Archive for the 'Site Features' Category

Automatic Player Linker / Statistical Sharing / Add your Blog/Site to our Newsfeeds

It has been a few weeks since the season started and I've found the time to return to our 10 for 10 anniversary celebration. We've added Newsfeeds to our active player pages. We've also added a linking tool that makes it very straightforward for you to add links to a player's Baseball Reference page from your blog posts or news stories.
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2010 NL Standings

One of our company trademarks is our Simple Rating System discovered somewhere in the annals of time and dusted off and used by our Doug Drinen. SRS has two components, run differential and strength of schedule. I've added those two components to the 2010 standings page and it should be updated daily.

We also had an issue with the computation of luck and pythag W-L which I've rectified.

Change in Baseball Attendance 2009 to 2010 - Baseball-Reference.com

One of the links on the front page is to this page which tracks changes in attendance from last year to this year.  What I like about this table is that it matches up the first six games of last year with the first six games of this year rather than looking at the dates.  So far Minnesota is unsurprisingly way ahead of last year with 38k/game.  Atlanta (thank you Jason Heyward) has also seen a resurgence.

In honor of Sunday and Monday, the greatest days of the year, here are some Opening Day features we have here at B-R:

• Franchise Opening-Day Starters (1952-2010)
• Batting and pitching game finders can be set to search "In team's first x games":
  • Example 1: Most HR in team's 1st game of the season
  • Example 2: Highest Game Score in team's 1st game of the season
• Use streak finders to look for the longest streaks to open the season:
  • Example 1: Most consecutive hits to start the season (2000-09)
  • Example 2: Most consecutive pitcher wins to start the season (1980-89)
• Game Previews

Give them a try, and enjoy baseball's return.

With the season starting in a week, 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.

This is the fourth of ten features we are adding for our 10th anniversary.

The first place I saw Win Expectancy (WE) was when I was writing for the Big Baseball Annual back in the late 1990's. Doug Drinen, who has since moved on to become one of the leading NFL analysts and creator of Pro-Football-Reference.com, wrote a series of articles on reliever usage that built on the original Mills Brothers work on Win Expectancy (WE). Doug even included a WS Game WE Graph in one of the books. I always have thought it was an elegant measurement of what happened during the game and I'm excited to now have it on the site.
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Today, I show you how to use the Win Probability graphs in box scores:

This is the third of ten features we are adding for our 10th anniversary.

Uniform numbers have been a long standing user request and if you are a user of our other sites you know that we have had uniform numbers and neat uni medallions on our other pro sports websites for quite awhile.

I'm happy to announce that B-R is joining them. From 1929 on, we have uni medallions on player, team pages (under the roster tab), and retired numbers on the franchise pages.

Here are a couple of examples.

Bernie Williams (the consistent),
George Brunet (the inconsistent),
1979 Astros (scroll down),
2009 Yankees (scroll down),
Braves Retired numbers

We've also provided links to the HOF's Dressed to the Nines Exhibit, so you can see a drawing of what the uniform looked like as well as the numbers for the players. Putting the two together gives you a fuller picture of what the player's uniform would have looked like.

The data is essentially complete and comes from multiple sources. Please let us know if you have any corrections or suggestions.

This is the second of ten features we are adding for our 10th anniversary.

Due to the tireless work of the RetroSheet volunteers (otherwise known as heroes) Baseball-Reference.com now has play-by-play (PBP) for the 1952 and 1953 seasons and box score level accounts (BSEF) of all games in the 1920-1939 seasons. This is the first time that I have incorporated seasons with just BSEF data, so it necessitated some changes which I'll try to highlight below.

Beyond that major change there have been many, many additional improvements to the
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I'm been getting the new RetroSheet data into our database and I'm working on. This is raw from the database, so the format and columns are a bit funky. This is Babe Ruth in 1927.

Here's Gehrig. I think sitting your rightys might have been the right move against them.