Archive for the 'Site Features' Category

Via Baseball-Reference.com's Situational Records tool, here are teams from 2002 through 2009 with 10+ "one run" wins in a season against teams with a W% of .450 or less, ranked by W% in such games:

.

It's interesting how many teams from 2004 made this cut.

Picking up where yesterday's post left off, here are some more features of Baseball-Reference's draft search tool:

• Search by Type of School Drafted From - For instance: JuCo 1st-rounders in 2008 ... 1st Overall Picks from 4-year colleges ... High Schoolers drafted by the A's in the 1st round ... etc.
• Search by Position and Draft Round - 3rd Basemen drafted in the 2nd round ... 7th-round Pitchers ... Catchers taken in the 1st round of the January-phase draft ... etc.
• Expansion Drafts - 1997 ... 1976 ... 1961 ... etc.

In honor of the 2010 MLB Amateur Draft starting today, here are some things you can do with Baseball-Reference's Draft Search Tool:

• Search by Overall Pick# - For instance: Every #1 overall pick in the June draft ... Every #50 pick ... #2 picks in the (now-defunct) January draft ... Top picks in the June secondary phase draft ... etc.
• Search by Round and Year - 2007 1st-round picks ... 1997 5th-rounders ... the 3rd round of the 1976 June secondary draft ... etc.
• Search by Franchise and Year - All Nationals picks in 2009 ... 2000 Braves picks ... 1972 Red Sox January picks ... etc.
• Search by Franchise and Round - Yankees 4th-round picks ... Giants second-rounders ... January-phase 1st-rounders by Oakland ... etc.
• Search by Position and Year - All Catchers drafted in 2009 ... OF drafted in 1991 ... SS drafted in 1969 ... 1974 January-phase Pitchers ... etc.

With MLB in midseason form, I'd like to take the time to share with you some features of the Play Index (PI), 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.
• 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 (excluding 1940-1951), 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 (excluding 1940-1951) 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.

Here's a post concept that's sure to be a lightning rod for discussion: who are the best position players not to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame? Using Baseball-Reference's new Wins Above Replacement data, we can attempt to answer that question. First, the players with the most total career value who aren't in the HoF:

Read the rest of this entry »

(Note: All of the data in this post was obtained from the new Baseball-Reference Fielding Stats.)

Sometimes a player has a season so magnificent that it becomes truly legendary. A batting example would be Babe Ruth's 1920, when he had more home runs by himself than any other team in the American League. For basestealers, Rickey Henderson's 130-steal 1982 campaign has gone down in history as the most prolific in modern history. And for pitchers, you have Pedro Martinez's 2000, when he posted a 1.74 ERA in a league where the average was 4.91. All of these feats have been justifiably lionized over the years for their brilliance, but where's the love for the greatest fielding performance of the postwar era?

Read the rest of this entry »

(Note: All of the data in this post was obtained from the new Baseball-Reference Fielding Stats.)

A month and a half into the 2010 season, the L.A. Dodgers' defense has been one of the biggest disappointments in baseball. Among NL teams, they current rank a distant last in both Fielding +/- and TotalZone Runs Above Average, and they're quite a bit below average in Defensive Efficiency as well:

Read the rest of this entry »

This is the sixth of ten features we are adding for our 10th anniversary.
Read the rest of this entry »

A couple small changes to the site. First off, we are now updating the transactions on a regular basis. I can't promise it will be daily, but as new players debut and players change teams, we'll be updating our database and pushing that data out to the player, team and league pages.

For example, here is Carlos Monasterio's page and transactions.

I've also update the league transactions pages to 1) show the most recent transactions more prominently, and 2) also show a list of currently injured players. This is now linked to just below the league standings on the front page.

We are also include links from our team schedules and from the front page to a stubhub ticket page for the game in question. We get a small cut of any tickets sold this way, so we are doing it for the money, but I also find it interesting to see the min and max ticket prices for each franchise.

With baseball in full swing once more, it's time again to share with you some features of the Play Index (PI), 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.
• 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 (excluding 1940-1951), 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 (excluding 1940-1951) 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.