Archive for the 'Site Features' Category

It may be December, but Baseball-Reference's Play Index is in midseason form. 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... Subscriptions are just $36 for an entire year of unlimited queries!

The Baseball-Reference Bullpen: Baseball's collaborative encyclopedia

Just a reminder for everyone to check out the B-R Bullpen Wiki, the collaborative baseball encyclopedia that anyone can edit. We have 57,845 articles -- and counting -- thanks to users just like you, and we hope to add many more as we collect and organize as much baseball knowledge as possible. To get you started, 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. There's a lot of baseball knowledge out there just waiting to be added to these pages!

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.

The World Series is over, but Baseball-Reference's Play Index is never out of season. 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 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.

Phew, after about 10 hours of hacking on chrome, IE, and firefox, I believe I've got a new blog theme that works pretty well in all of them.

The major changes:

Cleaned stuff up and now it uses the same stylesheet and js as the main site, so it will be much quicker to load when you travel from the main site to here.

Added tweet this and facebook like buttons to every page.

Added a default gravatar of Honus Wagner. I may mess around with this as time permits. I thought about using a random player, but that seems like it would be a waste of bandwidth. You can set up your own here: http://www.gravatar.com/, Grab a b-r player photo and make one.

It should look pretty good in any browser now.

Any new tables that authors paste in should have full b-r functionality for users.

It is much faster to load.

Yesterday afternoon. we update the full site with some new functionality, new look and new performance upgrades.
Read the rest of this entry »

Assuming tonight's build runs as expected, we'll be doing a sitewide update around noon tomorrow.

This update will:

1) update (very slightly) the look and feel of the site. I've cleaned up much of the css on the site and made some updates and what I hope will be improvements in the appearance of the site. For example, we are removing underlines for links. I researched this and found the 99% of the top 100 sites traffic-wise no longer have underlined links.

2) we will be switching from prototype to jquery for a javascript framework. For 99% of you this should mean nothing other than all of the sports-reference sites will soon have a more unified look, feel and functionality. With this switch made you should also see more improvements and bug fixes made as all of the Play Index code has been upgraded, and

3) we've made a number of tweaks to page structure and formatting that should result in improved site performance. We are still somewhat at the mercy of our ad providers, but we've tried to wring all of the performance improvements out of what we have control over.

If all goes well, these updates should go live around noon ET tomorrow. There may be some unplanned downtime involved, and we apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

Hopefully you know about our Play Index by now, but did you know there are ways to filter the results to only include postseason games? It's like having an entirely different set of finders that apply just to the playoffs.

Take for instance the Pitching Game Finder. If you wanted to look up postseason no-hitters after Roy Halladay's gem last night, go to the finder, set up the query you want (in this case, Role-->Starter-->CG, H=0) and change the radio button selection on the left side of the box from "Regular Season" to "Postseason"... Then, voila! Halladay joins Larsen as the only pitchers to spin a postseason no-no.

And you can do the same type of search for postseason batting games via the Batting Game Finder. As an example, here are all the instances of a catcher going 3-for-4 or better with 2+ RBI in a playoff game, a list Bengie Molina joined yesterday. Also, remember that the same queries can be run at the team level using the Team Batting and Pitching Game Finders.

We even have you covered if you're looking for specific events in the postseason. Check out the Postseason Batting Event Finder to query for things like all postseason HR by a New York Yankees 1st baseman in the 7th inning or later with the score tied (a la Mark Teixeira last night), or try the Playoff Pitching Event Finder to search for pitchers who escaped 1st-inning bases-loaded jams (like Cliff Lee did yesterday).

These examples are just a few of the nearly infinite number of searches you can run using the Play Index, so give it a whirl, and as always, let us know what you think in the comments below or with our feedback form.

Yesterday I gave a big-picture overview of all the features we have in our Postseason Section, so today I wanted to talk about a really cool, underrated feature of our playoff boxscores...

As you probably know, our regular-season play-by-play data stretches back to 1950 -- which is amazing and to the credit of Retrosheet that anything close to that amount of information is available. But did you know that our postseason boxscores have play-by-play accounts for the entirety of the World Series era?

That's right, we have play-by-play descriptions of baseball games that happened 107 years ago. Not only that, but we have Win Probability statistics and graphs for those games! I don't know about you, but I think that's pretty amazing. In fact, basically anything you can do in a 2010 box score, you can do for postseason games going back to 1903.

So if you ever wondered how much WPA Babe Ruth cost the Yankees when he was caught stealing to end the 1926 World Series, we can answer that and many more questions. Play around for a while in the Postseason Section, and you may find a whole new way to look at games that happened a century ago.