Archive for the 'Site Features' Category

The 2011 season opens tomorrow, so now is a great time to tell you about Baseball-Reference's Play Index . In case you don't already know about the PI, it's a set of research tools that allow you to create customizable queries on our database, save the results, and share them with others. Using the PI, you can:

• Search full-season or multi-year totals to find your own custom leaderboards - Look at the entire history of baseball from 1871-2011 with every year, team, and position available, or filter the results in a vast number of ways: by specific years, by age, by first six seasons or last ten seasons, by American League only, by Cubs only, by switch-hitters, by catchers, by outfielder or infielder, by year of debut, but active or retired, by Hall of Famer, by height and weight, by living or deceased, or by a range of common statistical categories. Then sort the results by any common statistic, by the teams with the most players matching that category, by players with the most seasons matching that category, or by most recent, youngest, oldest, final year, or year of debut, and others.
• Search player game totals - Filtering on any of a dozen or more choices, search for games on a single player level, or on any batter from 1919-2011, or on any pitcher. The same can be done for Team Batting or Team Pitching Totals.
• Search player games looking for the most consecutive games matching a particular set of criteria - This can be done either on a single player level or on any batter in the last 92 years or on any pitcher. The same can be done for Team Batting or Team Pitching Streaks.
• Search the records of a specific player - Output a detailed summary and play-by-play list of all events of a specific type from a single year or an entire career. For example, you can see all of Harmon Killebrew's triples or even his outs to the second baseman.
• Search Batter vs. Pitcher Matchups - This tool presents a complete sortable list of batter or pitcher with totals for every opponent they faced by career or by year. Clicking on the player's name will lead you to a detailed output of their head-to-head plate appearances.
• ...And more!

Personal Subscriptions to the Play Index cost $36 for a year, $6 for a month, or $2 for 24 hours. Subscriptions may only be used by a single user, and there are discounts for users sponsoring at least $35 in pages.

Organizational Subscriptions can be set up for either an unlimited number of users ($600/year, this includes three hours of custom programming and reporting to be used at your discretion), or for up to five users ($125/year, this includes one hour of custom programming and reporting to be used at your discretion).

There are Two Steps to Subscribe to the Play Index:

1. Login to or create a Sports-Reference.com account (the same account used to sponsor pages).
2. Already logged in (or just created an account)? Go to our subscription page to sign up.

Our Always-Available Free Trial: Non-subscribers can use the PI's features as much as you like. However, your outputs will be restricted to a limited number of results.

The Play Index comes with a money back guarantee. We will gladly return the unused portion of any Play Index Subscription should you be dissatisfied with the Play Index.

So go ahead, give the Play Index a try -- we're confident that once you start using it, you'll wonder how you ever got along without it.

Sponsoring a page is fun, fast, and easy way to support what we're doing here at Baseball-Reference. With a sponsorship, you can:

• Show your support for your favorite player or team.
• Drum up traffic for your own site & draw in fans with a common interest.
• Get some well-deserved recognition for your support of B-R.
• Make your voice heard by the tens of thousands of people who visit Baseball-Reference every day.

Here's all you have to do to get involved:

1. Create a membership account.
2. Find the page(s) you'd like to support, and click "sponsor" (available pages).
3. If the page you want is already sponsored, click "Alert Me!" to be informed when the current sponsorship expires.
4. Follow the instructions to create your message and make your payment.
5. Your message and links will be visible on the page after we approve them (usually in less than 24 hours).

And who knows, if you're clever enough, your message might end up on lists like these.

Automatic Player Linker / Add your site to our newsfeeds

Just a reminder that you can request for your site to be added to our player newsfeeds. To get started, all you have to do is write a post as you normally would and use our linker tool, causing baseball-reference player links to be automatically added. Then let us know you want to be included by sending us the following information:

• The name of your site to appear in the feed (at most 25 characters)
• The url for your rss feed (must be a full feed)
• A contact e-mail address
• The url of an example page with our links in place

We'll review your request, and try to get your content added as soon as we can. It's a great way to get your content out there, and it gives your readers quick access to player stats and information.

With the 2011 season rapidly approaching, you don't want to miss Baseball-Reference's Play Index . In case you don't already know about the PI, it's a set of research tools that allow you to create customizable queries on our database, save the results, and share them with others. Using the PI, you can:

• Search full-season or multi-year totals to find your own custom leaderboards - Look at the entire history of baseball from 1871-2010 with every year, team, and position available, or filter the results in a vast number of ways: by specific years, by age, by first six seasons or last ten seasons, by American League only, by Cubs only, by switch-hitters, by catchers, by outfielder or infielder, by year of debut, but active or retired, by Hall of Famer, by height and weight, by living or deceased, or by a range of common statistical categories. Then sort the results by any common statistic, by the teams with the most players matching that category, by players with the most seasons matching that category, or by most recent, youngest, oldest, final year, or year of debut, and others. You can now isolate 2010-11 free agents and 2011 Hall of Fame candidates in your searches as well.
• Search player game totals - Filtering on any of a dozen or more choices, search for games on a single player level, or on any batter from 1920-2010, or on any pitcher. The same can be done for Team Batting or Team Pitching Totals.
• Search player games looking for the most consecutive games matching a particular set of criteria - This can be done either on a single player level or on any batter in the last ninety years or on any pitcher. The same can be done for Team Batting or Team Pitching Streaks.
• Search the records of a specific player - Output a detailed summary and play-by-play list of all events of a specific type from a single year or an entire career. For example, you can see all of Harmon Killebrew's triples or even his outs to the second baseman.
• Search Batter vs. Pitcher Matchups - This tool presents a complete sortable list of batter or pitcher with totals for every opponent they faced by career or by year. Clicking on the player's name will lead you to a detailed output of their head-to-head plate appearances.
• ...And more!

Personal Subscriptions to the Play Index cost $36 for a year, $6 for a month, or $2 for 24 hours. Subscriptions may only be used by a single user, and there are discounts for users sponsoring at least $35 in pages.

Organizational Subscriptions can be set up for either an unlimited number of users ($600/year, this includes three hours of custom programming and reporting to be used at your discretion), or for up to five users ($125/year, this includes one hour of custom programming and reporting to be used at your discretion).

There are Two Steps to Subscribe to the Play Index:

1. Login to or create a Sports-Reference.com account (the same account used to sponsor pages).
2. Already logged in (or just created an account)? Go to our subscription page to sign up.

Our Always-Available Free Trial: Non-subscribers can use the PI's features as much as you like. However, your outputs will be restricted to a limited number of results.

The Play Index comes with a money back guarantee. We will gladly return the unused portion of any Play Index Subscription should you be dissatisfied with the Play Index.

So go ahead, give the Play Index a try -- we're confident that once you start using it, you'll wonder how you ever got along without it.

Just a friendly reminder that you can follow us at your favorite social media sites:

• Baseball-Reference at Twitter
• Baseball-Reference at Facebook

Also, be sure to check out the Play Index, baseball's most powerful search tool...

Sponsoring a page is fun, fast, and easy way to support what we're doing here at Baseball-Reference. With a sponsorship, you can:

• Show your support for your favorite player or team.
• Drum up traffic for your own site & draw in fans with a common interest.
• Get some well-deserved recognition for your support of B-R.
• Make your voice heard by the tens of thousands of people who visit Baseball-Reference every day.

Here's all you have to do to get involved:

1. Create a membership account.
2. Find the page(s) you'd like to support, and click "sponsor" (available pages).
3. If the page you want is already sponsored, click "Alert Me!" to be informed when the current sponsorship expires.
4. Follow the instructions to create your message and make your payment.
5. Your message and links will be visible on the page after we approve them (usually in less than 24 hours).

And who knows, if you're clever enough, your message might end up on lists like these.

Our apologies for the long delay since the last time we did this... Since September, 29 new linker users have begun participating in our newsfeed program, bringing the grand total of users up to 83. Let's give them a warm welcome:

• The Sporting Hippeaux
• Raise the Jolly Roger
• Reds Fan Central
• Pittsburgh Lumber Co
• Splashing Pumpkins
• Above the Shoulders
• Philly Phanatics
• The Rally Cap
• The Biz of Baseball
• The Process Report
• The Writer's Journey
• The Golden Sombrero
• Blog Red Machine
• COSFBA
• Cubs Billy Goat Blog
• Baseball Reality Tour
• Nationals Daily News
• The "Mc" Effect
• The Friarhood
• A Diehard Cubs Fan Speaks Out
• GoldenGateBias
• The Perpetual Post
• The Juglandaceous Porthole
• Mets360.com
• PAAPFLY
• Chicago Sports Memories
• PhillyBaseballNews.com
• Subjective Baseball
• SocraticGadfly

Here's how your site can be added to our player newsfeeds. Our linker tool supports most common blogging and bulletin board software. Write your post and then one-click later links to the players' baseball reference pages will be added.

Last week, Adam from Lonestarball.com pointed out that while we offered Batting Average on Balls In Play (BABIP) as a sorting option in the Pitching Season Finder, we didn't include it as an option under "Additional Criteria". We're happy to say now that Sean has fixed this, and BABIP is currently available to use in the criteria drop-downs as well as the "sort by" option, giving you potential queries like this:

For single seasons, For 2010, (requiring batting_avg_bip>=.320 and At least 100 Innings Pitched), sorted by smallest Earned Run Average

Notes on a few minor site fixes/additions over the past week:

• Countries of birth were fixed in Play Index and Bio Section (bug was caused by some countries being erroneously listed as their ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country codes). Also, fixed Curacao birthplaces.
• Fixed "all teams" bug in PI Event Finders (searches for "all player outs" and "all teams" in a given season were failing)
• Added "at least/at most" option to Batting Season Finder under "defensive position" (now allows you to find players who played less than a given # or % of games at a position)
• Added black ink to single-season Finder searches (represents league leader in a category)
• Updated 2010 franchise retired numbers (Frank Thomas, Luis Gonzalez, Tom Glavine, Whitey Herzog, Jon Miller/Monte Irvin)
• Added note about neutralized run environments to League Neutralized Batting & Pitching pages (stats are neutralized to a 4.42R/G and 162-game season)
• Fixed duplicate substitutions bug in some older boxscores
• Fixed a glitch in neutralized stats that was causing "Gact" to be corrupted for some players

As always, email us and let us know about any site bugs or potential features you'd like to see.

For a baseball fan, the month of December means it's time for the winter meetings and debates about this year's candidates for the Hall of Fame. Sean already has you covered on the former, so let me show you some features we have regarding the latter:

• A complete list of players on the 2011 BBWAA ballot, along with their career WAR and conventional stats
• The ability to isolate 2011 candidates in Play Index Batting and Pitching Season Finder searches (under "Hall of Fame ")
• B-R's Hall of Fame section, featuring historical inductees with career batting and pitching stats
• Voting results for past elections, and a description of the HoF induction process
• Projected future ballots for 2014, 2013, and 2012
• A look at the 2011 Veterans' Committee candidates (of whom only Pat Gillick was inducted)
• Information on the Hall of Fame from the B-R Bullpen Wiki

Enjoy the features, and don't let the debates get too heated when someone calls your favorite player a "fringe candidate"...