Archive for the 'Power Users' Category

Baseball-Reference Blog » The Baseball Reference Player Folio on your E-Reader

Teaming with John Burnson of Heater Magazine we've produced a set of Encyclopedia files specifically formatted for the Kindle. The files are plain pdf files, so they should work in other settings as well. We hope you enjoy the downloads.

Tom Ruane sent out this note to the RetroSheet mailing list. Sometime this winter we'll have boxscores for every game from 1920-1939, and we are really close to having a complete run of box scores from 1920-2010. This will mean complete career game logs for Gehrig, Grove, Ott, Greenberg, Foxx, Dickey, DiMaggio, Williams. We'll be able to compute Williams' longest on base streaks or Gehrig's best RBI games, or Foxx's home/road splits.

As we wrap up the 1930s and turn our attention to the 1940s, I would like to mention that we are always looking for volunteers to help digitize the Hall of Fame player dailies. Depending upon your skill with a spreadsheet, a team's worth of batting dailies should take you anywhere from 5 to 20 hours of work. I won't lie to you - it can be pretty tedious stuff, but the end product (box scores, player dailies/splits, top performance pages, and so on) hopefully makes it all worthwhile.

If this sounds like something you might be interested in, please let me know (off-list at tjruane who has email at gmail.com).

Thanks.
Tom Ruane

One of the projects that I've wanted to do since I started to work with the PI was to break down every starting pitcher's line and see how often pitchers with various innings pitched and runs allowed stats won their starts. The recent addition of the CSV option in the PI results has made it particularly easy to grab the information and import it into a spreadsheet. Therefore, the time has come to address the issue. I am going to present the info for the 2009 season and if there is enough interest (please let me know in the comments), future posts will contain information for a larger sampling of years. To do this, I simply used the PI pitching game finder and searched for all starts sorted by IP and (when I reached the results limit) just kept changing the IP requirements until I had a copy of all 4860 starts from 2009. Here is the information in couple of tables:

Read the rest of this entry »

Danny Ainge Statistics and History - Baseball-Reference.com

As you hopefully are aware, Baseball-Reference.com is part of a family of Sports Reference sites. All of them very good, very complete and well worth checking out. We have now created a rosetta stone matching players and coaches across all of the sites, so Danny Ainge's page, linked above, now has a link to his Basketball-Reference page, and Ricky Williams' minor league page now links to his Pro-Football-Reference page.

Chain of Teammates from Bid McPhee to Elvis Andrus

Just updated the oracle with the 2009 player data. Enjoy.

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.

Ever wanted to make a statistical point on a blog, to a friend via e-mail, on twitter or in an internet forum? The data you need appears on this site, but we've got twenty columns of additional data and then you would have to cut and paste, delete what you don't need and then maybe add some html or bbcode to get it to look just right? So only the really crazy statheads even bother. We've now made that process much, much (maybe one more much) easier.

Stats tables on Baseball-Reference.com now have the option to modify and easily share nearly all of the data found on the site. Clicking on the SHARE tooltip found above most stat tables (see image), now calls up a dialog box that allows you to delete columns and/or rows and then get the stat table to cut and paste in any of eight useful formats.

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Babe Ruth, Share Demo

One of the underlying principles for the site has been to make it easy to share data. We've done that by supporting the baseball-databank.org and retrosheet and we've done that by providing options like CSV and PRE above each of the tables on the site.

These options are helpful to power users who understand excel and don't mind taking a little time to learn new things, but for users who just want a quick and dirty table, it has always been a little too
hard to copy and paste what's on the site. We've solved that problem and dramatically increased the ways and means you can share data on the site.

The sharing feature appears only on Babe Ruth's pages (main, batting, fielding, pitching) right now, but after we are confident all of the bugs are worked out it will appear on every page and above every table on the site (sadly I have to rewrite much of the play index to get this to work there) and on our other sites as well.

Here is how you do it.

• Find the data you want to share. For now just on the Babe's Page
• Click on the SHARE link just above the stats next to the header (javascript required).
• 
• A sharing toolbox appears and buttons to delete columns and rows appear allowing you to pare the data down to just want you want.
• Please note that any sorting should occur before you delete rows or columns.
• Next select the output option from html, to iframes, to pre-formatted (good for most internet forums) and more. We've created a Demo Page for all of the options
• If we don't have the format you want, let us know.

Please give this a try and use it to post something at your favorite websites or a website you write for. You will be free to use this data anywhere, we would just ask that you include the citation at the bottom of the table as a courtesy to us for providing this service.

Also, once we are confident all of the bugs are worked out, we will release this site-wide, so give us all of the feedback you can.

Shane Victorino Batting Statistics and History - Baseball-Reference.com

People want to share what they find and we want them to as well. We have added an option to the list of options above all of the stats tables (not sitewide until we re-run the entire site) after CSV (comma-separated values) and PRE (pre-formatted text) called LINK. Clicking this updates the URL address bar (where you type www.baseball-reference.com) and brings up a popup that gives a url (the http: thingie) that will automatically guide another user to that particular table with the same sorting that you are presently looking at. So for example if you want to show a user that Victorino had a ton of infield hits last year. Sort on infield hits, click the LINK option and send them the link that shows up.

This happens with a bit of javascript, so you'll need that enabled (it probably already is) for it to work.

A couple of gotchas that we are still working out:

IE is a little funky in the url it presents in the popup, but if you use right click save shortcut it works.
The styling of the popup needs work and it should be shifted left if possible.
The use of the hash value puts you below the table header in Firefox, so the table header is not visible when sent via a direct link. This is not an issue in IE.

Search Engine Features and Capabilities - Baseball-Reference.com

I just added a mod to the search box on the site. With the addition of all of the minor league pages, getting to someone like Alex Rodriguez's page via a search "A Rod" returns like 50 people. Now, if you type in "the A Rod" it looks through our db and returns the most popular major league player who matches the search "A Rod". Adding "the " to the front of any player search will send you to the most popular player matching that search. This isn't quite perfect. For example, for strings like "the b l" you won't get whoever is the most popular player with B.L. initials. You'll get Bonds due to "b l" matching "Barry Lamar". Still I think this will cut down on the number of clicks people will have to make.

There are lots of good tips on the linked page above that shows all of the things our search box can do.