Archive for the 'Site Features' Category

One of the interesting  pieces of information available on the bottom of each of the  player pages here at  Baseball-Reference.com  is  the list "Similar Players". These lists,which utilize Bill James's similarity scores detail the the top 10 players to have comparable statistics to the player in question.  For players who spent a significant amount of time batting and pitching there are 2 lists - one for hitting and one for pitching.

Today's challenge is to find 2 players who were so similar that they appear  both of the other's lists, both as hitters and as pitchers.

I've been working on getting the latest and greatest data from RetroSheet onto the site and will be making a few additions to the affected pages as well, which I'll go into more later when they launch.

Building all of this stuff is a five day process where our server runs continuously for five days building the 120,000 box scores, the 9m rows of play-by-play, the 5m rows of gamelogs, and 10m rows of splits. So adding a little thing here and there just isn't worth it. I've got about two windows a year to get things added and this is one of them. So if you want to suggest a split, gamelog, or boxscore feature, now would be a good time to do so.

One idea I've had since we'll be adding a lot of data from 1920-1939 (no pbp, just boxes) is to add a split for vs. RHstarter and vs. LHstarter. We won't know Lou Gehrig's exact splits, but we'll know what he did when a lefty started the game and when a righty started the game.

Others you would like to see?

Note: We also had a twitter outage after our blog update, but things are back up and running now.

If you haven't had a chance to look at it yet, the Bio section of the site (which is tucked away under the "more [+]" drop-down menu) got a little bigger when we updated the site last week.

In case you're unfamiliar, on that page we break down every player by their place of birth, and using the links at the top of the page, you can sort the batting, pitching, and managing totals for those born in every U.S. state and every country. You can also see more detailed breakdowns for each state/foreign country/territory, including a sortable list of every player born there and his career MLB stats.

In addition, we still provide the same tools/breakdowns for each player's place of death -- and since you may have noticed that deceased MLB players now have burial data on their profile pages, we've also added a new section to the Bio page that gives the breakdowns described above for players based on their place of burial. So if you ever wanted to know which players were laid to rest in Wyoming (hint: there's only 4 of them), this is the feature for you.

Also, I should note that the death and burial data is not complete, so if you come across someone with missing data and you have citable documentation regarding their correct info, please let us know via email.

(See more Baseball-Reference Tutorials here.)

One of the things that I like best about playing around with the data/information on Baseball-Reference.com is that it sometimes reminds me of things that I already knew...and then either forgot about or hadn't thought of in a while.

For example, today, I was scanning the Players by Place of Birth and Death page and I noticed that one player had France listed as his location of burial.  Seeing this, it rang a bell in my brain - so, I clicked on the link for Eddie Grant's Baseball-Reference.com page and then checked out his BR Bullpen link.   And, that's where I found this on Grant:

"Harvard" Eddie Grant died during deadly fighting in World War I, and is the most prominent major league baseball player to ever die in combat. (Several more prominent Japanese stars died in World War II, most notably Eiji Sawamura.) General John Pershing had ordered the troops to move forward against the Germans in their trenches. On the day in question, Grant's commanding officer had died, and Grant was put in charge of his battalion while searching for a lost battalion. Grant was hit by two shells and died in the Argonne Forest.

I first learned the story of Eddie Grant about seven years ago. And, since that time, I haven't thought much about it - until today. It's a great piece of baseball history - and one that many fans would probably want to know about. It's wonderful that things like this can be learned and/or remembered via Baseball-Reference.com.

The Play Index (PI) is 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 1871-2009 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 in the last 55 years, 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 fifty 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.

Pete Palmer is the godfather of baseball statistics. His old Total Baseball database (via the Baseball Archive) long formed the backbone of our site. We are now very honored to have his latest and greatest database on the site. The Batting, Pitching and Fielding stats now follow Palmer's data. The changes are subtle (a strikeout or two here, some RBI's there), but we believe the Palmer/Gillette database represents the most accurate view of baseball's history which we are always striving to present.

The site's birth and death data which was woefully (and embarassingly) out of date has now been synced (and will continue to be) with the SABR Biographical Committee Database which is the gold standard for biographical information for ballplayers. In addition, we have now added information on the player's burial following their death. This can be found on the player pages and in the bio directory.

One last update, we've added a number of tweaks and improvements to the minor league data as well. We now show appearances on Baseball America's top 100 list on player and affiliate pages.

With an update this massive it is very hard to check every possible contingency, so please let us know if you come across something that doesn't quite add up.

These are the first in a long line of changes and improvements coming down the pike. As always, thank you for supporting the site.

my wife is gonna be mad « Scott Simkus

Scott, Gary Ashwill and I have put together an agreement that is going to put some of the first publicly available Negro League data on the web.  See the article for the full rundown, but I'm very excited to be working with Gary and Scott on this project.   April is the goal date, though naturally this is a busy time for me, but I think we can get that done.

With the Winter Olympics in full swing, have you taken a look at Olympics at Sports-Reference.com? If not, here are some features you'll find there:

• Detailed information on all Summer and Winter games
• Every athlete to compete in the Olympics
• Results for all countries
• Every Olympic sport
• Individual events
• Times/points in various runs/heats/phases
• A Medal Finder that lets you create custom reports of medal winners based on a wide range of criteria
• Our Olympics blog, written during the Vancouver Games by Prof. J.C. Bradbury

...And more!

Minor League Baseball

The minor league db has been updated with the latest information from SABR's Minor League Research Committee. This has fixed a lot of bugs and added additional data. List of completed leagues. If you would like to volunteer or have data to offer contact them on their website. We will be syncing this data more often than in the past. There was a database schema change that required some work on my end to get the site up to date. I hope you enjoy the additional data.

Just for the fun of it, because of what tomorrow is, I punched in "Valentine" into the SEARCH box of Baseball-Reference.com to see what I could find. And, one of the answers that it spit back to me was the page for "Jersey Joe" Valentine Stripp.

Now, having the words "Valentine Stripp" in your name is interesting enough. But, when I looked at the B-R.com page for "Jersey Joe," I saw some other interesting things as well.

First, he was a pretty useful player from 1930 to 1932 and from 1934 to 1936. (Have to figure here that he had something which was bothering him in 1933.)

But, more so, dig the trades that he was involved in:

• March 14, 1932: Traded by the Cincinnati Reds with Tony Cuccinello and Clyde Sukeforth to the Brooklyn Dodgers for Wally Gilbert, Babe Herman and Ernie Lombardi.
• October 4, 1937: Traded by the Brooklyn Dodgers with Jim Bucher, Johnny Cooney and Roy Henshaw to the St. Louis Cardinals for Leo Durocher.

That's some nice company there. Clyde Sukeforth later became the Dodgers scout who helped bring Jackie Robinson to the (then) Brooklyn organization. Babe Herman went on to have a storied career. Ernie Lombardi is in the Hall of Fame. Ditto Leo Durocher who went in as a manager.

To be candid, I never heard of Joe Stripp before today. But, thanks to playing around with Baseball-Reference.com, finding him by random, I discovered that he did play in the majors and then I learned more about him.  And, that's a baseball fan's version of a dozen roses or a box of chocolates, no? Cool stuff.