Archive for the 'Site Features' Category

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

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

Danny Ainge Statistics and History - Baseball-Reference.com

As you hopefully are aware, Baseball-Reference.com is part of a family of Sports Reference sites. All of them very good, very complete and well worth checking out. We have now created a rosetta stone matching players and coaches across all of the sites, so Danny Ainge's page, linked above, now has a link to his Basketball-Reference page, and Ricky Williams' minor league page now links to his Pro-Football-Reference page.

1967 Hall of Fame Voting - Baseball-Reference.com

Several readers pointed out (thank you!) that we had some issues with the older HOF voting results. The HOF had some quirks (like runoff elections in 49, 64, 67, a nominating round in 1946, and a ill-defined Veterans Ballot in 1936) that I wasn't quite prepared for (we assumed players could only be on one ballot a year) and it screwed up a number of the results, which we have fixed. Things now jibe with other sources and are presented correctly. Sorry for the mixups.

Link to Baseball-Reference Player Pages - Baseball-Reference.com

I added a tool for matching names to minor leaguers on B-R, so you can auto-create links to minor leaguers from an article, etc.

Sadly, the 2009 MLB season is over, but that doesn't mean the world of baseball has gone quiet. The hot stove is warming up, of course, and over the past month we've also had a chance to take in the major-league award announcements, as well as the annual Hall of Fame ballot. Thanks to our Awards Section here at B-R, you can keep track of these developments and look back at past recipients of the game's highest honors.

First, there's the long-awaited addition of Hall of Fame balloting summaries. From the Awards Section, scroll down to the area marked "Hall of Fame Ballot and Voting Summaries" and you'll find links that lead to Hall of Fame voting results for every season since the HoF began bestowing its honors in 1936. On any of those pages, you'll see every player who was on the official ballot in that year, along with the number of years they had been on the ballot, the number of votes they garnered, what percentage of the total ballots cast contained their name, several of Bill James' HoF monitor stats, and of course, their traditional career batting and pitching statistics. Notice also that players who were voted in by special non-BBWAA committees, including the Veterans Committee and the Negro Leagues Committee, are included in separate tables to denote their different enshrinement circumstances. Also take note of the fact that you can navigate from any year's HoF voting results to the results of any other year by using the dropdown menu near the top of the page.

And for those not just interested in historical Hall of Fame elections, but also current and upcoming ones, we have projected ballots for each of the next 5 years (through 2014). And of course, you can sort the lists by each of the column headers -- for instance, clicking on "YoB" twice will allow you to sort in ascending order by the number of years on the ballot, giving you the players in their first year of eligibility at the top of the list. Barry Bonds in 2013, anybody?

The Awards Section contains more than just Hall of Fame data, though. We also have lists of (and voting summaries for) every major regular-season and postseason award, including the MVP, Cy Young, Rookie of the Year, Manager of the Year, Gold Gloves, Silver Sluggers, and more. At the bottom of the main awards page, you'll find an area called "Baseball Award Voting Summaries", with a series of years -- and similar to our Hall of Fame area, just click any year, and you'll be taken to the voting summaries for every major award in that season.

As always, the Hall of Fame and Awards data is updated through the most current season, so be sure to spend some quality time with the freshly-minted results from a few weeks ago, and check out the first-timers on next year's HoF ballot while you're at it. And don't worry, just like the awards information you're used to being able to find on indivdual player pages, you'll also be able to see a player's history of Hall of Fame voting results on his page now -- take Bert Blyleven's, for instance.

Now, I do have to say that because this HoF data is brand new, there are likely still bugs in the vote totals. So please report any issues that you come across, and together we can continue to make Baseball-Reference your one stop for baseball information from the past and the present. Enjoy the new data!

One of the interesting new features of the PI is the sortable summary provided when using the game finder. This summation provides the total statistics of the games found can be ranked by a variety of different stats. I find this very exciting because it represents the first step in searching splits. Let me explain with an example.

Suppose we wanted to find the player with the most hits on the road in a single season.

1. Use the Game Finder called Player Batting.
2. select "Find Players with Most Matching Games in a Season"
3. Limit your search to Visitor
4. Search for H>=1

That will provide you with this list:

Until now we had to stop at this point and say that "Lou Brock had the most road games with a hit in a season (since 1954)". However, the new version of PI lets us take this a step further. Assuming that it is logical that the player with the most hits on the road in a season would be among the top 300 in games with a hit, we can find that player by sorting for hits. After completing the above search, simply click on the column heading "H" and you will be presented with this list:

Brock drops down to #22 and Ichiro now tops the leader board!
Let's do the same thing for hits at home:

Clearly, this technique is limited. It can't be used for stats that usually occur in bunches (most pitching stats). It also can't be used for rate stats like batting average. However, for a lot of hitting stats it can be a fun and useful new tool.

With the new additions to the Play Index, you can run a wider variety of queries than ever before. Here are just a few examples...

Read the rest of this entry »

Baseball-Reference.com Play Index / Subscribe to the Play Index

We did a major reworking of nearly the entire website last April. One area that remained unchanged was the Play Index. It took seven months, but the Play Index has finally been updated to match the rest of the site including features like in table sorting, the Share Tool, and pre-formatted and csv text. I have also reworked a number of the tools allowing for more types searches.

The main advantage to this update besides those listed above is that these changes will speed the development of new features dramatically. I've basically been on hold for new Play Index features for 18 months as I worked to move the entire site over to our new platform. Thankfully, that is essentially done now, and we can focus on improvements and additions rather than refactoring old code.

Some of the new features.

I've added a fifth criteria for the game and season finders allowing searches like seasons with "HR > SO" or "CS > SB". This is still pretty crude, but it is a first step toward full arithmetic searches.

The season and game finders now have more matching options at the top of the forms. Most of these options were already in the tools, but were buried in the sort options. These are for searches like "Most multi-hit games in career, 1954-2009" or "Most 20-HR seasons".

For the game finders there are additional new features. When doing a matching search (like "most games with a home run in first 50 games"), you also get a summary line for all of the games matching that search, which allows you to definitively say that Wally Joyner has the most home runs in a player's first 50 games since 1954. This also gives you a way to do a reasonable good split search ("Most wins against the Blue Jays in the last ten years"). There are also more matching options for things like most players with a multiple hits in a single game for one team or both teams.

I've also re-organized the front page and now show only the last 30 days of saved searches by default.

We are also going to add a few more photos to Play Index, so look for those later this week.

Special thanks to our team of bloggers who put these updated tools through their paces. They will be highlighting some of the new things you can do in upcoming blog posts. There are definitely still bugs in there to be ironed out. There are millions of potential searches to do, so we just can't test every possible combination. You can report issues you find through our bug system. Suggestions are also welcome there. Please be as specific as you can.

Subscribe to the Play Index

To celebrate the update, we are offering a free trial for the play index through November 20th. Give it a whirl for free and we hope you'll find it worth your while to subscribe after the 20th. Also, it has been three years since we launched the Play Index and our prices have held constant during that time. We have increased the prices with this update, so that a full year subscriptions has gone from $29 to $36/year.

If something isn't working as before and you really, really can't wait for it to get fixed, the old version is still available.

Thank you for your support of Baseball-Reference.com and your feedback is always appreciated.

Chain of Teammates from Bid McPhee to Elvis Andrus

Just updated the oracle with the 2009 player data. Enjoy.