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Some of our more eagle-eyed (pun intended) users may have noticed a new feature on the main page today, a link to The Baseball Early Bird. But maybe you were also wondering, what on earth is The Baseball Early Bird? Well, that's the question I'm here to answer.
The Baseball Early Bird is a joint project between Baseball-Reference and Gary Gillette of 247baseball.com (you may also know him as the co-editor of the ESPN Baseball and Pro Football Encyclopedias) that sends out daily e-mails containing recaps of the previous night's games, the day's slate of games, current standings, the starting pitchers and top hitters of the previous day, a list of players who were born, died, and made their MLB debut on the current date, and a variety of other editorial features.
You can access the Early Bird at the project's website, or by subscribing via e-mail, which offers the option of receiving the message optimized for html, text, or mobile devices. So go over and check it out, and be sure to make it your first stop for baseball info when you wake up in the morning.
Posted in Site Features | Comments Off on Feature Watch: Baseball Early Bird
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.
Got a little bit of time today to add league pitching leaders and yearly leaders (across all levels). To get to a year, go to the front page of the minors select a year and then select the leaders. To get a league leader, go to the league page and then select the leaders. Here is a pitching leaderboard.
A couple things are still missing.
1) Leaderboards by level (A, AA, etc.)
2) Speed, this is really slow, so I may have to cache results or something
BTW, a 20-year old SS in AAA with a .340/.389/.522 line?! We'd be going crazy over that now.
Sorry it has taken so long, but I've made a start to getting the old minor league leaders back on the site. Now if you go to a league season page there is an option for finding the leaders for that league for various stats. Still a little rough. No pitching stats yet, no classification or all leagues together stats, just batting for individual leagues.
Among the wealth of information we have here at Baseball-Reference, some of the coolest can be found at our splits pages -- in fact, there's so much data to be had that I get the feeling many users don't even know the extent of what they can find. So over the next week or so, I'm going to be taking you through a guided tour of the splits pages to show you exactly how many awesome factoids there are to be uncovered there.
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.
Frequently when you have to put a feature "out of sight" in order to save room on a page, it also becomes "out of mind" for users who no longer have an easy way to navigate to it. unfortunately, that's been the case with the Bio section of the site, which is tucked away under the "more [+]" drop-down menu and consequently gets overlooked all too often. Since we get a handful of requests per week about player birthplaces and places of death, I thought I'd shine the spotlight on the Bio page to help our users know about the tools it offers.
First, we break down every player by their place of birth. Using the links at the top of the page, you can sort the batting, pitching, and managing totals for every U.S. state (did you know that Pennsylvania boasts the most Hall of Fame pitchers in MLB history?), and for every country as well (for instance, Ireland has provided the most career games without producing an All-Star). You can also see more detailed breakdowns for each state, including a sortable list of every player born there and his career MLB stats (aside from Chad Santos -- career PA: 8 -- Benny Agbayani is Hawaii's all-time leader in career OPS with .807), and each foreign country/territory as well (Ed Porray's birthplace was apparently "A Ship on Atlantic Ocean," making him unique among major-leaguers). We also provide the same tools/breakdowns for each player's place of death, although this section is understandably less complete and/or accurate than the birthplace database. Meaning that if you ever wanted to know that Jackie Jensen hit more career HR than any other player who died in Virginia, this is the place to look.
So feel free to look around and experiment with the various states and territories, and I'm sure you'll dig up a piece of trivia in the process that will stump even the most hard-core of baseball historians.
One of the features here at Baseball-Reference that I think a lot of people miss is the Videos section, which can only be accessed via the "more [+]" dropdown menu. I hope this won't be the case much longer, because I'm going to be adding a number of new videos to the page over the coming weeks and months in an effort to educate users on some of the more common tools we have on the site. But even before I begin posting new videos, there are already three tutorials on the page that you should watch if you'd like to maximize your experience as a B-R user. The first one involves box scores and the many cool (and semi-hidden) tricks you can execute in them with the right know-how. The second deals with player and team gamelogs, and again clues you in to some of the neat aspects of those pages that you might not have noticed at first glance. Finally, the third video discusses the changes that B-R underwent back in the spring, when we redesigned everything to make the site easier to use, more readily able to add new goodies, and of course, to make it match our brethren at Basketball, Football, Hockey, and Olympics.
So go and watch those videos now if you want to become a Baseball-Reference master user. And be on the lookout, new videos are coming soon, possibly as early as the end of this week!
Posted in Site Features | Comments Off on Feature Watch: Tutorial Videos
