurrence, and the best search method I could think of was to find games where a team faced only one batter over the minimum and still lost, so I went to the team pitching game finder. I had to search in kind of a roundabout way, because I didn't see a way to find all games where BF – PO = 1 for the losing team (and also I'm not a subscriber, for which I sincerely apologize—I won't tell anyone how I got around the limited result displays). So I searched for losing efforts where BF = 25 and PO = 24, then BF = 26 and PO = 25 (to account for games ending in a walk-off), and so on. After about ten rounds of this, I did some broader searches (BF < 42, PO > 36; BF < 48, PO > 42, etc.) to make sure I didn't overlook an extra-inning game that fit the criteria.

Point is, unless I missed something, there are only three full-length games in the Baseball-Reference archive in which the losing team faced one batter over the minimum. Oddly, they were all in the same decade:

July 25, 1992: Pirates 0, Braves 1
July 27, 1993: Rangers 1, Royals 0
September 20, 1998: Dodgers 1, Giants 0

The latter two were won by the visiting team, with 28 plate appearances, so the Braves appear to be in sole possession of the record, since 1919, for least plate appearances in a victory—and it took one of the most memorable plays in Braves history to do it.

A few more observations:

• Kevin Appier's game score of 91 in the 1993 game is the second-highest in the archive by the losing pitcher of a nine-inning game, and the highest since 1964.
• In the 1998 game, the Giants' Brian Johnson led off the eighth with a triple, but the Dodgers managed to get out of the inning.
• Barry Bonds was on the losing team in two of these games, was caught stealing in both, and went a combined 0-for-7 at the plate.
• Nixon robbed Van Slyke of more than a home run—Van Slyke finished the 1992 season with 199 hits (his career high), and tied with the Braves' Terry Pendleton for the league lead.

So, there you go. It's not timely at all, but I feel like I've made an archaeological discovery here (if this is already online somewhere, I haven't found it), and just wanted to pass it on to someone who might be interested.

Thanks, James!

Baseball-Reference always owes a debt of appreciation to our users who edit the B-R Bullpen Wiki, the collaborative baseball encyclopedia that anyone can edit, but that's especially true today as the Bullpen reached a major milestone -- 60,000 articles! -- thanks to its many tireless editors. Great work, everyone!

If you want to get involved, here are some links on the project:

• What is the Bullpen?
• How to contribute
• Guidelines
• Learn more
• What's Happening in the Bullpen

(Or you could just go to a Random Page.)

Give it a try, explore a little, and maybe even take a shot at editing a page. With your help, the Bullpen can add even more pages as we continue collecting and organizing as much baseball knowledge as possible.

2002 Oakland Athletics Batting, Pitching, & Fielding Statistics - Baseball-Reference.com.

If you look above the team batting stats you will now see a graphical summary of the team's season.  The height of the bar is equal to the margin of victory (up to ten runs).  Losses are in red and wins are in green.

I've grouped the games by month.  Double-headers are slightly narrowed since they occurred on the same day.  Off days are included as blanks, and if you mouse over the bar you will see a summary of the game as shown below. Clicking on the bar will take you to the box score.

Mouseover a bar to show the game's details

Currently this is updated back through 1985, but we'll have every team updated within an hour or so.

MLB EloRater / Live Ratings

Over at Basketball-Reference.com, the Player Elo Rater has been up and running for several weeks, and I'm now pleased that we have it up and running on Baseball-Reference.com as well.

Justin Kubatko put together the guts for the system and I don't have much to add beyond his introduction to the method. Please let me know if you have any suggestions.

I have also just added the player's current rank to their player pages where they appear just below the player newsfeed. I'll be rolling out rankings to franchise, year and the front page, next week probably.